Technews
ith its release four years
By Jaye C. Bautista
How to make techieness work for you
Being effective in more ways than one (Part 1)
n ordinary office
A
scenario consists
of the administra-
tion, its staff which
is made up of a mix
of professionals in
the business realm whether it’s
in sales, marketing, academe or
technical. Some years back, I ran
a Telco company and we had a
fleet of Telco engineers and our
main product was digital loop
carriers. And in the course of
marketing this, I had to go out on
field with my engineers. I soon
found out that not all techies are
good marketers or sales people or
presenters.
Well, if you are a technical
person working in the business
world, at some point in your ca-
reer you will be asked to speak up,
answer Q & As regarding product
and publicly give your opinion. It
may be as simple as speaking in
a staff meeting, or as pressured
as dealing with a key customer
presentation. Good presentation
skills are a competency linked to
career advancement. Simply put, if
you get so nervous that you cannot
explain to customers the benefits
of the product you and your team
have designed, your company
will not choose you to rep¬resent
them. No matter your brilliance,
if you can’t express your ideas, no
one will ever be able to judge your
expertise or what you can con-
tribute. Poor presentation skills
are a career liability. So how can
your “geeky staff” learn to relax
and perhaps even enjoy present-
ing? The good news is that there
is science and research that can
be applied to calming your nerves
and building your public speaking
skills. Once you understand the
science of stress, you can learn
to control your nervous reaction,
which in turn will improve the
quality of your public talks.
Some studies have come up with
the idea that the number 1 fear
Tweetup 101
Have you seen the word
“Tweetup” and ever wondered
what it really meant? Basically,
a tweetup (or Twitter meet-up)
is an informal gathering of Twit-
ter users with no agenda at all,
well, except to socialize. Most
of the time, the people who at-
tend tweetups have already built
an online friendship with other
tweeps (Twitter peeps) and have
found common interest amongst
themselves.
From online sharing to per-
sonal meeting, a tweetup is a
great venue to talk and get to
know people from different walks
of life. Whether it is catching up
with old friends, learning inter-
esting things, sharing ideas or
simply just having fun, a tweetup
can be your best source of net-
working. You’ll never know who
you will bump into the room – a
local government official, your
future employer or your favorite
celebrity. The networking part is
what makes a tweetup very ex-
citing.
If you decide to attend a
tweetup, all you need to bring is
yourself and an open mind. Pre-
pare to be showered with tons of
stories and creative juices, but
don’t forget to also speak out and
impart interesting ideas to oth-
ers. Make sure that your brain
functions well, so you can re-
member everyone’s Twitter ID;
else, bring your electronic device
so you can follow or list them
down at once. If you have a busi-
ness or personal card, it would
not hurt if you bring them as
well. Although forming a tweetup
can be all about the joys of meet-
ing people and having fun, some
choose to add something more
by making it a charitable event.
An example would be the re-
cently concluded TwestivalMNL
(Twitter Festival Manila) last
EVERY MONDAY• 11 April 2011
of people is public speaking and
death only comes second. Yup,
number two. “This means to the
average person, if you go to a
funeral, you’re better off in the
casket than doing the eulogy.” -
Jerry Seinfeld, Comedian
So how do techies deal with
this?
The First Step to
Calming Your Stress
When Herbert Benson, MD,
started practicing as a young car-
diologist more than 35 years ago,
the term “mind/body medicine”
was unknown. Dr. Benson’s work
linking stress to physical health
was contrary to the western medi-
cal thought of his day. However,
his research at the Harvard Medi-
cal School proved that there is a
mind/body connection and that
under¬standing that connection
is the first step to control-ling and
diminishing stress.
Mind/Body Link to Stress
Response
After noticing that most of his
patients experienced a rise in
blood pressure when visiting his
office, Ben¬son wondered if the
two were related, if his patients’ el-
evated blood pressure levels were
due to stress over visiting the
doctor. To test his hypothesis that
there was a mind/body connection,
Benson and his colleagues used
squirrel monkeys and operant
conditioning technology. They
found that the monkeys who were
“rewarded” for higher blood pres-
sure learned the behaviors that
caused the condition and went on
to develop hypertension. Their
response was much the same as
the “Fight-or-Flight Response”
first noted by Walter Cannon in
1915. Benson and his colleagues
noted that the monkeys trained to
elicit a more relaxed response did
not develop hypertension.
To be continued…
Glenn Richmond Ong
March, where, in a short span
of time, several tweeps volun-
teered to join a global event by
organizing a local tweetup for a
cause. With the entrance fee of
Php250 and help from few advo-
cates, all proceeds went to their
chosen charity, JeepneED Inc.
By doing this, they did not only
make themselves happy from all
the socializing and raffle prizes,
but also the charity’s kids who
will soon experience the wealth
of education.
Tweetup is the new eyeball.
Surely, we have heard of bloody
stories that happened to people
who met up with people they
knew from online. As such, there
is still the fear of danger in the
lives of people who aren’t smart
enough to distinguish who are
good and bad people. Remem-
ber, crimes may possibly happen
out of a tweetup even in modern
times. For instance, the person
you meet tries to win your heart
with his wit and humor. When he
does, he might try to make his
intentions sound good even if it
is not. The culprit’s succeeding
action, as we say, is history. Let
us practice vigilance even if this
is a group gathering. It’s always
better to keep yourself safe than
sorry.
In a nutshell, Tweetups are
fun and educational in one way
or another. It is all about putting
a face behind the Twitter ID and
the 140 character status updates,
turning online connections into
physical and emotional connec-
tions, building relationships that
go beyond the shapes of elec-
tronic devices.
Have you joined one or plan-
ning to? There’s a tweetup hap-
pening soon in Mercato Centra-
la, Bonifacio Global City. Follow
me @GlennOng for updates on
future tweetups.
D5
W
ago, Crysis, had raised
the bar on game graph-
ic standards for PC-
playable- first person
shooters.With its large
servings of action and suspense---
coupled with cinematic graphics and
audio---Crysis surpassed the expec-
tations of gamers in terms of realism
and hands-on-action fusion.
But Crytek, the same game de-
velopers behind the 2003 Best PC
Game “Farcry,” is not content to sit
on its laurels. They just had to wow
gamers once more with another in-
stallment of the Crysis franchise,
Crysis 2.
But…hold your horses first. We
won’t be discussing Crysis 2 until
several days from now. Weare talk-
ing of the merits of the first edition
of Crysis for a backgrounder in the
hope of giving you a better gaming
experience.
Crysistakes place in a fictitious
chain of islands in the Philippine
Sea in the year 2020---picture the
Spratlys situation several years from
now except that the United States
and North Korea are on the same
side of the conflict.
The story is played out as a team
of archeologists sends out a distress
call saying North Korea has taken
control of the island and that the
rogue state islooking fora discovery
could change the world order. In re-
sponse, the US sends its Delta Force
and issues directives to the soldiers
to rescue the stricken archeologist
and retrieve any information they
could find. The succeeding events
unfold and suddenly, the US and
North Korea finds themselves in a
battle for survival against an alien
invasion.
A look at Crysis would bring up
a normal first-person shooter into
mind. But Crysis is more than just
shooting, jumping, and crawling.
acebook, Zynga,
F
Groupon, Twitter and
LinkedIn have come
to define the social
Web. Founded within
the last five years, the
quintet of start-ups is now estimated
to be worth more than $71 billion.
Behind these companies is a tan-
gle of venture capitalists, founders,
engineers and angel investors who
stand to profit handsomely if these
Annalyn S. Jusay
How to write a blog post 101
reader wrote me ask-
A
ing tips on how to write
a blog post. This may
sound simplistic to
some but is actually
loaded with meaning.
The style of writing when you blog
is very much different from spin-
ning words in a newspaper, a press
release or back in college when we
composed our thesis.
I don't know if you agree with me
but there's something about suc-
cessful bloggers and how they get
their point across in so few words as
possible. Content is king when com-
municating in the internet, all right.
People will flock to you like geese if
you add value and provide good in-
formation. But it also important to
be TERSE, to have substance while
doing so in as few words as pos-
sible.
What could be the reason, you
might ask? First of all, it is because
internet users are suffering from at-
tention deficit in this age of Youtube,
Facebook and other social media.
Crysis, revisited
What differentiates Crysis from
other similar games is the use of the
characters’ “Nanosuit.”
The Nanosuitadds complexity to
the combat situations in-game. It en-
ables the player to choose between
different modes, such as amplified
strength, near invisibility, and in-
creased speed. Utilizing these func-
tions helps the player to plan and
strategize on ways to accomplish the
mission. Adding realism to the game
is the Heads-up Display (HUD) which
is rendered as a computer screen for
the suit, complete with loading se-
quences and distortions.And among
all these things, the Nanosuit looks
intimidating and cool.
Missions and objectives can be ac-
complished in a variety of ways. Go-
ing from point A to point B depends
on the player’s discretion in which
path he chooses.The tropical setting
of the game bombards the environ-
ments with foliage and trees which
could be mown down as players fire
bullets into them. In-game physics
engine is hot and still is a standard
start-ups go public. For some com-
panies, it is just a matter of when.
Groupon is considering a 2011 of-
fering that would value the social
buying site at $25 billion, while Fa-
cebook has signaled that it will go
public next year.
The club of technology insiders
is a deeply connected, interdepen-
dent network, with many players
overlapping at one time or another
on the same investments, boards
When you're thinking of blogging,
you have to know that you're com-
peting with gazillions of other web-
sites and all of you want to get the
readers' attention. Just imagine
what a tall order it is! And people
are so pressed for time these days.
Unless you're close friends, a reader
can only spend two minutes in your
site at the most.
When blogging, ditch the diction-
ary and heavy words like pusillani-
mous and supercallifragilistic. Get
cozy with nomnom, LOL and other
internet slang.
Length is also a big factor when
writing your post. Forget about writ-
ing a treatise knowing that internet
readers have short attention span.
A post of at least 100 words will do
if you match it with the right mix of
images. But ideally, 200 to 400 words
should do. If you're using Word-
Press, you can easily see your word
count in your dashboard.
(Another thing that you can do in
your WP dashboard is post schedul-
ing. Hitting the publish button once
in today’s games.Blow things up and
you’ll see a display of both fireworks
and shrapnel. Vehicles for air, land,
and sea are also present in-game.
Enemy AI (artificial intelligence) is
very managed and takes advantage
of the surroundings.
Multiplayer multiplies the fun ex-
perienced in the single player. The
game is capable of handling games
with 32 players. Each player has
their own nanosuit, together with its
functions and abilities. Matches are
played in two game types: Death-
match and Power Struggle a.k.a. cap-
ture the flag. Points are acquired by
eliminating enemies and capturing
bases, and these points can then be
spent to purchase stronger weapons.
The first edition of Crysis re-
mains a gem up to now. The only
problem was the large processing
requirements to run it. At four years
old, the game may already sound old
by today’s standards but definitely,
any mid-level PC is still capable of
running the game. (Jose Gamaliel
S. Felongco)
The Money
Network
and payrolls.
For example, the Russian billion-
aire Yuri Milner - who was virtually
unknown in Silicon Valley before his
first Facebook investment in May
2009 - is a criti\cal connector in this
ecosystem. Milner, the founder of
the investment firm DST Global,
has plowed more than $1 billion into
Facebook, Zynga and Groupon in
the last two years.
He has also drawn the Wall
Street elite into this world, joining
with Goldman Sachs for a $1.5 bil-
lion investment in Facebook.
"Silicon Valley is not only build-
ing and investing in social networks,
it is an efficient network of relation-
ships where each individual can be
activated or brought into a deal with
just a few e-mails or phone calls,"
said Jeff Clavier, an investor who
owns stakes in Twitter and Grou-
pon. "That can be fascinating, or
irritating, to watch for outsiders."
(NYT)
you finish your blog post isn't really
compulsory. Some bloggers specify
a date when a post should go live if
they think their blog traffic peaks on
certain days of the week, like Tues-
day.)
A lot of people who are just start-
ing to blog treat the whole thing like
keeping an online diary. They pour
out their thoughts, abstract feelings
and whatever they did for that day.
But savvy bloggers already know
that they have to write to feed the
search engines. Optimizing your
blog post for searches leads to an
opportunity to increase your blog
traffic and possibly advertising op-
portunities.
Optimize your post beginning
with the choice of your headline or
title. Hence, instead of writing some-
thing vague like "Adventures with my
new cellphone," be more specific and
name it " Hands on with the Nokia
E7." It would also help if you use
tools like All in one SEO Pack which
can easily be downloaded from the
library of WordPress plugins.