Wasn't Sure if would be of Interest an many but it sounded Interesting. Dumaguete to host its first Startup Weekend | Sun.Star Jack
Not when you have one of the most corrupt Customs agency in the world (very little is produced locally in terms of electronics components), your duty on imports are ridiculously high and you have one of the most inefficient, corrupt and unreliable postal services to ever exist. The price for anything "electronic" here is just silly, add all the bribery you have to pay to do business and for importing and you wouldn't be able to produce anything electronic at a competitive price.
What makes you think that start-up weekend is for producing hardware? You mentioned "electronic" but that's hardware. Thanks for pointing this out. I do find this interesting. I would love to see what sort of ideas people come up with. From the article... This sounds like it's largely just a way for people to show that there is a tech scene here.
Is there though? If FB qualifies as a "tech scene" then I suppose so. I think the Philippines has quite a ways to go before the education system here start spitting out quality programmers/web-designers/engineers. When people think "tech" they don't think "Philippines". I think the only way that will happen is if they start praying a lot harder and some omnipotent being pops a squat over the Philippines and craps out big brick of magic on the islands.
If Google is looking to recruit large numbers of developers here, then they will have problems. By definition, a start-up is usually just the beginnings of a business. Tech start-ups are generally small teams, maybe just the founders, until they go bust, make money or get funding. I didn't go to school for web development. This stuff isn't difficult to figure out if you have the will. Here is one definition I found for start-ups. Seed Startups - Business Model Experiments – Correlated Causation In this case, many of the start-up ideas are probably targeted to the Philippines. The competition is probably internal. If your competition isn't much better than you are, then you have a chance. By the above definition, most will fail. That's why they call it an experiment.
First thing that came to mind was internet based business but then the PI would need decent internet access... Lots of things that could be sold overseas but as mentioned above the corruption and incompetence makes trying to do any of that very difficult.
The internet isn't that bad. People complain, but it's functional. The call centers wouldn't be setting up shop here if the infrastructure didn't meet a certain level of functionality. If the call centers can do it, then a small start-up team could do it. There is corruption here, but I don't think it's hostile to businesses (they are getting shaken down.) I believe the corruption affects mostly government services - which would also affect things like infrastructure, legal issues and competition in areas which are well defended (telecoms.) I know a lot of business owners here. Most of the corruption people I know have to deal with is in greasing palms with small payments to get the system to move faster. Start-ups are small, flexible and can move fast. If they run into an issue and find a dead-end, they can pivot to something that is relatively open. Selling services abroad might be relatively clear of corruption. You have a lot of options. The free economic zones which are setup to help grow certain services seem to take corruption seriously. I believe many of the call centers here are considered free economic zones. The great thing about a service related business is that it has relatively little surface area to get hit with corruption. The more infrastructure you need and the more red tape your business has to deal with, the more surface area you have for getting tampered with. A business selling services over the internet can just sort of hop over all that and reach directly to consumers.
