His argument is that in order to come up with a truly innovative business model, business strategists shouldn’t be afraid to throw in ideas from way out in the left field. Otherwise, you’d end up processing contaminated information using data you already know and come up with the same shitty business idea hundreds of people already came up with years before it even crossed your mind. (i.e. “That buffalo wings place around the corner is doing well, why don’t we put up our own buffalo wings place. Only ours is cheaper. And has more sauce. Bitches love sauce”)

It’s similar to the entire concept of the curse of knowledge popularized by Chip and Dan Heath in their book Made to Stick (another totally boss book).

I love it even more because the ideas Luke present are parallel to the ideas Sir Ken Robinson presented in his TED talk about how our educational systems undermine creativity as opposed to nourishing them.

Essentially the book teaches you to identify opportunities by addressing “tension points” and following a simple template:

There’s an opportunity to provide [who?] with [what?] that [fills what gap?] and coming up with a hypothesis to challenge an existing business cliche from way out in the left field.

A real-world example can be seen in the resounding success of the Nintendo Wii in a playing field supposedly dominated by the XBOX 360 and the Playstation 3:

Cliche: Gamers are lazy couch potatoes who do not want to move more than they have to while enjoying games with kickass, realistic graphics.

Disruptive Hypothesis: What if there’s a significant segment of gamers who would enjoy  laid back games with their friends using an unorthodox input system that would require them to get off their couch and move?

Insight: Some casual gamers are actually intimidated by realistic graphics and complicated controls.

Opportunity: There’s an opportunity to provide casual gamers intimidated by current generation games with a gaming console offering laid back games which they can play with their friends using a motion controller.

Again, this book contains a lot of valuable insights. Insights which, if I were aware of about the time I graduated college, might’ve given me a shortcut to the financial empire I am going for. Obviously, the path I took (one that involved a call center job and dancing half-naked in front of a clothing store in exchange for vegetables) was the longer route.

But, as my mom used to say: “Gumising ka na, hindi ka hihintayin ng pari. Naglasing ka nanaman ba?” (The rough equivalent of which in English is: “It’s never too late”.)

Using my learnings from this book, I came up with an airtight business idea that would undoubtedly propel me to within striking distance of the financial empire I’ve been longing to build. And maybe a couple of lawsuits. (Whatever. Again, like my mom used to say–never mind. Too much effort).

Business Idea: Brothel 2.0™

Cliche: Men would pay good money to pay prostitutes in brothels to satisfy their carnal desires. (Never go to brothels to satisfy your emotional desires. I swear, my friend Jerry fell “inlove” with a prostitute and made her his girlfriend. Bro got into so much debt, he is now awaiting arraignment from the Quezon City regional trial court for Grand larceny and estafa. Do NOT do this.)

Disruptive Hypothesis: What if some men would rather go to brothels to get paid by prostitutes to have sex with them?

Insight: some prostitutes would have sex with some men for free if they are good-looking enough.

Opportunity: There’s an opportunity to provide men with free sex by salaried prostitutes. The only requirement that patrons need to satisfy is that they should buy at least PhP 5,000 worth of douchebaggy clothing/perfume/hair product from the brothel’s store.

Men get “free” sex by looking good. Prostitutes “pay” the men from a small piece of the brothel’s profit from the mandatory clothing purchase. As an added bonus, patrons walk away with fashion articles they can reuse. Everyone’s happy and we gots 99 problems but a bitch aint one of them!

I know this idea needs a little polishing but hey, that’s where you, my friends/potential business partners/angel investors come in.

I’m just going to leave this link to my contact form right here.

To recap: For businesses, Twitter is effective as a Marketing/Lead Generation platform only if it is used to build trust for your brand. Start with considering using it as a Customer Service tool. I see what you did there @SMARTcares, I see what you did there and I love it.

I’d also like to thank everyone who attended SEMCON 2009, you guys were great. See you next year!

Daniela’s family, at that time, was living in David’s house after years of domestic abuse prompted her to take her kids and divorce her husband.

The appeal was pretty straightforward: Using ChipIn.com, David intended to raise $5,000 for Daniela and her family to get a decent roof over their heads without worrying about deposit or rent for a while.

To say that the community response was significant would be an insulting understatement. In fact, a mere 24 hours after the appeal was posted, David was able to raise over $15,000 for Daniela and her family.

One only needs to look at the deluge of twitter responses and media coverage (most notably from Business Week and The Vancouver Sun) to see how quickly and phenomenally the virus spread.

After everything settled down, I realized a couple of things: First, the #daniela campaign has got to be one of the most noble ways I’ve seen anybody put their social authority to use in recent memory and second, the campaign is a gleaming example of how a community’s altruism and willingness to extend a helping hand does not get watered down even if its members are connected only by mere wires and fiber optics.

Also, after the proof of concept on how authority can be leveraged to raise funds for a good cause was laid out, I got to thinking about my own authority in the local blogosphere and how I could leverage it, being one of the country’s most prominent bloggers, to pull off my own #daniela.

And so here we are with a little experiment…

Ready?

Wait for it…

And here it goes…

I think you should totally give me money

No, don’t go just yet and hear me out. I know I’m being a douche and you’ve probably decided in your narrow minds that I am, indeed, a douche but that’s not what’s important.

What’s important, bro, is that I’ve written an assload of posts in this blog (and here) since June of 2005 and while you’ve consistently consumed the high art that are my blog posts, I have never really asked you for anything in return. Until now.

To put things into perspective, I am going to run some numbers by you:

• I have written over 400 posts between this blog and my old one
• The average length of a Mike “Fucking” Villar blog post is 800 words.
• Now, using the magic of math, I can safely estimate that I have, in my career as a blogger, written well over 320,000 words
• On the average, a book is about 70,000 words long (I totally made this up. Sorry.)
• Again using the voodoo that is math, assuming that you’ve read every single blog post I churned out, you’ve read the equivalent of 4 books! Written by me!
• A cursory look at Amazon tells me that a new book costs around 7-8 USD but since I am only a “semi-published” writer, I am willing to slash the prices of the 4 “books” you’ve read to $5 each.
• Now do you know why you owe me $20 ?

(Wait, even if you didn’t read all of my posts, you still owe me a little money.)

Let it go on record that I do NOT earn anything from advertising through this site and I am, in fact, hemorrhaging thousands of Pesos yearly because of web hosting bills and my being obdurate.

For those of you who haven’t yet realized the gravity of this, just think of it this way: The thousands of Pesos I blow annually on Web Hosting is money better spent on alcohol–specifically those swanky cocktails I’ve been addicted to lately or on generously helping the local prostitution industry prosper.

If you’re one of those people who like really love this blog and consider yourself affluent, we can make it more “interesting” depending on the amount you are willing to donate:

• For $500 I will give you total access to my hamper and keep 1 (one) article of clothing I recently wore (No underwear. Come on, that’s just creepy)
• For $1,000 I will have an hour’s worth of phone sex with you
• For $5,000 I will buy a Macbook Pro and print a thank you card to be sent to you using it (could be worth a lot of money after I die 3 years from now)
• And for $20,000 Me and my entire family can be your slaves. Forever.

And there we have it my humble plea for a little money. Your donation would be a clear sign that you care for me and appreciate the entertainment I’ve been providing you for four years now.

Remember: Your appreciation makes me all warm and fuzzy inside and your cash, it keeps me drunk. Which is awesome.

Thank you for your time, and below is the ChipIn widget you could use to give me monies!

Facebook

…If I was the CEO of my own company. But for now I have to live with the fact that I am but a program manager encumbered with the fact that I live in a country where most system administrators have a reactive thought process in dealing with IT-related problems.

What do you mean you can’t access your email? Oh I know, let’s reformat your hard drive and do a fresh Windows XP install! Bam! Problem solved!

A virus threat?! OMG! Let’s disable WiFi access on all laptops in the network! THEN do a fresh Windows XP install! Bam! Probllem solved!

Is the Internet slow during office hours? Why, let’s indiscriminately block half of the sites our employees access! Bam! Problem solved!

Twitter

The usual IT scapegoats in almost all network congestion problems seem to be social sites like Facebook, MySpace and their ilk. This is fine–In an assembly line. What IT departments in most companies, especially those who are marketing-driven, fail to take into consideration when doing their capacity planning is that the underpinnings of successful employees are creativity and innovation–hallmarks which a restrictive IT environment fails to and will fail to cultivate.

Some system administrators and upper management types might argue that creating a restrictive IT environment is necessary to sustain productivity.

Well guess what, You’re wrong.

According to a recent report, an employee’s inability to access these same websites you block could also lead to a drop in productivity.

a takeaway from the report:

The report concludes with a note of caution and some practical advice with regards to developing a frame work for a responsible and prosperous network. This should be a group in which its citizens respect the power and realise the mutual benefit of giving and taking. Businesses should consider the following guidelines when auditing and analysing their own networks:

1. Do not separate ‘social’ networking from ‘professional’ networking. Attempts to control employees’ use of social networking software in the office may end up damaging the organization in the long run by depleting its network capital

2. There should be value placed on networks with people outside the firm. Too often, it is only senior staff who are encouraged to build relationships with people outside the organization. The power of horizontal networks across organisational boundaries is clear, and growing

3. Keep in touch with employees that have left the organisation. The temptation during a difficult economic climate is to hunker down; but this risks cutting off flows of network capital. Companies should consider how to keep former employees in the network

4. Do not police networks but consider how they operate and what could be improved. This should be a first step towards collective conversations about the ‘rules of the game’ when it comes to operating within networks

These are things the most successful marketing-driven companies like Zappos (who list Creating Fun and A Little Weirdness and Being Passionate and Determined as two of their core values) realize.

Also, In an HR-retention perspective, keeping top talent means giving them the easel and the canvas to tap into their creativity; an effort which would ultimately translate into new business opportunities.

I for one wouldn’t be too happy if I have spent months researching on how Twitter, Facebook or social media in general could be leveraged as a PR/Marketing tool for the company and one day I come in and see that my access to these sites has been blocked.

So yes Mr. IT Administrator/Upper Management guy, if you’re even thinking of blocking access to social sites, I suggest you think about getting more bandwidth first. Or hire robots.

–

Mikey does Marketing for US Auto Parts, a publicly-traded, Internet 500 top retailer. He is NOT a robot. nor are his brilliant coworkers.

What I don’t tell you enough is that I am a pretty successful mid-level executive for an US-based Internet 500 top retailer. Here’s the short version of how that happened: Because of my charm, my ambition and my intelligence, I was able to rise above considerable poverty to attend a private grade school school where I got the distinction of getting the highest National Elementary Aptitude Test score in my district.

After high school, because of my shrewd, devious influence, I was able to get into the medical program of one of the better medical universities in the country where, after two years, because of the unhealthy obsession I had for video games, I dropped out and easily got a Marketing degree from a not-so-prestigious business school.

Finally, because of sheer luck, a kind job market and alcohol-induced casual calmness which employers mistook for confidence I was able to land key positions and jobs that got me where I am today.

In the jobs I had, I learned a great deal about Customer Relations Management, Account Management, Internet Advertising and Internet Marketing. So yeah, I guess what I’m saying is that I’m pretty competent at what I do but, I am, in no means, a guru. I mean, if I were to summarize my entire academic and professional life with just several words, the words I’d use would probably be “Winging”, “bluffing” and “bullshit” also “not”, “having”, “consensual” and “sex”

So, you could only imagine my surprise when I was given a speaking gig over at the 2008 Search Engine Marketing Conference. I cannot stress enough the monumental lapse in judgment the person who decided to include me in the list of the “brightest stars of the local marketing scene” they have as speakers. I actually imagine the planning meeting the organizers of this event had to have gone something like this:

Organizer 1: “So I managed to get a senior management guy from Yahoo! Southeast Asia to present for us. How about you guys?

Organizer 2: “Well, I got a prominent managing director from a Thailand-based Interactive marketing firm to confirm. Anyone else?”

Organizer 3: “Well I managed to get this local internet celebrity who does marketing work for a US-based internet retailer. I heard he does nothing at work but make personal phone calls and running a small sports betting operation from his cubicle. But he’s REALLY funny and people get a kick out of seeing him fail so I think it’s a good idea.”

Organizer 1: “I like it! You know what else we can do? Maybe we can put him on a panel with SEO experts so people could be entertained watching him make a complete tool out of himself!”

[Organizer 1 and Organizer 2 exchange high fives]

Organizer 3: “So are we done here? You guys want to snort some lines and get fucked up somewhere?”

Organizer 1 and 2: “k!”

Fast forward to Tuesday, with my armpits assured of dryness thanks to the sheets of newspaper I crammed in them and with 2 tablets of xanax in one hand and my crotch in the other, I went up to the podium confident that my talk would go hitch-free. After all, I’ve talked about my topic dozens of times before.

My talk was pretty uneventful a couple of slides into it, I started off with one of my killer jokes I’m notorioulsy known for and several more jokes later, I was literally bringing the house down. Everything was going fine until somewhere in my tenth slide when I realized that the images in my presentation were NOT displaying. AT ALL.

Now, I have a dilemma in my hands. I was talking about CPM and creating the perfect banner ad and people, naturally, were expecting to see examples.

I was in full panic mode at that point. I saw two possible routes I could take at that point: one, I could start apologizing profusely and maybe promise all the people in the room a 500 peso refund off the 9,500 pesos they paid for admission or two, I could pull off a Michael Jordan Flu game push through with my presentation and drop 38 points on the audience’s collective asses. I took the second route.

So, I digged through my arsenal of sure-fire jokes and charmed my way through the entire thing–something which apparently worked really well.

So yeah, to all of you who attended SEMCON 2008 and had the misfortune of witnessing my talk, I apologize profusely to you. In my defense, it wasn’t entirely my fault. It was Microsoft Powerpoint’s fault that it couldn’t render something I made out of Apple iWork’s Keynote application properly. Also, partly, it was NingNing, our maid’s fault because she couldn’t follow simple instructions. (The night before my talk, a couple of friends invited me for a few drinks and I asked NingNing to embed the images I am going to use on my presentation on keynote. I told her explicitly to use the Insert > Images > From file menu but I guess she thinks she knows better and drag and dropped the things into the slides. I guess we all know why she’s a fucking maid and why I’m a Senior Marketing Manager. Fucking idiot I swear.)

Anyway, I leave you all with a video of the epic failure that was my SEMCON 2008 talk:

SEMCON 2008 Excerpt – Beyond CPM from Mike Villar on Vimeo.

Naturally, I asked her if she was serious and after learning that she was, I committed myself to doing it, even though I might as well write something about “breeding racist birds” given the degree of knowledge I have in the field of Marketing.

I agreed to do it mainly because:

1. It would give me more exposure, some professional credibility and at the very least, add to the paltry list of press pieces that feature me.
2. It’s short, meaning I am only required to dish out around 500 words.
3. I get a kick out of churning out advice on topics I do not know squat about. There’s no better feeling in the world than knowing that I’ve have influenced a significant number of people in a field where I’ve had marginal to no success at all and something where I lack any sort of acceptable acumen in. All of these give me a MAJOR boner.

So, two days after getting the email, I sat down with my Macbook and brewed this little tour de force:


1. How do you retain your clients by going beyond merely completing the transaction? What do you do to keep your clients/ make them ask for additional orders from you?
My post-sale marketing strategy actually begins before the first sale is made. I feel that all marketers have an obligation to create a unique value proposition for the products they market and make sure that the customer understands the value the company has delivered to them. This can usually be done by genuinely highlighting your company or product’s salient advantages over the competition.

Customer Experience Management then follows. We usually do this by contacting our top, most important customers, emphasizing that we want to better understand their needs and asking how we can create more value for them in the future.

From this, taking all responses into consideration, we come up with special deals for them and make sure they are notified of all price drops and/or bargains applicable to products directly related to the item they first purchased. After all, there is no hotter lead than a potential repeat customer.

2. In an economic slowdown, how does your company realign (your) sales force with your turnaround marketing strategies?
Our recession strategy is simple: a) We put more weight, effort-wise, on selling to our current customers—What few people see is that during a recession, and when customers make buying decisions, they tend to have a strong predilection for buying from a source they already trust. Since this is the case, we want to make this decision for our current customers easier and more obvious. Our sales teams take extra measures to be more effective with our existing customers—getting down and asking them what they need from us and basically communicating more personally and more intimate with them.

b) We focus our marketing resources to growing market segments. In a recession environment, there are steep declines in some market segments but there are market segments that grow faster and more lucrative than others. These are what a good marketer should see. As an example, my company is a top internet retailer of after-market automotive parts and accessories; In a recession setting and in a world of spiraling gas prices a segment we see the most potential in are parts that increase fuel efficiency and, because people tend to keep their old cars longer in a recession setting and because they tend to break down more often, we also see great potential in marketing replacement parts.

Of course we also would want to reduce investments in segments that are going to get hit the most in a recession like luxury items and performance products.

3. Define (an) effective sales force.? What are the components of an effective sales force?
For me the single most important component of an effective sales force is motivation. And I believe that the best motivation is something that transcends incentives and monetary compensation. Although people in sales can obviously be motivated by money, money is not the only motivator in having them an excellent job.

The people I work with and worked with in the past expect more from their job–feeling valued, respected and appreciated in the organization they work with as well as believing in the product they sell are some of the key factors in achieving the right kind of motivation for sales personnel.

4. What are your approaches to achieve an effective sales force?
Empowering your sales force through training, a good incentive scheme as well a clearly-defined career path worked wonders for me.

–

A couple of minutes later, the writer emailed me back. I opened the email expecting a congratulatory note from her that goes on to say how she loved the piece and it would get published as is and, in the process, cementing herself as the best writer in her magazine and me, being hailed by marketing professionals everywhere as Asia’s premiere marketing wunderkind and sex symbol.

However, upon opening the email, I learned that I had, in fact, missed the deadline she so clearly stated on her previous email by 12 hours. This was followed by “This is great, and I am going to see if I can do something about it. I’ll let you know if there are any plans to publish this.”

Of course, I know that what she actually meant “You blew your chance. This could’ve gotten you out of writing about penis jokes and masturbating into soda cans over the internet and started you off into the wonderful world of discussing direct marketing trends with some Europe-based, Ivy-educated girl with low morals and a throat with an insatiable itch longing to be scratched by nothing but the smallest, most Asian cock.

I could only try to make fun of the situation but, right now, it’s too soon. Fuck.

I have worked with a lot of companies in the past and if there is one thing that’s common between all of those companies’ Human Resources departments, it has got to be the fact that, traditionally, the department has assumed the role of a pen-pushing, forms-collating, support unit.

Sure, I’ve worked with some HR departments that have people in them who do stellar jobs in sourcing talent, but never have I seen such a department that gives equal weight to taking care of talent.

An excerpt from Seth’s post:

What if you started acting like the VP of Talent? Understanding that talent is hard to find and not obvious to manage. The VP of Talent would have to reorganize the department and do things differently all day long (small example: talent shouldn’t have to fill out reams of forms and argue with the insurance company… talent is too busy for that… talent has people to help with that.)

I couldn’t agree with this more. If you’re a company looking for top talent to join your ranks, do you think that putting your hat in your hand, extending an attractive compensation package and pretty much just chucking the candidate into the routinary fray of things to rot forever would suffice?

Even sadder is how most Human Resources departments seem to try to mitigate their workload by dumping clerical tasks (i.e. Attendance monitoring, forms-filing, etc.) to the people they hire to become middle management superstars.

I guess what I’m driving at is that if you want to keep top talent, you have to treat them like Superstars–and I’ll tell you what superstars don’t do: They do not fill up leave applications in triplicate for their staff, nor do they argue with accounting on behalf of their staff members because of salary disputes. Superstars are too busy excelling at what you hired them to do for any of this.

And what the fuck’s up with the term “Human Resources” anyway? “Resource” is not something you ascribe to the word “Human.”

Following Seth’s lead: How about “Corporate Talent Management?”

Last Saturday, I talked about Affiliate Marketing (Surprise! I can talk about stuff besides penis and fat jokes) on the first day of the Philippine Internet Marketing Bootcamp. Surprisingly enough, my presentation went well and was pretty uneventful save for a couple of slurred words and my general incoherence which are pretty normal for me when I talk about shit I don’t really understand or when I’m outright shooting crap (my girlfriend and ex-girlfriends could attest to this).

I could even go ahead and say that if that event had an ass, I probably went crazy on it and kicked the shit out of it.

Anyway, it was nice to see Noemi, Lauren, Dine, Jedi, Sasha, Eugene and Abe among other people during the Boot Camp. There will be another session on Saturday, January 26th at 8am so drop whatever it is that you’re doing and request for an invite NOW.

(If you go, I’ll sign an autograph for you and, if my schedule permits it, I’ll even host your monggoloid son’s birthday party. Whatever. Just go. Please.)

From Signal Vs. Noise, 37Signals’ blog:

8. Ride the wave. Seek momentum and ride it. Is everyone buzzing about the iPhone? Then make an iPhone app. Are people interested in rapid development processes? Then blog about building your app in, say, under a month. Find out what people are talking about already and then figure out a way to get in the picture.

First of all, we all know that the market doesn’t need another mediocre product and how, pray tell, is the “ride the wave” mentality going to allow R&D teams to come up with a proverbial Purple Cow?

Starbucks became a Purple Cow not by “Riding the wave” and releasing a complementary creamer for Maxwell House coffee but by boldly introducing the phenomenal coffee bar concept to a market that, at that time, seemed to be unreceptive to the idea.

And even 37Signals as a company did not “Ride the wave” to get in the frame. The fact that their first product, Basecamp showcased the organic unity of milestone management, messaging, files sharing, and to-do list never before seen made it a remarkable product that took little time to spread virally–a Purple Cow.

Surely, Matt Linderman et al. know that they should give themselves more credit.

And about the “Self Promotion” bit, I think Seth Godin says it best:

37 Signals, as usual, has a thoughtful post about self promotion.

Except they missed the biggest part, by a mile.

They don’t do self-promotion. Self-promotion, as the term is used by many people, is a mildly pejorative way to describe someone who promotes himself at the expense of others.

Nobody says, “That Yo Yo Ma, he’s so self-promotional,” or, “can you believe what a self-promoter the Dalai Lama is?” That’s because they’re not promoting themselves. They’re promoting useful ideas. They’re promoting tactics or products that actually benefit the person they’re reaching out to.

Paris Hilton is a self-promoter. You don’t get any benefit out of her appearances other than temporary entertainment value and some schadenfreude. The guys at 37 Signals have never done a bit of self-promotion in their entire careers. That’s because they’re doing you-promotion, not me-promotion.

Yes, yes and yes.

Anytime, anywhere what? Well, anytime, anywhere 2MBPS Data, VOIP and Video that’s what.

I met with Marvin over dinner and I must say that from what he describes the service to be, I’m already creaming my pants in anticipation and I foresee other web workers like myself blowing their loads too once the service rolls out sometime in 2008.

If you’re anything of a web worker as I am, you’ve probably experienced using other mobile data platforms to use VOIP to communicate with clients or send important documents to them while you’re on the road. Everything’s going great until Globe Visibility arbitrarily decides to shift down from giving you HSDPA connectivity to GPRS causing your VOIP connection to get choppy and your file transfers to dramatically slow down. In a moment of utter frustration, you mumble something about wanting to throw newborn babies up in the air and catch them with bayonets–something which your Japanese client overhears. Next thing you know, you’re haunting gasoline stations along South Luzon Expressway, and giving weary travelers hand jobs in exchange for food.

The fact that WiMAX’s Quality of Service mechanism is guaranteed, as opposed to Wi-Fi’ where QoS is relative between packets, pegs your up and down speeds to 2MBPS and ensures that the aforementioned scenario doesn’t happen.

Their product offering also comes with a VoIP service where you’re given a local number from which you can make and receive calls from anywhere. The implications of this are huge. I did Business Development work for beleaguered US broadband phone company Vonage in the past, and I remember one of our salient points being the fact that the service allows making US calls more cost efficient. A person based in the US can send a Vonage box(which comes with a US-based Direct Inward Dialing Number) to anywhere–say the Philippines–and anybody there with a broadband connection can place calls to the US for free.

Happy’s VoIP service is similar to Vonage’s to some extent as it allows people to make Happy VoIP – Land line calls, Land line – Happy VoIP and Happy VoIP – Happy VoIP calls for free.

And because Happy allows you to register up to three MAC addresses with the service(Ideally, you can set up your laptop, home router or desktop, and mobile phone to work with the WiMAX service), you can place and receive calls using your mobile device anywhere there’s coverage.

Aside from data and voice services, Happy’s consumer offering also aims to provide IPTV which is basically a streaming mobile cable TV service which would allow you to watch over 80 channels on your laptop, desktop or mobile device. This is similar to Smart’s myTV service only it’s not a fucking Value Added Service nor is does it feature a paltry 11 channels.

Now, I haven’t had the opportunity to test Happy’s VoIP and IPTV services but the fact that Happy Communications’ management team is composed of Silicon Valley veterans with links to companies and services like Smart, Joost, Skype, and ICQ says a lot about the service’s potential.

How much is the service going to cost? Well Marvin says the price will be in the neighborhood of 3,000 pesos a month or possibly lower if they implement a tiered pricing scheme. This isn’t bad at all considering other mobile data providers’ services cost around that much already.

All in all, I have nothing but high hopes for Happy Communications’ upcoming consumer product offering. The best thing about this, in my opinion, is that if anything, the newcomer’s going to make the mobile data landscape more competitive price-wise.

I mean, really. Come on.