Dean Michael Berris

So I've picked up reading again, and this time I'm focusing on reading (and buying) books about investing and business. I feel that even though I've been trying to break the family trend of starting and owning businesses, I have that entrepreneurial knack in my blood. I'm thinking instead of trying to fight it, I'm going to learn more about it and maybe someday tough it out as an entrepreneur myself.

To arm myself with knowledge I know I will need to someday be that entrepreneur and to cushion myself (and eventual family perhaps) by securing my financial status (in the present and in the future), I went to the nearest PowerBooks and got myself the following books this weekend:

• The Little Book on Common Sense Investing by John Bogle
• The One Minute Entrepreneur by Ken Blanchard, et al
• The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

So far I've read both "The Little Book on Common Sense Investing" and "The One Minute Entrepreneur" and I've started chapter 1 of The Long Tail. It's the first time I've actually read books and finished them (two at that) in one weekend.

I tried my hand at reading fiction, but I found thoughts drifting away from what I was reading so I stopped that quickly. I have a copy of F. Sionil Jose's Don Vicente (two novels, compacted in one) which I promise I'll read with more enthusiasm (like how I read his other novels Ermita, Mass, and The Pretenders).

In the past month I also read "The Google Story" which is a fascinating read -- which I think inspired me to read more about business and entrepreneurship.

Hopefully by next week I'll have a new batch of reading materials to devour and blog about.

CHill.

It's really hard to stop spending. When you get started, it's like a disease. You don't stop until it hurts. It starts with a couple of books, then you go on to make bigger and bigger purchases, and you don't stop until it really hurts. And only when we've been burnt that we learn -- you don't know what hurts until you feel it.

Now I mark the last day I keep spending. Starting tomorrow, I will track my spending and make sure I don't spend more than 100 pesos a day. That means I'll do my groceries during the start of the week and keep the food I eat per day under 100 pesos, stop eating the junk food, and start saving more money each month to put into an equity fund I already have money in. I vow to put in Php 1000 pesos a month to the equity fund.

Starting Monday next week, I will only drink water, will take my daily vitamins, and eat at most 70 pesos per day (that's 20 pesos a meal plus 10 pesos for merienda). I'll put in 30 pesos a day for other expenses: because I can walk from the office to my rented condo unit, I'll do that everyday. 30 pesos should go into the savings per day, which should give me 30x20 = 600 Php per month. Now I just need to make 400 pesos to put into the equity fund every month.

I know, you're probably telling me: good luck with that in Makati. That's why I've made it a point to optimize my spending to prove that you can live in Makati and live in a condo unit and spend only 100 pesos a day for comfortable living. Of course, I spend a lot on the board and lodging -- but I believe in living comfortably and not compromising on the living space. The current living quarters I live in is more than enough for my needs, and I don't plan on changing that anytime soon.

So join me in this quest for the 100 peso days in Makati, and I'll give it a month: I'll do a daily log on my spending so that I can let everyone know how it goes.

CHill...

I have been mulling around with this idea: what if people didn't have to buy powerful computers but instead just buy a computer good enough that connects to a powerful time sharing system which can pretty much be located somewhere else in the world? Will the concept fly? What changes will it bring to the PC consumer industry? What will it mean to software vendors who target the end-user market?

First off, let's consider the proposition: what if you can have your data hosted in a data center which has all the failover and redundancy technology you can only dream about, with bandwidth that you can only wish you could have, and with the most powerful computers you can only wish will fit in your pocket. Now what if you can do that for a recurring cost like how you pay for your electricity, water, bandwidth?

Personal computers are getting cheaper and cheaper, and it would certainly be very easy for some well-off companies/individuals to set up a cluster of computers from these personal computers to come up with a system that shares resources and serves hundreds and thousands of users simultaneously. Will this model work for third world countries like the Philippines?

I think it would. If PLDT sold a computer worth Php 15,000 and gave a low income family a phone line along with it and a year's worth of access to a time-sharing system in their data center. If Php 15,000 is too high even for small income families then let's say that's spread out over a year (roughly Php 1,000++ monthly). For a family with children studying in shool, what they'll just probably need is access to some internet resources through a browser (that ran on the server), a word processor, some educational games, etc. and all this can be accessed though a dialup link via a VNC client.

Now think of the economics on the side of PLDT (or Globe, or Bayantel, or some other telco with internet data centers): A PC with two dual core processors can easily host (4 users per processor, 4 virtual systems) 16 people _easy_. How much does a PC like that cost? Let's check: easily around Php 100k. But with 16 people paying 10k each, that already covers the cost of the actual PC. The internet bandwidth is realy just constant.

How now does PLDT or other telco's make more money out of it? The same way ABS-CBN, GMA, and other companies make money. Only this time, PLDT has direct access to a demographic that these media companies only want to be able to contact directly. Ads drive the entertainment industry, and ads drive the Internet business (more or less). And at the same time, they can do more direct marketing to the people that actually avail of their services. It also allows them to move into a different market segment and re-vitalize their fixed-line business and synergize with the internet business.

This can allow faster Internet adoption in the many different segments of the Philippine market: more than 50% of which cannot afford the luxuries of broadband Internet access.

Now if I only had the capital...

CHill...

Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business.

Google Co-Founder speaks in UC Berkeley.