SAY hello to Karen Galarpe, who has started blogging for INQUIRER.net on our Open for Business blog for entrepreneurs.

Here’s the intro from INQUIRER.net business editor Ma. Salve Duplito, who started the Open for Business blog and handed over the reins to Karen:

Karen is the editor of SME Insight, the Inquirer group’s magazine for entrepreneurs, and has been a journalist for almost two decades now. She has written extensively on entrepreneurship in many different magazines and books like The Ultimate Guide To Starting Your Own Business and has been a consulting editor of Entrepreneur. Karen is bringing in her extensive experience on writing about entrepreneurship and is a great addition to the INQUIRER.net team. Welcome, Karen!

And here’s an excerpt from Karen’s first post:

So why be an entrepreneur? It’s to do what you love to do. And I found out, through years of covering interesting people in my work as a journalist, that such passion is the one that will spell success in business. Indeed, when you do what you love to do, you excel in it, and in the process, you help enrich other people’s lives. The money will just follow.

In this blog, Open for Business, we’ll be featuring passionate business people and find out how they run their businesses. We’ll follow the travails of the winners in our mentoring contest and see what will happen when they implement mentor Willy Arcilla’s tips. We’ll talk about entrepreneurs’ concerns and what must be done to address them. We’ll talk business — plain and simple.

Thanks, Karen, and welcome to the INQUIRER.net blog network. And I agree: it’s all about passion. That’s why INQUIRER.net (then known as INQ7.net) has been number one for so many years, and why we’ll continue to strive harder to become the best we can be.

Cheers!

TODAY we launched two more sites under the INQUIRER.net blog network.

Say hello to Original SIM, the blog of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine, and the Morph Code blog, which will cover the bootcamp that Morph Labs is holding for technology entrepreneurs in the Philippines.

Original SIM, which is exclusively available on INQUIRER.net, is the venue for the SIM staffers to “share their thoughts on different ideas arising from the week’s forthcoming issue of SIM” while giving us all a taste of what the magazine has to offer when it comes out on Sunday.

Here’s an excerpt from the first post by SIM publisher Leica R. Carpo.

I COULD say it was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby,” Dickens’ “Great Expectations” or even Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” that turned me onto reading. But that would be a lie. I must confess that historical novels were my secret passion and I was a Barbara Cartland girl first and foremost.

Meanwhile, check out the Morph Code blog as we cover the first day of the bootcamp, which kicks off tomorrow, March 29. We’ll be providing video coverage via INQUIRER.net VDO and blogging the event, of which INQUIRER.net is a partner.

Stay tuned for more cool stuff ahead as we continue to expand our multimedia content and services

TODAY we did the soft launch of our new INQUIRER.net VDO page.

Contrary to what some people might think, our VDO service has always meant more than just, well, videos. It just so happened that online video was the most obvious “new thing” for INQUIRER.net, foreign territory for a company which has its roots in a print newspaper. What’s great and at times amusing, however, is that in a relatively short span of time, video has become one of the staples of INQUIRER.net. More and more people are coming to expect that video will be part of our coverage, and it’s even come to the point where some PR people would ask me, “When will the video interview come out?” in the same manner that they would once ask, “When is the story coming out?” or “Will you be able to use my press release?” In fact, I’ve even heard anecdotes of some people in print being asked when covering events if they’re also going to take videos.

Online video was once a novelty. Now, it’s becoming a necessity, if you want to gain a competitive advantage.

Of course, we’re just starting out and we know there’s a lot of room for improvement — and we’re addressing that. Moreover, video is a very important, but by no means the only component of our multimedia thrust. VDO is our hub for all our multimedia initiatives, including online video, blogs and podcasts — and yes, whatever new services we will launch in the months to come. I’m pretty excited over all the things that we’ll be rolling out this year, but for now I have to keep my mouth shut.

Anyway, let me leave you with this Technobabble video podcast, where Cisco Philippines country manager Luichi Robles and Cisco Systems (USA) Pte Ltd director for Asia Channel and Commercial Business Christian Hentschel give us a tour of the Cisco Network on Wheels mobile showcase, a container van featuring the latest Cisco solutions. Joseph Lee, Cisco Systems (USA) Pte Ltd director for Advanced Technologies in Asia, also demonstrates some of the solutions for the education sector.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

As we’ve been telling people inside and outside the organization time and again, we are no longer an online newspaper but have to transform ourselves into a multimedia news site. We have to move beyond just the news, and develop new content that will address different niches. The future won’t happen overnight, but it will come, whether you want it to or not, whether you’re prepared for it or not. So it’s really up to you how you deal with the inevitable.

Some might choose to worry over what tomorrow might bring. I’d rather embrace the future and take part in building something new.

SORRY it took some time, but our blog network is once more online!

I promise that we have a lot of new stuff in store for you this year, so don’t let technical difficulties and hiccups get you down heh

Are you excited to find out what 2008 has in store for the information and communications technology industry? What developments would you like to see in 2008?

On that note, check out what Sun Microsystems Philippines managing director Cynthia Mamon has to say about her company’s performance in 2007 and its prospects for 2008, and why we really need a Department of Information and Communications Technology. All this and more in Episode 4 of the Technobabble podcast.

AS you may have noticed, we now have a spiffy new blog box on the INQUIRER.net homepage… and the sites of our sister company Hinge Inquirer Publications have joined our blog network.

It’s another example of the convergence between the different members of the Inquirer Group of Publications, and our role as the online home of this growing family

So say hello to HIP, Mobile Philippines, GAME! Magazine, FB World, SME Insight and Golf Digest on INQUIRER.net.