By Erika Tapalla
INQUIRER.net

MORPH LABS CEO David Abramowski’s talk gave us the lowdown on setting up a successful software as a service (SaaS) business.

He started by identifying the need to know your customer and your target market, otherwise you will be kaput.

Abramowski emphasized that it’s not just knowing the people involved, but also considering the bigger picture, which deals with regions, countries, and languages.

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By Erika Tapalla
INQUIRER.net

AFTER quipping that lunch may induce a “food coma,” Morph Labs CEO David Abramowski went ahead and talked about different strategies for growing software as a service (SaaS) businesses.

He said SaaS has four key aspects:

• They are Internet-based applications
• They enable anywhere, anytime access
• Users may rent instead of buying, so a great amount of capital is no longer a necessity
• They require patience for a long tail revenue.

As an example, he referred to a successful Australian SaaS company, Atlassian Software, which took its business slowly and generated revenue from $0 to $24 million.

Patience is key in developing SaaS, Abramowski emphasized.

“You can’t project revenue at the start of April and then expect this April the 30th,” he quipped.

By Erwin Oliva
INQUIRER.net

DAVID ABRAMOWSKI, CEO of Morph Labs, explained that software as a service is about “stealing” business from the incumbents.

He said companies like Salesforce.com have captured the customer relations management market from giants like Siebel. Recently, more companies are even challenging Salesforce.com, such as SugarCRM.

Software as a service is also not about creating software from the ground up, he said. It could be a simple software application that mashes up existing Web-based services.

By Erwin Oliva
INQUIRER.net

UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES professor Hector Manaligod said most teachers in the Philippines today are knowledgeable in information and communications technology, but they are not using it in teaching and learning.

Sometimes, the students know more about ICT than their teachers, he said.

Manaligod said the process of learning is changing thanks to the Internet.

Technology, however, remains a tool or an aid in learning, he said, stressing that ICT only facilitates or supplements the learning process.

By Erika Tapalla
INQUIRER.net

UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES professor Hector Manaligod said the age bracket of the student may be a challenge or constraint to information and communications technology.

As technopreneurs, the goal would be to develop a virtual learning community that is for anyone, anytime, anywhere — education for everybody.

He cited these thoughtful leads in developing software for education:

• Why? What is the reason?
• What does it mean?
• What is the same about… and?

By Erika Tapalla
INQUIRER.net

SOFTWARE as a service provides a solution to physical medical records by utilizing the Internet and providing an Electronic Health Record, portions of which the patients can access.

Such records would include CT scans, X-ray results and ultrasounds.

This expedites access to these records, Dr. Alvin Marcelo said.

“Maybe we could just send URLs to our doctors like in Facebook, and say, ‘Hey, Doc, this is my Facebook account, please check out my health here.”

By Erika Tapalla
INQUIRER.net

THE PRESENTATION of Dr. Alvin Marcelo on e-Health stressed the opportunities for technopreneurs in the health industry because of the immense amount of information.

“Information on health is multimedia,” he said, adding that information on health can no longer be just text or charts.

He said that recently there was a need to record sound, such as the murmurs of a heartbeat and gurgles of the intestines since this information is vital to doctors and medical experts.

Images are just as important, hence the continuous development on MRIs and CT scans and microscope slides, among others.

In terms of video, Marcelo stressed the need to view ultrasounds and 3D rendering of CT scans for MRI.

By Erwin Oliva
INQUIRER.net

DR. Alvin Marcelo, who is the director of the National Telehealth Center at the University of the Philippines-Manila, said health “is one of the most profitable sectors of society.” Thus it presents opportunities for companies that want to enter the e-health industry. Marcelo talked about the opportunities in e-health for software companies.

“Health is an information-intensive field, and it relies mostly on its operators,” he said.

Marcelo has been pushing the idea of e-health as a means to deliver better healthcare services to Filipinos. Information systems should be developed for public hospitals and clinics that are now overwhelmed with patients, he said.

E-health is not just about hospitals, he added, as he stressed that much work has to be done in making electronic versions of patient records.