NEAR THE FAR end of Tomas Morato Avenue in Quezon City, a new restaurant has been quietly luring diners these past seven months with its authentic Asian cuisine. This is Nasi Lemak, a small cozy restaurant just across the big McDonald’s outlet with French fries on its roof.

There’s a queue at lunch and dinner on weekends, and during weekdays at peak hours, the restaurant gets almost full too. And it’s all due to word of mouth, as satisfied customers rave about the tasty dishes, mostly Singaporean, at reasonable prices.

Restaurant consultant H.K. Tan, a Singaporean, says they are very particular about the quality of the food they serve, to the point of being paranoid. “We import ingredients to be assured of consistent quality,” he says. They also don’t scrimp on the ingredients to be used in the dishes so as to give customers the real deal.

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I RECENTLY came across a report on CNN about personal paparazzi you can hire for a day (or night). Yes, for about $1,500 a day, you can have a pack of paparazzi trailing you from your home to a restaurant to several clubs, snapping away every second and calling your name so you can look at the camera for yet another (expensive) click.

So far, the service is offered in the US and Britain, but who knows — this may click soon in Asia. Really now, if there are people dying to get to the society pages around here, then there’s a market for this service.

Clearly, the personal paparazzi business is one crazy business idea that has worked. And there are a lot more crazy business ideas that have brought in the cash for its owners.
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Great article today from SME Insight. Read the excerpt:

There’s a new food craze in town, and if you haven’t heard of it yet, you’re either out of touch or you’re getting too old. That’s because since 2006, many young kids, from grade school to college, have been saving up their baon for bowls of cereal they can buy in school. And a lot of yuppies troop to the nearest outlet for their cereal fix too.

So what’s with the bowl of cereal, you ask. At Cerealicious, a cereal bowl is not just a cereal bowl. True, cereals are drowned in milk here, but the toppings go from fruits to chocolates to puddings to coffee jelly and more. In fact, Cerealicious offers 40 cereals and 40 toppings and you can mix them any way you want to or go for any of the 20 certified “blockbuster” mixes cheerily named after blockbuster movies. Thus, you can munch on Charlie and the Chocnut Factory today, order Nutting Hill tomorrow, and snack on Oreo Afraid of the Dark the day after.

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Why is the Bank of the Philippine Islands promoting science and technology?

In this video, BPI vice-president Florendo G. Maranan, who was chairman of the BPI-DOST awards committee for the bank’s “Best Project of the Year” awards explains that science and technology is a catalyst of business and the economy.

Just think of all the outstanding Filipino scientists out there. They need angel investors who will believe in their inventions and turn these into living, breathing, “employing” national treasures. Who knows, you may be investing in the next Microsoft?

Online Videos by Veoh.com

I made a very interesting discovery. Filipino inventors are not rare. In fact, we have quite an impressive roster of them in some websites. Google “Filipino investors” and here are some of the information you would find.

Inventions range from incubator, fluorescent lamp, a water-powered car, the karaoke system, a videophone, erythromycin, a chip that makes computers work a lot faster and the Ethernet controller chip that made the Internet possible, and a revolutionary fuel half-composed of water. (Source, DOST website)

So why haven’t we heard of them? Why do we know more about Microsoft and Post-It and other products that are were not invented in our own shores?

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