By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net

A KOREAN businessman has put up the country’s first true “PC bang,” a stylized Internet and online gaming café made popular in South Korea.

iHooked, built by Sabiclub Corporation, is located on Katipunan Avenue, Quezon City fronting Ateneo de Manila University. It is also right in the middle of an area popular for its Internet gaming shops.

The new shop has over 60 high-end computers, a wireless Internet lounge and a sitting room for non-PC using customers who can order food and drinks at the bar. The entire place has been designed to look like a living room area of a house than an Internet café.

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By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net

AMONG the Taiwanese laptop makers, Acer is one of the most prolific, perhaps next only to Asus. In fact, both Taiwanese products compete toe-to-toe in almost every aspect of their products and this is most noticeable when they licensed two of the most well-known luxury car brands: Asus got Lamborghini while Acer got Ferrari.

At any rate, Acer churns out model after model of notebooks, usually the TravelMate and Aspire series, and in each series at least six new models come out every year. The company was gracious enough to lend its TravelMate 3272NWXMi model that comes from the 3270 series. It targets at least two user groups: the multimedia fanatic and the casual gamer.

First of all are the innards of the TravelMate 3272NWXMi; it is among the first models in the series to use the Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 (1.6 Ghz per core) processor running on an Intel Mobile 945GM chipset. It also has a 1 Gigabyte DDR2 memory and an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300 video card with up to 256MB TurboCache.

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By Joey Alarilla
INQUIRER.net

IF you want clear proof of how much technology has changed our lives, think about how we take camphones and video phones for granted when these were the stuff of sci-fi just a few years ago.

Now that they’re very much a part of our lives, think about our first reaction whenever we see something interesting. Yup, we instinctively whip out our phones and take a pic or video.

Like this one I took of a green mime when my wife Ellen and I were doing the groceries with our five-year-old daughter Sam.

Remember those old jokes about stereotypical Japanese tourists who took pictures of everything with their film cameras (well, it was the Dark Ages, heh)?

Guess what? We’re all turning Japanese!

And what’s even more interesting, is that the natural urge nowadays, especially among the youth, is not just to take a photo or video just to record the moment for posterity, but to share it.

And I don’t mean just share it with friends and family. We want to share it with the whole world, by uploading the videos to sites like YouTube and Yahoo! Video (our partner for our iVDO service). Heck, sometimes we even refer to these as “YouTube moments.”

Like this dog here and his coconut, heh.

Anyway, these embedded clips show moments I’ve captured using my Nokia N90 and uploaded to iVDO. If you think about it, it’s funny how we’ve become so used to having our lives publicly documented, and watching the lives of others. It’s like “The Truman Show” and “EDtv” for real.

So don’t be shy. Share these moments. These days, you don’t have to be on CNN to know the world is watching

By Lawrence Casiraya
INQUIRER.net

THE QUEST continues to produce the cheapest computers people can lay their hands on, which pits rival chipmakers Intel and AMD in a rather different ballgame.

Intel is coming up with a number of designs such as the Classmate PC, while AMD is making $100 notebooks for MIT’s One Laptop Per Child campaign.

But for a change, is anyone making a “green” PC? I asked Chris Hines, SVP for research at Forrester, whose photo is shown here, that question during a recent Singapore summit by HP.

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By Joey Alarilla
INQUIRER.net

AS I’ve previously blogged in @play, Friendster is huge in the Philippines (and readers have sent in comments to explain why that’s so).

Sadly, however, elsewhere around the world Friendster has been overtaken by other social networking sites. But this could change now that Friendster is back in the news after finalizing a deal with Google for search and targeted advertising.

Friendster launched on June 8 Google search for its more than 44 million users in over 75 countries.

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