halfwhiteboy

This morning I just got my very own PayMaya Visa card with beep . It's a three-in-one financial technology product that includes an instant virtual Visa that consumers can use for online shopping and payments, a physical card that can be used at any Visa-accepting brick-and-mortar establishment, and a beep card that commuters can use for their LRT and MRT fares. It's the perfect time to get one because the Black Friday and Cyber Monday madness in the U.S. is now officially being introduced in the Philippines--by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) no less! DTI has partnered with over 20 e-commerce stores in the country, such as Takatack , to launch the first ever Pinoy Cyber Sale , which will run from Black Friday (Nov. 27) to Cyber Monday (Nov. 30).

Sleek box for the Pebble Steel. I use a smartphone in my attempts to smarten up the dumb in me. Apparently it's not enough and now I have a smartwatch, thanks to My Bibe. This is a long-delayed post, though. When smartwatch maker Pebble announced in January at the CES 2014 that they're releasing an update to the original Pebble watch--the Pebble Steel --My Bibe immediately got me one. Well, because it was on pre-order, and with free shipping to the Philippines to boot, we had to wait. And sometime first week of March, the watch finally arrived. (We actually kind of forgotten about it already.) For whatever reason, however, I only got to unbox it a couple of weeks later.

Close to 300 developers, 24 hours of marathon coding, and a couple more hours of pitching -- but in the end, it was a group from Davao that bested 50 other teams to win more than Php 2 million worth of prizes in the first-ever AngelHack Manila over the weekend. They've successfully hacked their way to Silicon Valley. Team Pagesnapp with Smart DevNet guys Jim Ayson and Paul Pajo (the bespectacled guys on the leftmost), IdeaSpace President Earl Valencia (2nd from the right), and AngelHack founder Greg Gopman (rightmost). The team of Rolly Rulete, Marvin Consuegra, Raymund Delfin, Mio Galang, and Jay Albano, who all work for Davao-based startup Lifebit, developed Pagesnapp , a service that would enable businesses to easily create mobile apps based on their official Facebook pages. In short, it's like an app that allows you to create an app. The world's biggest hackathon Dubbed as the world's biggest hackathon, AngelHack is expected to bring in more than 10,000 de...

While many of us spend considerable time in front of our PCs or Macs, we also access the internet a lot on our mobile phones and tablets. Come to think of it, we may even be spending more time on mobile than in front of a computer! Given this premise, I'm sure all of you have come across websites that appear on your phone exactly the same way as they are displayed on a regular computer, which is kinda annoying, right? Everything loads a lot slower and you need to zoom in just to read the text. I'm not an IT guy, nor do I know coding, but I know that websites need mobile versions to fit into our phones and tablets much better, and make everything else much faster. However, it's one thing to make a website and another to come up with a mobile version, let alone multiple mobile versions. Your iPhone version certainly won't fit into your Samsung Galaxy S3 or even your iPad. But how to do it if you're not much of a programming geek? I came across this India-based sta...

What used to be a concept is slated to become a physical reality by mid-2013. The Instagram Socialmatic will let you take photos (of course), share them online (of course), and wait, print them in an instant? Yes, you read that right. The camera has an internal printer that allows special paper cartridges for printing your photos in that familiar Instagram shape. The paper sheets have a Post-it-style glue strip on one side. There's no info on megapixels but it has a 16GB storage space, a 4:3 touchscreen, 2 lenses with optical zoom, an LED flash, and is both WiFi and Bluetooth-enabled.

The new incarnation of Motorola's once popular Razr was finally revealed to the public. As written in a previous post , it's powered by Google's Android software and is aptly dubbed the Droid Razr . And it's looking really good! Although no longer sporting that sleek clam shell aesthetic of yesterday's Razr, at only 7.1mm thick, the Droid Razr is the world's thinnest smartphone. It boasts of a dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, an 8MP camera that allows HD video recording, a 4.3" Super AMOLED display, and 4G LTE support. It's also made with KEVLAR fiber (Wow!) and Corning Gorilla Glass for a stronger hardware. Motorola also says the phone and its internals are meant to withstand some water. Just some but at least you'll worry less with any accidental splash. The Droid Razr will be released in the U.S. exclusively by Verizon  in November. No word yet, however, on when the phone will be available elsewhere. For more info, click here .

Motorola is sure making its presence felt recently. First off there was the Motorola Xoom , the company's own attempt at taking a slice off of the tablet market. Now the company has another offering set to be unveiled on October 18 in New York. The accompanying video obviously hints at a new Razr , an extremely successful line of mobile phones from a few years back. Rumored to be the Droid Razr , it comes as no surprise that the phone will be running on Google's Android OS, following the search engine giant's acquisition of Motorola back in August. The original Razr phones were really sleek and stylish, so I hope that this latest incarnation will be just as stunning to say the least. So let's just wait and see then.

I may not be the first to admit, but I do admit, that I'm not alien to having photos with out-of-focus subjects. Sometimes it's a hurried shot. Other times you think you've focused it right but when the photos come out, turns out you haven't, errors you realize you've made only after you've downloaded them to your PC or Mac. Sorry, can't do anything about it anymore. But with the advent of next-generation camera  Lytro , that should no longer be a problem. Imagine having the power to adjust the focus of a photo after you've clicked the shutter! No more wasted shots! Seriously! Thankfully, a Silicon Valley start-up thought of it. And the brains behind the technology is Ren Ng. But how does it work? The camera uses a special kind of sensor called a light field sensor that "captures the color, intensity and vector direction of the rays of light," which completely runs against traditional camera sensors that adds up all light rays and r...