Roofcamp will be visited by a collection of startups, VCs, and incubators from Singapore to scope out the local tech startup scene.

We’ll have lightning talks and networking throughout the event by the startups and VCs.

The VCs

Lim Kuo-Yi
Infocomm Investments PTE Ltd.

James Chan (Tentative)
Neoteny Labs Incubator

Vinnie Lauria
co-founder Lefora.com

The Startups

• Lobangclub
• Longscale
• Tripvillas
• Pointlogic
• Vobile
• EdenCr8
• Reqall
• Lumatic
• Progreso

Register for free now!

We’re returning to Cafe Alfonso which many roofies admit to be one of the best venues ever.

Cafe Alfonso is located at the ground floor of the LPL Center, No. 130 Leviste Street, Legaspi Village, Makati City. You’ll find it right across the Makati Sports Club.

Speaker Lineup

• Luis Buenaventura debuting social media campaign manager infinite.ly
• Ryan Sumo presenting winners of the 48 hour game development hackathon at the Manila Game Jam.

Learn more about social media campaign app infinite.ly at Roofcamp 12

Matthew Pontoles and the rest of the Barefoot team graciously hosted Roofcamp 9 by providing their geekchic co-working spaces and more than enough beer to lubricate all the inquiring minds in attendance.

The great folks at Ubertor, and their Micro.ph/one team made sure to provide Roofcamp with it’s first taste of professional video documentation, immortalizing the event for the rest of the web community. Micro.ph/one is on a mission to document and broadcast the velocity of the philippine tech startup scene to the world.

Brian Tan Seng recounted the 98Labs journey and how it was all starting to take shape for him and his team. Brian’s call to the Roofies? Continue the open and transparent sharing of information that will only spell the collective success of the philippine tech startup community.

Matthew Pontoles followed by giving us a glimpse of his startup journey which has brought him to the shores of the Philippines and has built his Manila based startup around a few island resort properties and a green-centric serviced office operation called The Little Green Hub.

Roofcamp #10 will be a big one (which is why we’re having it in October) and we’re planning to make it a whole day affair with multiple talks, speakers, and companies. You shouldn’t miss this one!

Wed, July 28, 6:30 pm

We’re being invited by Barefoot LLC to have Roofcamp #9 at their offices on July 28. We of course accepted since they promised to spring for the beers too.

The first confirmed speaker will be Matthew Pontoles, co-founder and principal partner at Barefoot.

More about Matthew:
Matthew is the co-founder and a principal partner of Barefoot Investments LLC, an SME venture specialist focused on green and ethical businesses. He is a published author and experienced practitioner in offshore finance, having lived and worked in the Caribbean for 3 years. In London he spent four years building and managing large sales teams for a PLC publishing house before establishing Barefoot Investments. Matthew now resides full time in Asia and oversees the start-up phase of Barefoot’s new ventures. Two of these include an eco-luxe private island development in Palawan and the Little Green Hub – a serviced office facility and boutique business hub for dynamic businesses, ambitious start-ups and entrepreneurs.

Brian Tan Seng (@briantanseng) of 98Labs and Randell Benavidez (@_randell) of nullpointer.ph are planning to give a talk too but we’re still confirming this with them. Stay tuned.

I’m hoping that the cool fellas we met at the Metro Manila Cloud Web Developers Group show up for a beer or two. Yo Mike, Piotr, et. al.!

Visit the event page on Facebook.

Brian’s vision represents a growing passion among philippine startups that dream of bringing filipino branded, top class innovation to the world stage.

Brian’s shares with us 3 points to follow when searching for that great idea,

1. find something that comes easy for you and hard for others, something that reflects your personality;
2. find something to do that you love so much, it doesn’t matter if you get paid for it or not;
3. find something that gives back to society.

Rock on Brian!

Date: Weds, 30 June 2010
From: Matt Rutledge (CEO – Woot.com)
To: All Woot Employees
Subject: Woot and Amazon

I know I say this every time I find a picture of an adorable kitten, but please set aside 20 minutes to carefully read this entire email. Today is a big day in Woot history. This morning, I woke up to find Jeff Bezos the Mighty had seized our magic sword. Using the Arthurian model as a corporate structure was something our CFO had warned against from the very beginning, but now that’s water under the bridge. What is important is that our company is on the verge of becoming a part of the Amazon.com dynasty. And our plans for Grail.Woot are on indefinite hold.

Over the next few days, you will probably read headlines that say “Matt Rutledge revealed to be monstrous pseudo-human creation of Jeff Bezos.” You might even see this photo making the rounds. Rest assured that these rumors have nothing to do with our final decision. We think now is the right time to join with Amazon because, quite simply, every company that becomes a subsidiary gets two free downloads until the end of July, and we very much need that new thing with Trent Reznor’s wife on our iPods.

Other than that, we plan to continue to run Woot the way we have always run Woot – with a wall of ideas and a dartboard. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are simply adding one person to the organizational hierarchy, except that one person will just happen to be a billion-dollar company that could buy and sell each and every one of you like you were office furniture. Nevertheless, don’t worry that our culture will suddenly take a leap forward and become cutting-edge. We’re still going to be the same old bottom-feeders our customers and readers have come to know and love, and each and every one of their pre-written insult macros will still be just as valid in a week, two weeks, or even next year. For Woot, our vision remains the same: somehow earning a living on snarky commentary and junk.

We are excited about doing this for all sorts of reasons. One, our business model is so vague that there’s no way Amazon can possibly change what it is we’re truly doing: preparing the way for the rise of the Lava Men in 2012. Also, our deal means that Jason Toon will finally be released from that Mexican jail owned by Zappos honcho Tony Hsieh. No, don’t lie, Tony, we’ve seen the paperwork. And we need a powerful ally in case Steve Jobs finally breaks down and comes after us for all our Apple jokes over the years. Don’t think of it as a buyout; think of it as NATO!

I will go through each of the above points in more detail later, but first, let me get to the top 5 burning questions that I’m guessing many of you will have.

TOP 5 BURNING QUESTIONS:

Q: F1RST!!!!
A: Okay, that’s not a question, but it is a good place to mention that our forums will still be policed by a team of moderators, as before. And also, Woot’s previous and always-in-effect privacy policy will still be just as always-in-effect, so don’t worry, there are no plans to suddenly give up or merge your forum data.

Q: Is Snapster leaving?
A: Are you kidding? He’s out the door about ten seconds after that check clea- that is to say, Snapster will continue as Woot.com CEO, just like before, and the rest of our staff’s not going anywhere either. Woot and all our various sites will continue to be an independently operated company full of horrible, useless products and an untalented jerkface writing staff, same as it ever was.

Q: Will the Woot culture change?
A: Amazon is interested in us because they recognize the value of our people, our brand, and our unique style of deep-tissue, toxin-releasing massage. And they don’t want to start changing things now. Amazon’s hoping our nutty Woot steez continues to grow and develop (and perhaps even rubs off on them a little). They’re not looking to have their folks come in and run Woot unless we ask them to, which incidentally you can do by turning off the bathroom lights and saying the word “Kindle” three times; a helpful Amazon employee will appear in the mirror. That said, Amazon clearly knows what they’re doing in a lot of areas, so we’re geeked about the opportunities to tap into that knowledge and those resources, especially on the technology side. This is about making the Woot brand, culture, and business even stronger than it is today, and we expect that any changes will be for the better or we wouldn’t bother with this endless paperwork.

Q: Where can I get one of those vuvuzelas?
A: Are you even paying attention?
Several months ago, when we were all sitting on Jeff Bezos’s bumper drinking orange Mad Dog and trying not to be noticed, we heard a voice in the distance yelling “You kids better not scratch my Mercedes or I’m calling the cops!” We ran. It was later that night when Amazon came by the house and said they liked our style and also wanted to get that money we owed them for messing up the chrome. We like to think that our relationship with Amazon will continue at this level for many, many, many years to come.
But we here at Woot are still a thoughtful company, so, at the end of the day, I watched the sunset, and its golden-hued glory made me think about two questions:

1) Is there really a universal deity?

2) Does such a thing preclude free will or are we humans in control of our own destiny?

After spending a lot of time falling asleep at the library while facing the philosophy books, I determined that the concept of destiny is a construct that allows man a gentle release from facing the terror of his existence, and that a Hyundai full of twenties would pretty much offer the same benefits. And so, I ultimately said YES!

This is definitely an emotional day for me. The feelings I’m experiencing are similar to what I felt in college on graduation day: excitement about getting a check from my folks combined with nausea from a hellacious bender the night before. I remember fondly that time when an RA turned on the lights and yelled “WHO OWNS THESE PANTS?” Except this time, the pants are a company, and the RA is you, and the sixty five hours of community service is a deal that will ensure the Woot.com experience can continue to grow for years and years and years, like a black mold behind the Gold Box. Join us, because together, we can rule the galaxy as father and son. Also, there will be six muffins waiting in the company break room, courtesy of the nice folks at Amazon.com. Welcome to the family!

Matt Rutledge
CEO, Woot

Two great takeaways from this talk are:

• Stop wasting peoples’ time by developing or creating based on false assumptions.
• Learn to Pivot…and pivot fast.

This is a must see for aspiring startups.

Good call to have Roofcamp #6 at Mag:Net Bonifacio High Street.

That location was more conducive to attendance over the Proudcloud HQ located in Libis. Looks like Roofcamp’s got a new home! Thanks to @jcmedina for helping us with the venue.

We started later than scheduled which tells us the next one should have a pre-talk window of around an hour to get the folks in and settled.

First up was Alan Magtoto and Alex Calero presenting the Digital Puppet technology they used for the movie “Dayo”. Good of them to point out that beyond the obvious entertainment application, this technology had very serious potential in child education and medical rehab.

The 2nd talk was given by Michael “Smitty” Smith, Jr., SEA Evangelist for the Yahoo Developer Network. Michael enlightened the crowd on Yahoo’s open developer platform and their keen interest in partnering with the local dev and startup community. He reminded everyone that Yahoo had a pretty hefty user base that could be exploited by app developers.

After the talks, the crowd (composed of a healthy number of developers, angels, and VCs) had a good amount of time mingling and connecting with each other.

A Special thanks to Jack Madrid (@jackmadrid) and Erwin Oliva (@cyberbaguiboy)  Yahoo! for supporting the event! See you at Roofcamp #7!

Our speaker will be Michael F. “Smitty” Smith Jr., Director for the YAHOO! Developer Network SEA who will talk on How to Reach the YAHOO! Audience.

The 2nd speaker will be Alan Magtoto, President of Woodpecker Studios who will demo their Live 3D Avatar Technology.

Beer follows afterwards (or before and during if you fancy that).

Come on fellas! Let’s jump start this rocking year! click here for map

Visit the event page on Facebook here or learn more about Roofcamp here.

Roofcamp #4 started with a good discussion about the local startup experience with regard to the availability of skilled people, a clueless VC community, and the difficulties of setting up a local startup business.

Terence Pua, formerly the country manager of Friendster PH and now the founder and CEO of XACKUP, explained that US based VCs are often off-put by locally incorporated companies. This is due to their (the VCs) lack of awareness of local business practices, intellectual property matters, and local political dynamics which fails to to provide a comfort level conducive to investments.

However, Jojo Flores, VP Operations for startup accelerator Plug and Play Tech Center, has a self imposed mission to bring deserving filipino startups to the attention of US VCs. Being well entrenched in the community, Jojo is in a good position to allay any kind of apprehensions VCs may have about getting in bed with philippine startups.

Terence and former Google engineer Franklin Naval of Quadraforte are two of a growing stream of filipino-american valley veterans that have found a strong desire to pursue their startup efforts in the Philippines instead of the US. They cite giving back to their filipino roots and the surprising high level of competencies that pinoy tech professionals posses.

The night was capped by demos of (previously) under-the-radar startup apps by Terence, Franklin, and Jay Fajardo of Proudcloud.

Codename Hawaii, Quadraforte (Franklin Naval)
A cloud based application that manages online advertising assets and propagates them throughout multiple ad networks while providing consolidated performance analytics.

Insync, Xackup (Terence Pua)
A file sharing and collaboration application with key features of value to enterprise users such as access permission control and automatic syncing to local folders. The app includes desktop clients for major operating systems including Windows, OS X, and Linux. check it out

Convoflow, Proudcloud (Jay Fajardo)
A real-time search engine that harvests social media content such as micro-blogs, blogs, video, and photos. Users can immediately view video and photos without leaving the site while social sharing options allow immediate re-tweets and Facebook posting of interesting content. check it out

We hope to see you at Roofcamp #5!