Calliope Version 2 previewed at iBlog2

I.ph co-sponsored the recently concluded iBlog summit 2 in UP Diliman. I.ph’s Emil Avancena and Mike Villar presented Calliope version 2 which should roll out in the following weeks for I.ph users. Key features highlighted were the improved profile pages which lets users conveniently aggregate all their data from different services on the web; AJAX integration which dramatically lessens page loading times and blog recastability, a feature that redraws the blog depending on the access given to the viewer by the blog author.

We would like to thank all the I.ph users who attended the summit and we hope to provide you with an even better blogging experience once version 2 rolls out.
 

Mon David wins world Jazz competition

Photo courtesy of Inq7.net

Jazz singer Mon David won the grand prize in the prestigious London International Jazz Competition (LIJC) last Wednesday, besting 106 vocalists from 27 countries.

The 52-year-old native of Pampanga province began his performance at the finals-held at the Cadogan Hall in London’s Sloane Square-with a few bars of an ethnic chant, singing a cappella the first lines of "Nature Boy," and then crooning "My One and Only Love" and "Lullaby of Birdland."

As LIJC Jazz Vocalist 2006, David will receive 1,000 euros (nearly P90,000) and take on engagements at the Jagz in Ascot and the 606 Club in Chelsea.

Via Inq7.net 

 

Our very own Mon David bagged top honors in the recently concluded London International Jazz Competition. Being the only Asian who made it to the finals of the prestigious competition, Mon bested the twelve other finalists in addition to standing out from over one hundred other participants from 27 countries who joined.

So in behalf of the entire I.ph community, congratulations to Mon, and we wish you more success in your career. 

Let’s welcome Candid Records to the I.ph community!

The country's leading independent jazz record label, Candid records , has just joined the i.ph blogging community. Candid records' stable of talents include 2005 AWIT AWARDS nominee Mishka Adams; jazz superband The Johnny Alegre Affinity; piano empress Isha; talented multi-instrumentalist Mon David; young, up and coming crooner Enrique Marcos; and perhaps the only group that does justice to the term "girl band"–The Chickitas.

"I.ph believes in and stands behind our talented OPM artists. We hope that through blogging, they can reach and interact with an even wider audience." Says I.ph Business Development Manager Ginny Magdaluyo. "We also hope that through this partnership, we can bring the artists closer to their fans."

Visit their blogs by clicking on the pics:

I.ph takes home the webby!

We are proud to announce that I.ph won the webby for the E-services category at the 8th annual Philippine Web Awards held last November 25, 2005.

Being a locally developed, easy to use, full-featured blog publishing service, I.ph outshone the other eleven nominees in its category.

We would like to thank all i.ph users for your continued support and for making this possible.

The Philippine Web Awards (PWA) is an award-giving body that annually honors the best Filipino-created Web sites and the individuals and teams behind them. Now on its eighth year, the Awards has gained industry-wide acceptance and is one of the most highly anticipated events in the business community and the Internet industry.

View the complete list of winners here

View pictures from the Web Awards here 

PayPal Gateway is temporarily unavailable

To our Pay4Access users,

Please be informed that we are currently working on improving the
Pay4Access PayPal gateway.  For the meantime, accepting payments
and earnings through PayPal is unavailable.  The G-Cash gateway is
up and running, and you can still receive payments and earning
remittances through G-Cash.

Click here to learn more about Pay4Access.

i.PH is a finalist at the 8th Philippine Web Awards

We are pleased to announce that i.PH is a finalist for the 8th Philippine Web Awards (under the e-Services category).

PWA is an annual event organized by Media G8way Corp. It honors
outstanding Filipino talent and creativity in Web design and
development.

(Learn more)

To vote for i.PH for the People’s Choice Award, send the following message:

WEBBYS VOTE 57

to 283 (for Smart, Addict Mobile, Talk & Text) or 2973 for Globe and Touch Mobile.  Text voters will get a chance to win weekly prizes (from Media G8way).

The awards night will be held on November 25, 2005.

i.PH featured on Manila Bulletin

The October 24, 2005 Infotech section of the Manila Bulletin features i.PH in "i.PH blogs now active" by Edison Ong.  Excerpts from the article:

Anyone can now start weblogging or blogging simply by signing up at http://www.i.ph.
…
It is a free service [that] can actually help people make money with the Pay4Access service.
…
Using simple point and click, i.ph users get to redecorate their blogs anyway they want, even using their own pictures to completely personalize the site.

Unlike any other blogging service, i.ph doesn’t just give people a space to speak their mind. It also makes it easier for people to get in touch with the owner of the blog.

Pay4Access users can now receive payments via G-Cash

We are pleased to announce that the G-Cash Pay4Access gateway is now up and running.

Your readers can now pay for subscription to your i.PH blog (or for your multimedia files like photographs, music, videos, e-books, and the like) through their Globe mobile phones.

What is Pay4Access?

Pay4Access is an innovative feature we
developed so you can earn from your blog by putting up your content on
a “pay-for-access” or subscription basis. Say, you’re an artist,
musician, writer, photographer or expert in some field, you can now
sell your writings, music, photographs, and images to readers who will
pay you for a subscription to your blog.

Click here to learn more about Pay4Access.

What is G-Cash?

G-Cash a service that turns your Globe or Touch Mobile cellphone
into an electronic wallet.  You can send and receive funds just by texting.

Click here to learn more about G-Cash.

i.PH Downtime on Thursday, September 22

In order to serve you better, i.PH will conduct regular server
maintenance on Thursday, September 22, 2005. During the maintenance,
the system will be temporarily down between 9:00PM to 3:00AM GMT +0800.

Please be informed that the i.PH website, blogs, multimedia galleries,
and related services will not be available during the downtime. Normal
operations will resume upon completion of the maintenance.

We regret any inconvenience this may cause.

Thank you for your patience and continued support of i.PH.

i.PH now free! For life!

i.PH is now a free service!  Yes, you read it right.  Subscription for the entry level or Blog.Starter package is free for the life of the service.  We won’t ask you to pay anything.  The free blogs are ad-supported.

And what’s great: no more expiring after a few months’ trial! 
Your free account will auto-renew at every “end” of the subscription
period.

We also increased the disc space and monthly bandwidth allocation
across all accounts.  Blog.Starter now has 100 Megabytes of
storage space and 1 Gigabyte of monthly transfers.  That’s good
enough for a fairly active and popular blogger to live by!

Premium accounts are still available for those who want to make the
most out of their blogging experience.  We’ve narrowed down the
new packages to Blog.Pro and MindBlogging.  Here’s a plan comparison sheet.

What you get with a premium account:

• Password protect your Blog
• Ad-free blogging
• Flash-based Photoblogging
• Earn from your own Adsense Channel
• Change of Domain

So spread the word! i.PH is free, free, free.

PCIJ i-Report now available for download

Hot off the presses: Mr. Alecks Pabico of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ - homepage, blog) has put up the Center's latest i-Report eMagazine for subscription thru i.PH Pay4Access.

This recent issue is a mix of current and less timebound stories. In our cover story, we revisit the issue of jueteng. Given its deep roots in Philippine village life, jueteng is a popular entertainment and distraction. At the national level, however, it is fodder for political scandal and ammunition that can be used to oust presidents.

Links to the articles:

• Announcement at Inside PCIJ
• eMagazine Description at pcij.i.ph

Download it now, and get to learn more about the intricacies of Philippine politics and society!

- jangelo

G-Cash gateway still down

Please be advised that the Globe G-Cash gateway is not yet
available with our Pay4Access feature.  Globe is still undertaking
some routine tests.

We shall make an announcement once users can already receive Pay4Access payments and remittances through G-Cash.

For more information on Pay4Access, please visit this Knowledge Base article.

Earn from your Blogs with Pay4Access

We are pleased to announce that you can now earn from i.PH blogs with Pay4Access!

Pay4Access is an innovative
feature we developed so you can earn from your blog. You can publish
your content on a pay-per-access or subscription basis. Say, you’re an
artist, musician, writer, photographer or expert in some field, you can
now sell your writings, music, photographs, and images to readers who
will pay you for a subscription to your blog.

Click here to read more on how you can earn with Pay4Access.

Everyone is invited to join the i.PH forum!

We are inviting all bloggers to the newly-upgraded and reorganized i.PH Forum. 
We’re very excited with the new discussion boards we have put up, which
we expect would be very helpful to bloggers, beginner and experienced
alike.  A rundown of the discusion boards:

• General Discussion -
  Feel free to talk about anything and everything.
• Earn from your blog - Do you know you can now earn from your blog with i.PH Pay4Access? Here
  we can exchange innovative and cool ideas of how we can ride on the
  revenue potential of our i.PH blogs.
• Meet and greet -
  Meet other i.ph bloggers, plan EBs, gimiks.
• Feature Wishlist -
  Do you have a cool blog idea you’d like to see in action? Do you have useful features in mind? Let’s talk about them here.
• Power Users -
  Are you an advanced user? Let’s exchange tips and tricks on maximizing the use of our i.PH blogs.

So what are you waiting for?  This is our chance to get to meet and excange ideas with other i.PH bloggers in a forum.

To get there, simply point your browser to http://i.ph/forum.  Or you may click “Support” on the www.i.ph homepage top navigation bar, and then click “Forum” when the Online Support page comes up.

Let the conversations begin …

New features: tagline and blog entries in main page

We have recently updated all templates to support these new features:

• Tagline - Feel like your
  blog title isn’t descriptive enough?  You can now use this nifty
  feature to add a quotable quote or a blog description, or anything you
  please.  It’s sort of like a sticky item on your main page.
• Define number of entries in the main page - The default is five.  But if you’d like your readers to see more (or less?) entries in the main page, you can define it here.

To take advantage of these new features, simply log in to your i.Panel, and click on “Change Design” in i.Blog.  Check out this knowlege base artcle for more information on changing or editing your design templates.

New i.Blog look and feel

We are proud to announce that we have made
changes to the i.Blog control panel to reflect a cleaner look and
feel.  You will now be greeted with a simpler interface that
presents the following options:

• writing blog posts;
• changing your blog design; and,
• earning from your blog.

We
also integrated the Blog Management options under one drop-down menu,
so you have easy access to the most common management/setting commands.

A user emailed our helpdesk (helpdesk @ domains.ph ) to commend us for the re-design:

i like how the control panel looks like now…it looks more classy and less cluttered …Ü
 
keep up the good work!

If you do have suggestions, comments, or any feedback, we would
appreciate hearing from you.  You know where to reach us!

Blog for free!

You may notice that some i.PH galleries have started to feature
advertisements from Google AdSense.  We will eventually
incorporate these contextual, text-type ads in i.PH blogs (except for
the premium, paid ones of course) so free accounts will no longer be
limited to to a three-month trial.  Yes, you heard it right. 
You can now blog for free, and you won’t be limited to a trial account.

We believe that our service is superior to most other blogging services
whether free or paid, and we would therefore like everyone to enjoy the
benefits of blogging with i.PH for as long as you can.  But hey,
there’s no such thing as a free lunch right?   .  Think of
the ads as a way to defer the costs of development.  We have,
after all, invested much time and effort in making sure that i.PH works
for you, and that it works well.

More features are in the works.  But if you think you have good
ideas or feature suggestions, please do not hesitate to give us
feedback.  You can always get in touch with the i.PH team by
sending email to helpdesk@domains.ph or calling (632) 637-2104 to 05.

Keep on blogging!

New Downloads section

Good news!  We have made available a Downloads section in the main i.PH portal where you can get tools to enrich your blogging experience.

Click on the “Downloads” link at the main portal or go to http://i.ph/downloads.php.

As of this posting, we have these three cool apps:

• Gallery Remote - a client-side Java application that provides users with a rich
  front-end to Gallery. This application makes it easier to resize and
  upload images to your Gallery.
• Pocket Gallery - an application for Pocket PC users. This application makes it easier to
  upload images to your Photo Gallery even when you’re mobile.
• PIXResizer - a photo resizing program to easily create web and e-mail friendly versions of your images with reduced file sizes.

Enjoy!

New iPanel

Have you seen the new iPanel? Well, check it out and feel the
difference. A change in the iPanel interface will definitely enhance
the online experience of i.ph users. In the past, blogs were purely
technical. i.ph was the most user-friendly of them all. But now, we
have made it more accessible from which users can conveniently manage
the content of their blogs.

Feel the difference of simplified options such as “Post an Entry”,
“Change Lay-out” and enjoy looking at your current blog entries in a
window still found at your iPanel. Creating a new blog is easier so is
posting photos in the Photoblog that can be chosen if you wish to have
another blog.

Web address on the left part of your iPanel has been changed to
shortcuts for easy understanding. Comments can now be efficiently
managed thru your iPanel window. You can also post videos and photos on
your WYSIWYG editor.

What are you waiting for? Check out these upgrades and see for yourself!

Let’s Meet and Greet . . .

www.i.ph Blog Party, Tomorrow, Friday, April 22 at 6pm. The
venue? Allegro, here in Wynsium Building, Emerald Avenue, Ortigas
Center, Pasig City.

BLOGGERS! BE THERE!