A couple of weeks back, Go Negosyo signed into another new partnership, this time with Multiply. Multiply was one of the social networking sites that my kids used aside from Friendster many years ago. Multiply became more popular in the Philippines for online marketing since people used the site to advertise and sell things like an online retail store.

During the opening of Multiply’s new office, which they set up at the Hanston Square Building at the Ortigas Complex in Pasig City, I met the company’s new employees headed by Jack Madrid, its Country Manager, as well as the CEO and Founder of Multiply, Peter Pezaris. One of the commitments made by Jack and Peter was to see Multiply succeed in its new direction, that is building its online retailing business. To date, it has over 90,000 entrepreneurs using the site.
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Let me shift the topic a bit from the usual negosyo columns I write. My wife and I decided to visit our daughter in LA. She studies in Enderun Manila and is doing a six-month internship with the Peninsula in Beverly Hills. She’s the only Filipina that they’ve ever accepted, due to her persistence and constant follow-ups in getting them to accept. In a meeting in Manila, they visited the school and decided to accept her this one time. As usual, she does not even want us to eat or stay in the hotel as she’s embarrassed to let people know who she is.

The Internet in America today is so widely accessible that you can’t live without it, and it’s now even more important than TV to this new generation. For the first time, I decided to download a book using Kindle in my iPad. I bought a book from Amazon, one of what I’ve been hearing about a lot lately. It’s about a four-year old boy who had a near death experience, and this book has sold 3.4 million copies, excluding ebooks, in a matter of a few months. The book is called Heaven is for Real. (more…)

A couple of days ago, a good friend whom I regularly call to check what his crystal ball is saying on the financial market, warned me that something will happen and the formation is really bad (he is a chartist and does not really rely much on company news but on the charts). I have always been pessimistic about America, which is why I keep away from U.S. stocks. Well, a week after, we now see the Dow Jones start from a high of 12,700 to now at 10,900 levels in just a week. And there is a good chance that we will see this back to the 6,000 levels in the near to medium-term. He sees it that way and I quite agree with him, but maybe not in the immediate future, hopefully.

The bright side in all of this is that the prices of commodities such as crude oil, wheat, corn and milk should start to come down due to the fear of a double dip that may happen. This has some good implications for the Philippines as with consumer goods companies like RFM Corporation, since we buy a lot of milk for ice cream and our ready-to-drink milk, as well as a lot of flour products and other commodities. This will also be good for transport industries now that crude oil has broken the 80 dollar level. With inflation kept low, interest rates will also be low for quite some time, which is good for business. It’s quite early to say if commodity prices will hit the levels of 2008 when greedy hedge fund managers placed huge bets on commodities, pushing prices to go even higher. As things improved in 2009 and 2010, people forgot the problems of America as greed took over fear again. Balancing fear and greed is usually the problem and is the reason for all this exaggeration in the market. (more…)