PESO :: Philippine Emerging Start-ups Open

India gets its act together

After years of organic growth, India is taking a more organized approach to its technopreneurship by setting up a large multi-disciplinary group to study its national innovation system.

The Technopreneurship Tsunami

Over 72 business plan summaries were submitted to PESO for the first round of judging and we couldn't be happier with the response. There were a lot of teams with PhDs or multiple PhDs as members, and a lot of business people who had impressive backgrounds.

Stay tuned to see which teams ran the gauntlet and made it! :)

Cramming to meet the PESO biz summary deadline

According to PESO CEO, Dickie Gonzalez:

"As of 6 pm tonight, 67 teams had registered online, and 32 had submitted entries. I am hopeful that a large % of the rest will catch up with the deadline."

Get cracking on those plans people! We're so excited about the entries we're going to get! :)

Good luck to everybody!

Advice from Legends

While I was doing some late-night reading, I came across two superb resources.

The first is the "Top 10 Enduring Elements of High-Tech Entrepreneurship" by Tom Byers (Stanford Tech Ventures Program). It's a tight, focused overview of the basics of technopreneurhip.

The second is Bnoopy, a technopreneurship blog by Joe Kraus, founder of Excite.com. Joe talks about his experience and working with luminaries like Vinod Khosla and Geoff Yang. He even met Bill Gates (while in the men's room). He says it's a great time to be an entrepreneur.

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Maoi Arroyo | PESO Philippines

12 teams and counting

Things are heating up as 12 teams have already registered and business summaries are rolling in! Everyone in the PESO team, on both sides of the planet, is excited to see what kind of innovations participants will come up with.

Need a key team member or a mentor? Check out the PESO forums, where you can connect, create and catalyze with perfect ease.

Confused about the requirements, there's a wealth of information at the PESO website.

Best of luck to all the teams!

PESO forums online!

12 days before the business summary deadline and still missing a key member of your team? Want to have some mentors take a look at your business summary?

Don't worry, the PESO forums are finally online!

Aside from helping out with the competition, this is also a place to chat and make new friends. Good luck to all the participants!

Hamsters strike back

Everyone always laughs at my hamster examples. I never do, in fact, I'm always incredibly impressed at their versatility. Here's the latest use for these little cannibalistic rodents -- certainly innovative, but not enough to make it into PESO.

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Maoi Arroyo | PESO Philippines

Deadline Extended!

Great news, the deadline for the submission of the business summary and team submissions is EXTENDED TO SEPTEMBER 19.

On the campus tour side, we were recently at UP Diliman, UP Los Banos, and UST at the invitation of graduate students and faculty. It was really inspiring to see how many people are willing to support PESO.

Thanks for all your emails and your good wishes!

Coconets on the BBC

A Philippine company producing "coconet" was nominated and was selected as one of the finalists for the bbc-world challenge contest. This is basically a search for the best grassroots project.

There will be a documentary about the project which will be shown on the BBC world several times between September to October. It seems that the finalists will also be featured in a special issue of Newsweek. Just being publicised is already good for business.

But it would be nice to win for our country which has been getting very bad publicity nowadays.

Please open www.theworldchallenge.co.uk and vote for the Philippines.

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Dr. Asuncion K. Raymundo
Director
Institute of Biological Sciences
University of the Philippines Los Baños
College, Laguna 4031

PESO @ UPD

In case you missed the technopreneurship workshops, we're having one last mini-overview!

Wednesday, August 24th
Natural Science Research Institute, UP Diliman
9am - 12nn

While this is free, please contact technopreneurship@hybridigm-consulting.com for tickets.

See you there!