Some of the PayrollHero team was in attendance at the International Contact Center Conference & Expo (ICCCE) that ended yesterday. “ICCCE 2012 is the premier learning event for the contact center industry. It’s the must-attend conference for executives, managers, and professionals from both outsource and in-house call centers.” quote The President of the Philippines, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, even dropped by to check out the event.
Here are a few pictures from the event:
Amazon’s AWS ASEAN team, based in Singapore, was looking for a location for their 3 day “Architecting with AWS” event that they were planning on holding in Manila. We offered the PayrollHero offices, and this morning 35 engineers from some of the Philippines leading organizations showed up for three days of learning from Amazon’s AWS technical team.
Attendees needed to have some existing knowledge or experience with AWS and have a conceptual understanding of the key infrastructure services (EC2, S3, RDS, etc), their features, and how they are used.
Over the next 3 days, attendees will be immersed in all things AWS and will walk away with a great knowledge of what Amazon’s solution is truly capable of. Here are a couple of pictures from this morning. Looks like it is going to be a great few days!!
Last night was the first edition of Founders Drinks Manila. I first started attending a “Founders Drinks” event in San Francisco when Jonathan Swanson of Thumbtack.com would host them in his swanky waterfront condo downtown San Francisco. We borrowed the idea from his events and started running them in Vancouver and last night, we put together Founders Drinks Manila with the help of Jay from Proudcloud and Christian from Kickstart.
All in all it was an excellent event. We put together a group of 50 people, the vast majority founders of Philippine startups as well as a couple from the media and our friends at Amazon AWS. The event was invite only so that we could ensure only founders were in the room as a way to foster conversation about the startup community and network with others that are working to grow a business.
A big thank you to Amazon for picking up the food tab and to the Kickstart guys for the round of drinks!
We will do this event again… if you want to be on the list, be sure to reach out and introduce yourself.
Here are a couple pictures from the event… for more photos head on over to the PayrollHero Facebook page.
Erwin from Yahoo! Philippines and Franky from The Bobbery
John Arce from WebGeek.ph, Stephen Jagger and Marga Dumlao from PayrollHero
Erwin from Yahoo! Philippines
PayrollHero lead engineer Suman Mukherjee presented the other day at a Ruby Meetup in Manila, Philippines. Suman put on a 20 minute clinic about some Ruby and JavaScript quirks for a room of about 50 engineers who are considering making the switch to Ruby. You can see his talk and slides below.
Suman Mukherjee
We operate in multiple locations, and have for quite some time now. We use technology to bridge the gap so that teams in all locations can feel like they are together. Google Hangouts and Facetime are the goto technology but we find using large TVs on either end make all the difference. The teams literally feel like they are standing in the room together. We do daily standups, one on one meetings and group calls standing in front of these TVs with team members all over the world. (we even set it up during our 4 month stint in San Francisco)
(above) The view through the “window” from Manila, Philippines into Whistler, Canada
(above) The view through the “window” from Whistler, Canada into Manila, Philippines