Let me give you an example. Although about 300 people registered, over 700 people showed up. In addition, about 30 companies submitted their business plans to be incubated through iAyala. This never happened with earlier technologies. One of the interesting questions regarding Philippine society and culture is why we are taking to Information Technology in a way that we never took to other technologies.
Some obvious possibilities are that it coincides with our value of preferring white collar jobs.
But I think it is deeper than that, because I see so many young people spend endless hours writing, debugging, struggling with programs, in ways they never did with mathematics or physics or chemistry challenges. They offer new opportunities for redefining power relationships. Thomas Friedman writes of a friend visiting the Kayapo Indians in the Amazon mountains and jungles, seeing them in their native dress and rituals at night and then the next day seeing them watching television via satellite dish and switching from a soccer game to the price quotes on commodities markets to determine what they should charge that month for the mining rights in their area. There is now a project with some friends on providing e-mail and internet access to small farmers in different parts of the country. A major purpose of this effort is for them to know market prices around the country.