Reaction Paper: GDayX Manila

           GDayX provided for a more fruitful and productive escape for an otherwise, mundane and lazy Saturday afternoon for me last 23^rd of November, 2013.

            At first, I thought it was just gonna be another boring tech talk about the latest gadgets used in business today. And of all audiences to single out, they chose probably the most learned and sophisticated generation to give focus to in such a talk.

            Turns out, the event had much more knowledge in store for me, stretching far beyond the confines of day-to-day usage of gadgets and gizmos. The speakers for the event gave really relevant and useful points not only for aspiring entrepreneurs, small-medium scale businesses or students, but also to any modern man who encounters and works with these state-of-the-art gadgets and innovations.

             “Introduction to Google Analytics” was the first talk I listened to. I knew it really wasn’t the best sounding title for a talk to start off the day. But however drudgingly lackluster it sounded, the speaker, Maro Rimorin, who was a Blogger and Digital Strategist, was able to capture his audience through his natural charisma and of course, the relevant points he raised regarding Google Analytics and its relation to personal and company websites.

            Google Analytics, in a nutshell, is an online web-tracking service by Google that provides pertinent information regarding the website chosen by the user to be tracked. This helps users keep tabs on the development and progress of their personal or company websites, so they can adapt and make changes to their website according to the information relayed by Google Analytics.

            For instance, if the bounce rate (which simply means the times people visit a site and immediately leave without taking time to view its content) increases, then perhaps the business tied to it, say a restaurant, is also experiencing a higher bounce rate. Thus, the company will employ strategies to improve the website or explore other online venues of interaction with their market. Dealing with this problem successfully online will eventually trickle down to their sales and provide for a more efficient and successful business.

            The following talk was entitled “Google+ for Business” by Johnn Mendoza. It was as straightforward as it could get, pretty much bearing the whole-point-of-coming-here title for the entrepreneurs present then.

            Who never thought of Google+ as “Google’s Facebook”? That’s what I thought the first time and, as did any other user who thought the same way, left the site vowing never to visit again.

            The speaker clarifies Google+ as “Google plus all the other things; a label uniting all the other functions of Google into one brand”. Mail, Maps, Drive, and all the other services of Google fall under this category and each one these functions has the capacity to help further improve people’s lifestyle, as well as business.

            The speaker discusses of a project he worked on. It was an upstart hotel that catered to the middle class tourists in Cebu. They invested 80% of their capital on online marketing which roughly even cost them twenty-thousand pesos, compared to the expensive printing of flyers and paying more to post them around prominent landmarks. Now, the hotel is constantly receiving bookings, even beyond their capacity at times. All this was possible through online marketing through Google Places and Google Maps.

            The final talk I listened to was “Google for Education” by Jerome Locson. This topic, of course, piqued my interest as a student of this day and age, who is used to computers and other gadgets as mediums for my professors to lecture in class.

            The speaker showed a video of a man handling a class for less fortunate students who desire to learn and achieve greater. It shows the man putting on his Google Glass and traveling to a famous Science Complex to show his students over a feed through the laptop the machinery and processes inside.

            I can’t help but be excited with all the new technological possibilities and frontiers to be explored in the near future - may it be for a general betterment of lifestyle, economic progression or quality education accessible for a greater majority of people, I sincerely do hope that all these changes and innovations will bring genuine good to our society.

Sources:
"Build Your Audience - Google Analytics." Google. n. d. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.<http://www.google.com/analytics/why/>.
Castro, Fleire. "The Prestigious Business Community in Cebu."Blogger. n. d. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.<http://www.gbgcebu.org/p/about.html>.