The program went on despite the state of emergency (APEC Trace partnership)

Yesterday afternoon, PICS and UP Institute of Small Scale Industries held its MOA Signing on the Adoption of APEC Training and Certification Program (Trace) for Business Counsellors partnership project.



For while this morning I thought this would be cancelled due to the State of emergency announcement. Its scary when you watch TV but when I went out it seems everything was normal!



There was a long line of people watching movies, the mall was brimming with people, there was a long line entering the parking bldg and it took time for me to get to the event place due to the crowd I had to wade through. It seems the people are more interested in finding potential business than going to the streets to rally :)




Anyway back to the event, This was done at the GO NEGOSYO gathering at Market! Market! , the first and largest entrepreneurial gathering in the country.



APEC Trace is an internatonal training, certification and development program for small business counsellors. It is competency-based, self-directed and self-paced designed to produce effective business counsellors.The program is committed to distinguish business consulting PROFESSIONALS rigorously trained and assessed in accordance to the APEC standards, and dedicated to the highes standards of Business Counselling Ethics and Conduct.

At the end of the program, APEC will confer the APEC International Certificate of Business Counselling.For its part, PICS will help localize the content of successive version of the Electronic Commerce Module, recommend prospective trainors and resource persons for the eCommerce Module, and promote the program to the industry at large.

One of PICS' main mission is encouraging the leveraging and use of existing infrastructure and technologies by all businesses, particularly by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in order to energize private enterprise in the Philippines.As such, we hope to be able to develop more professional business counsellors via this program which could further support the upliftment of the various SMEs of the country.The signing was witnessed by Honorable Joey Concepcion, presidential adviser on Entrepreneurship.

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PICS EVP Mon Lizardo, emceed the short program. I gave the welcome remarks. Atty Teddy Kalaw, PICS VP for Advocacies and Deputy Director Sonia Aquino (UP Institute of Small Scale Industries) presented the project brief.

The Memorandum of Understanding was signed by Dr. Paterno V. Viloria, President of The Small Enterprises Research and Development Foundation (SERDEF), the Learning Delivery Center of UP-ISSI, and myself as President of the Philippine Internet Commerce Society.

This was witnessed by Hon. Joey Concepcion, Presidential Consultant for Entrepreneurship and Francisco R. Floro, Chairman of the Board of Directors, SERDEF.

Also present were the other PICS board of Directors Bobby Gantuangco, VP for Special Projects and Mike Abundo, VP for Emerging Technologies.

There were more than 500 booths in that huge hall and I still have not gone around a lot of them. I took some photos of the booths such as
the carts displayed available for franchising.

It seems this event is so successful that they announced an extension till Sunday!

Our Get together with Nerisse

The weekend prior to Jan 17, I received a text from Carla saying Nerisse was finally available to see us monday or tue so at short notice I had to infrom both our glee club group and some batchmates for this instant get together for Nerisse who flew all the day from Sweden. We all met at Italiannis on January 17 , tuesday at Italiannis, Greenbelt 2.

Some photos would show that the waiters sang a happy birthday song for Edwin who celebrated his bday last Jan 7 and Nerisse Dec 24. Nerisse still sported her tan then from a fun filled week at Boracay with her family.

Early January reunion with Dianne and Dan

Early January, as previously agreed upon, we all met Dianne again this time at the house of Nona Luisa Santos- Aquino in Marikina. Ella Salita and Tessa of course were also present.

We were joined by with another balikbayan batchmate, Dan Carandang who I was not able to readily recognize after more than two decades since college. Mon Villarama also joined us and much later Boy Apostol arrived after closing his shop at the abs-cbn compound.

A few days after the reunion, Dianne went back to Russia to join her family.