OPINION
Ibrahim ‘ Ibba ’ Bernardo has been working with marginalized and underprivileged groups by giving them access to relevant technology . An IT entrepreneur since he was 22 , he ’ s the founder and CEO of Sari Software Solutions . Ibba also wears other hats as a technology and motorcycle journalist , entrepreneur and IT lecturer and is currently the founder of IAM360 , a Virtual Reality startup based out of Hong Kong .”
DIGITAL
17
THE MISSIONARY POSITION
Everyone wants you but they don ’ t understand you . The answer is to proselytize .
It ’ s fitting that I ’ m in San Francisco , jet lagged on Mission Street thinking about disruption . This community , the religious center of the hipster world , is being disrupted . It ’ s being disrupted by unicorns , megatech giants , venture capitalists and $ 10 coffee drinking wannabe hipster tourists like me .
One street down , you have local merchants selling piñatas that look like Donald Trump , unlicensed Warrior shirts and liquor ― a lot of liquor . One street up you have an Interstellar Pilates Bikram Yoga slash coffee shop . And in the middle you have the Mission District . Is change good ? Not necessarily , but is it inevitable ? Most definitely .
I ’ m here to attend the Global Entrepreneur Summit . It is a place where innovators and entrepreneurs meet and create . The keynote speaker is President Obama , an innovator and disruptor in his own right ; and Mark Zuckerberg , some guy who dropped out of Harvard .
The Mission District is like a microcosm of what ’ s going on in the world here things are changing at a ridiculous rate . Companies like Twitter , Facebook and Instagram who have just started making ridiculous amounts of money are already being disrupted by startups like WeChat , Snapchat and my app DSCVR 360 . It seems like just a few years ago when Titans like IBM got usurped by Microsoft who in turn got whooped by Google . The cycle is getting shorter and shorter and the bets are getting ludicrously bigger and bigger .
So how does someone like me fit in ? It seems like I ’ m always in the missionary position , a little bit ahead of the wave , doing the tech gods work and preaching the vision of a new virtual paradise . Being a VR evangelist is tough . I ’ ve been preaching Virtual Reality for the last two years via I Am Cardboard and now DSCVR and only now has this technology started getting traction .
The problem with being in the missionary position is that everyone wants you but the technology is still so new that they don ’ t understand you . Virtual Reality is a perfect example . Clients have coke-high expectations with shabu budgets ( I don ’ t do or usually condone illegal drugs but I thought this sounded great , coz you know some people be trippin ’ like they ’ re on something ) We ’ ve had clients try to engage us for projects that would have worked just as well in normal 4K 2D rectangular video . The big moral dilemma is do you take their money and run or do you just politely tell them no ? Or do you put on your preacher robes and start proselytizing ? The answer is the missionary position because if your tech gods miracle fails , faith is shaken to the core . The challenge is , in the Philippines , we only hear echoes of the tech gods works . Like religious books , we misunderstand and misinterpret . To most , I speak in tongues , but to the few , this geek makes sense .
July - August 2016 | adobo magazine