In what could become a teleserye between ABS-CBN, on the one hand, and TV 5 and Willie Revillame, on the other, the TV gameshow host’s lawyer Leonard de Vera has now positively tagged the giant network as the one behind the efforts to press charges against his client in connection with the supposed child abuse of six-year-old Jan-jan Suan after Revillame made him dance, gyrating like a macho dancer, in the words of some reports, during his show.

By tagging ABS-CBN, de Vera is trying to shows that the copyright-infringement cases the network filed against his client (after Revillame left ABS-CBN) are tied to the child-abuse charge that Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman, Fr. Roberto Reyes and lawyer Ma. Cristina Sevilla have raised against the TV host.

De Vera has welcomed the move of the Sevilla group, saying it would give his client the opportunity to show that the television host did not commit child abuse against Jan-jan, the six-year-old boy at the center of the controversy. “We are all against child abuse. If only those who are quick to condemn Willie would view the entire 48 minutes of Jan-jan’s dance instead of the spliced and tampered YouTube tape, they would be enlightened and spare Jan-jan the stigma of being an ‘abused child’ for the rest of his life,” de Vera said.

On April 19, lawyer Pacito M. Pineda, representing Jan-jan’s parents Joe and Diana Suan, wrote Social Welfare Secretary Corazon “Dinky” Juliano-Soliman to clarify matters related to the allegations of child abuse against Revillame. Pineda made the move after a news report said the DSWD was prepared to find another psychologist to examine Jan-jan. The boy’s family denied receiving any offer from the DSWD for a replacement psychologist to attend to Jan-jan.

Pineda said the Suan family was, in fact, poised to go to the DSWD on April 11, but had a change of mind after learning that Dr. Ma. Lourdes “Honey” Carandang, who earlier said Jan-jan is a “child-abuse victim”—without even evaluating him, according to the Revillame camp—was the attending psychologist. Dr. Carandang, by the way, has been a consultant and lecturer in the giant network’s team-building activities. Her own NGO also collaborates with ABS-CBN’s Bantay Bata Foundation.

Revillame’s lawyers insist that the child-abuse charge was baseless because it was apparently based on a “spliced” or tampered video of the Willing Willie game show. The TV5 group is also citing the fact that Jan-jan has repeatedly said he neither felt abused nor exploited by anyone during his appearance.

The YouTube video lasted only eight minutes although the whole episode took a total of 48 minutes, Revillame’s lawyers said. Soliman and Father Reyes, the “running priest,” were said to have based their child-abuse charge on the YouTube video, hence the clamor for critics to watch the whole episode in the interest of fairness.

De Vera insists that the YouTube video was “doctored, spliced, mangled and tampered with” to put Revillame in a bad light and to support the child- abuse case against the TV host. If de Vera’s observation is true, then Soliman’s and Reyes’s complaints should go straight to a wastebasket since they were based on a misrepresentation of the real events.

According to de Vera, Jan-jan only cried twice in the six times that he danced and for reasons that had nothing to do with anyone abusing him or causing him distress, contrary to the claims of Soliman and Reyes and company.

Jan-jan himself had confided that he cried the first time he danced because he got afraid of the towering Bonnel Balingit whom he thought was a kapre, a mythical man-beast, and because he was overwhelmed by the emotion of being in the contest proper of Willing Willie after besting 3,000 other boys and girls who auditioned. The other time Jan-jan cried, again according to the boy himself, was when he danced a fifth time after it was already announced that he did not make it to the next round. Surely, it’s understandable why anyone would cry after losing in a contest.

For sure, the issues have been joined and the unfolding teleserye should not be spliced to assure all of a fair appreciation of the facts.

Globe eyes emerging opportunities for mobile-phone market  

It is gratifying to note that Globe Telecom sees bullish prospects about new and emerging opportunities for mobile phones in the country, indicating that there are innovative ways of creating demand in a business that is said to be near its saturation point. For Globe Telecom president Ernest Cu, there is pent-up demand for smartphones, increasing preference for more content, and the promising future of mobile advertising. That means the development of new business models for the telecom firm.

As one of the keynote speakers at the recently concluded Mobile Marketing Conference organized by the Internet and Mobile Marketing Association of the Philippines and the Mobile Marketing Association Philippines, Cu revealed that the pervasiveness of mobile phones in the country continues, with penetration rate likely to reach 98 percent by 2015, according to research agency Ovum.

“This presents an opportunity for us to produce more enriching and relevant experiences for our subscribers when they use their mobile phones. By offering the latest smartphones, developing up-to-date mobile applications and providing more affordable data plans, we commit to raise the bar in mobile data by making usage more engaging, interactive and compelling for our subscribers,” Cu said. Earlier, the company announced it will maintain an aggressive stance in pushing mobile-data usage by making it as a key business priority for 2011.

Apart from mobile data, Globe is also seeing the potential of its mobile-advertising platform myRewards, myGlobe Plus, with over 1.6 million members opted-in, over 25 million ads campaigns ran, over 400,000 unique subscribers receiving targeted advertising messages and over 450,000 rewards points awarded. To date, the mobile-advertising platform continues to attract more global brands and companies that consider the mobile phone as an important medium to deliver the right messages to the right markets. That just goes to show that the telecom firm, which has been suffering heavily from felled telecommunications towers, is determined to push the envelope further.

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