COMMUNICATING with their friends and loved ones is one of the challenges experienced by Filipino seafarers when they are onboard vessels.
While most of these ships have satellite connection for Internet, the data exchange is sometimes fuzzy.
In comes dot-com firm SerbisU, which publishes Marino Daily, an online news portal designed to provide news to seamen.
“Our mission is a bit different from the local start-ups,” said John San Pedro, CEO of Incubix Technologies Inc., the company behind SerbisU.
“Instead of ideas coming to us, we want to start and create our identity,” San Pedro told the BusinessMirror.
Hence, he ambled on to the office of Smart Communications Inc., the mobile business division of publicly listed Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT) Co., which led to what San Pedro calls a “partnership.”
“They have the infrastructure while we will [provide] the water to flow from the pipe,” he said.
It wasn’t that simple.
“We had to figure it out how the data would fit in this small space in the infrastructure. We also needed to develop a thinner code.”
The latter need arose as they needed to “eliminate coding that caused backlogs in the bandwidth.”
“After some initial tests, we decided to exclude heavy things on the Net, such as graphics and videos” because of these backlogs. Through research and trial and error, San Pedro said they were able fit the system with a proprietary computer software program. After finishing the final stages, Santos said SerbisU came out with two versions of the Marino Daily web site: for the land-based workers and for sea-based workers.
Marino Daily contains all the news from different news outlets in the country. It also has a regional section where the events in a certain province are covered. Further, there is a chat service that requires a user to use his or her Facebook account to communicate with his or her relatives.
Prepaid code from Smart is being used to access the service. Marino Daily provides updates on an hourly basis.
San Pedro said they plan to develop a mobile version of the program to enable seafarers to access the Internet wherever they are. He said the company also plans to develop e-commerce on the web site. By putting an e-commerce platform in the site, San Pedro said seafarers can now send their remittances to their dependents in a more efficient way.
Image credits: Alysa Salen