MMMiii!

Kenya sets world first with money transfers by mobile 

I got this link from Jessica Zafra’s blog.

I was like .. WTF?

I Googled on mobile money transfers in the Philippines, and I found one in the first page of results news dating back to 2004.

The Philippines has been doing this money transfer through text through Smart Padala. However, with this system, the remitter would have to go to a remittance station and send the money. The receiver, however, would receive the money through text.

Okay, so that’s not quite 2-way text-based money transfer.

But then there’s Globe’s G-Cash which has been around for almost two years, in reference to this blog entry.

So what now? The Philippines is, I believe, one of the innovators in mobile service technologies. I mean, duh, the Philippines is the Texting Capital of the world. We even coined the term “texting” for crying out loud. Mobile text-based banking and money transfer, ads through text, voting through text (not sure about this), and so on.

Perhaps the Philippines really isn’t a part of the world. I mean, we’re so different from Asia, there’s that hate mail about Filipinos not being Asians. And then, there’s the Philippines being left out of everything…

We’re always letting go of our “firsts” … Saa…

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