The Ilumina: Philippine Tech Trades Outsourcing for Open Source

The Philippines has traditionally been a very working class contributor to the global technology sector. Some would say the industry here is built on two pillars: 1) outsourced product assembly and 2) tech support with American accents. Over the weekend, Inovent – a local industrial design firm – did a demo for a completely Philippine-made high definition iTV called Ilumina that runs on an open source brain. The company hopes that the product will serve as a catalyst for a local design and software community movement.

PSFK asked Inovent founder Brian Quebengco and chief marketer Mark Ruiz to tell us more.

1. Please give us a quick description of Ilumina and what makes it different from the existing consumer tech out there.

The Ilumina is the first true LCD iTV, a category-breaking inovention. We’ve essentially put the brain of a computer inside a TV. As such, it’s not just a TV. it’s not just a PC. We’ve bridged the great divide. Some LCD TV’s have started to include hints of multimedia and content management functionalities, but still need external hardware to be truly interactive. Some PC’s are multimedia centers nowadays, but they also don’t have integrated TV. Ilumina is a wholistic solution, and it comes in one sleek package.

Equally as important – we’re an industrial design firm, and so the design of the Ilumina had to be inoventive. This is truly the only one of its kind out there in this particular form. In fact, it’s so unique that we were able to get both a design and a utility patent for it. The Ilumina LCD iTV is consumer technology as design furniture.

2. What comparative advantages do you think the Philippines has over other countries that make it a good place for local manufacturing?

We believe that the quality is the first thing to harp on. Philippine labor quality is international in standards; a big chunk of our exports is in electronics which alludes to our capabilities. This level of quality has immense value especially with the reasonable labor costs.

Secondly, the Philippines is geographically attractive. It can be a good base of operations for manufacturing in SEA and also to the western world. For Inovent in particular, ideally we’d like it manufactured in the Philippines because having research, design, & development close to the manufacturing base, PEZA, will allow for faster collaboration on quality control and inovention.

3. An open standard product like this allows an independent community of software developers to create applications that make the product more exciting. Any plans on building the community? Do we have enough software talent to start a real movement from the ground up?

We believe we have the talent on the grassroots level already because our colleges and universities generate a lot of software developer graduates who are sadly exercising most of their talent by going abroad. Having a Philippine-made tech product will inspire many Filipino software developers to get into the action, but we have to make it easy and exciting for them.

In terms of ease, we’re built on open source so it’s just really a matter of our software team liaising with all these developers and releasing the development parameters. We envision a web-based platform wherein they can communicate, collaborate, share, and even sell the applications they’ve developed. We also believe in making it exciting for the software developers through a revenue-sharing business model. Their efforts for the Ilumina should be aptly rewarded.

4. You do realize that you’re going to have to throw in some serious karaoke capabilities for this to sell locally right?

Oh most definitely. Given the platform of the Ilumina, this is tangible. All you Filipino lungs out there, get ready!

Thanks Brian and Mark!

Ilumina