“Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation’s oldest venture capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital investing that stretches back to 1911. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.”

Wonder why? Click on the link to find out.

(It’s a whole lot better if you find out now than later. ^_^)

I don’t know about you guys, but Venture Capitalists are not a familiar lot to me, until I joined PESO. But anyway, this is why Bessemer’s Anti-Portfolio is all the more amusing. It’s a list of famous companies they passed on investing. HP, Apple, eBay, FedEx, Google, Intel, Lotus, Compaq, PayPal, IBM, Cisco Systems… Will the absurdness ever end?

They’re so un-bitter about it that I wonder if it’s even true.

Beyond the humor of the story is a greater lesson, of course, especially to us Marketing apprentices (aka the VC lapdogs).

Never say die. Getting turned down the first time will just be the start of a string of many other rejections.

The greatest ideas aren’t the easiest to recognize. They’ll never know what genius hit them.

And we, shall laugh hardest, laugh last.

Fellow ACMers, I believe Kuya Harv has successfully transferred our present UPACM.Org files to the Chapter Website account provided to us by ACM International. W00t! Thanks!

It will become our mirror site at the moment, but it could even be our main one should we decide not to renew our hosting anymore. After all, it would be nice to hold on to this “UP” subdomain we grabbed quicker than the other UP’s (U Portland, U Pennsylvania, etc.) in the world.

HSBC Young Entrepreneur Awards is a regional business plan writing competition, inviting talented post-secondary students from Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand to display their creativity and business acumen.

The local competition will take place from September 2005 to March 2006. Gold Award winners from each country or territory will compete for the Best of the Best Awards in Hong Kong in June 2006, following by a rewarding US study tour.

Congratulations to the Sinfinity group, a finalist and best poster winner at the recently concluded Engineering Marketing Congress. Kudos to the CS198 groups responsible for this project, JSP (Secretary Ia Lucero, Treasurer Jonas Roque and Logistics Head Phil Kimpo) and J2L.

Folks, all members of the SIG are requested to subscribe to SDN. If you have friends who use Java, ask them to register as well.

The City College of Manila was generous enough to give UP ACM a nice plaque.

Kudos to all the ACMers who contributed to this endeavor!

P.S. Sorry for the poor quality of the images. I only used my phone’s camera.

On Sept 14, 9 to 12, at the DILC eMac lab, Apple Singapore will be giving a talk on how to develop applications using Open Source tools on the Mac platform. This is an exclusive event for UP Computer Science students and faculty (but other UP students may also attend subject to availability of space, of course).

I am appointing Mai to take charge of pre-registration. There are limited slots only (1 student to 1 eMac but worst case, 2 to 1 eMac). Please provide me with a list on Monday.

ACM funds – the US$1000 still has not cleared. It is still in my account waiting to be cleared. Once it is cleared, I will let you know so “we” can spend it wisely (movie, everyone? hehehe).

Check this out!

The premier conference and expo exclusively focused on Linux and other open source solutions. LinuxWorld Philippines provides Filipino business decision-makers of big, as welll as small and medium enterprises with information and resources to implement Linux and other open source solutions to achieve higher profits and increased productivity.

September 14-16, 2005
Wednesday to Friday
Dusit Hotel Nikko, Makati City

To pre-register, click here.

Here is the official Java mascot for the ACM Java SIG/UP JDG

Cheers!