Ilumina iTV unveiled for the second time

I was so tired yesterday that I forgot to write about the product demo of the Ilumina iTV, the convergence product invented by a young group of Filipino engineers and Industrial Designers. I've been helping them since last year because I sincerely believe that they need all the support they can get from every Filipino.

I arrived at Magnet Cafe at exactly 11am. The Inovent Design team was still preparing the iTV for us. Thirty minutes after, some people are already registering. They also want to see the demonstration of Filipino engineering and design ingenuity.

The event started at around 1:15pm when the Inovent engineers finished preparing the Ilumina. Unlike the November 30, 2008 "soft launch", this "beta prototype" is more stable and tougher than the first one. It has a 1.5 terabyte hard drive, able to store 10,000 gigabytes of movie and music files. It already has a kick-ass high definition (HD) webcam, a built-in VOIP and wifi/LAN and has a Blue Ray hard drive for full entertainment viewing.

Inovent founder Brian Quebengco and his partner Mark Ruiz claims that this is the first fully convergent interactive iTV. I believe him. Though in the US, there is already an interactive TV, as what my friend, Noemi Dado checked, this is the first LCD television to have all the media entertainment features that we normally find in our living rooms. It must be very clear that this is a convergence product, meaning, it already converged all the fine elements of the LCD television equipped with a very stable and powerful computing functions.

Anyway, the product demo is still a work in progress. Shortly before the event ended, the iTV encountered some problems, mainly due to the "overheating" of the internal fan. Brian explained that they still need to modify this in the final product, yet, they still don't have the funding, as yet. They need all the support.

What they want to prove, says Quebengco is the fact that this is achievable. If a group of young Filipino engineers, industrial designers and technicians can come up with a great product with only a pittance in their pockets, surely, someone with tons of money can truly come up with a greater and more refined convergence product.

This perplexes me. We Filipinos now have a product that we truly can call our own and has the possibility of dominating a new category, which is the LCD television category.

Like other Filipino inventors they lack the financial muscle. I urge all my friends in the United States to support this excellent initiative by our young fellow Filipinos.