Carl Lamiel has been writing about tech for over six years. In 2020, he founded WalasTech, an online publication which provides comprehensive tech news and reviews to a Filipino audience.

Can you provide an overview of your publication/initiative?
We are WalasTech, a portal in the Philippines that mainly covers technology, transport, and tech-lifestyle topics. We strive to bring the most relevant stories for Filipinos in a clearer, more concise and understandable structure for easy reading. This started as a passion project in early 2020, but the onset of the pandemic gave me more time to develop it into a full-fledged tech news website.

How is your team/publication structured?
The website is currently run by two people, me and Nate Trillana. I handle most of the reviews and collaboration inquiries while Nate writes news stories and occasional listicles or original write-ups. We dedicate ourselves to writing stories in our free time as we also have our own full-time work to tend to. I'm looking to expand the team in the coming months to cover more stories. I also hope to start our video production for social media and YouTube as well.

What themes/topics/stories are you most interested in?
We're avid fans of consumer tech (mobile, PCs, tablets, laptops, wearables, audio, appliances) and this comprises most of our covered stories on the site. We also have telecoms, consumer FinTech (i.e., mobile wallets, online payment transactions), software, and transportation topics as well. We also do market rounds once in a while and check prices of known upcoming products before they are officially launched in the market.

What are you looking for from PRs?
We'd love to structure our content in a way that Filipinos can relate, so we're mostly concentrating on how a product or service is best used in our local setting. While it's easily said internationally that 'Product A' is a good product and subsequently hyped, it may not work locally with us due to restrictions and/or other policies. I'd love to hear regional/global developments and product launches as well. We always seek out new stuff to share, and we're always fascinated to learn of new technologies coming to the devices we use every day.

Can you tell us more about your career? How does that influence your reporting today?
I started as an intern for YugaTech, undisputedly the top tech website in the Philippines, since 2014. I initially did weekly video content for our YouTube channel due to my multimedia arts background. I then had the opportunity to write stories a few months later as a Junior Contributor. I became a Senior Contributor in 2017 and left two years later in 2019 to take a break as I had major work projects to focus on. While I was working with YugaTech I am also working for one of the oldest appliance retail chains in the country as part of their marketing team, so it's also nice to see the industry from another perspective.

I credit YugaTech (most especially Abe Olandres and Louie Diangson) for a lot of what I do today, as they taught me the ropes of the industry, gave me freedom to pursue stories I never thought I can do, and assigned me to cover stories in places I never thought I'll reach. I entered as an avid website reader with a high level of fascination in the world of tech and left with a lot of knowledge, and I am always grateful that I had experienced that.

As I opened my own portal, I also took into consideration all the experiences I had. I wanted to develop my own writing style that will combine the technical expertise we had in YugaTech into a more concise, easier-to-digest format that can be read by the audience. I'm still learning along the way, but we're slowly getting there. In the future, I really want to pursue and publish investigative stories that will bring light to issues in the local cyberspace.

If you could interview anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
I'd pick Microsoft's Satya Nadella. I'd love to nit-pick the mind of a visionary who has led a pivotal change in Microsoft and make its services more profitable than its usual software products. There's this vibe from him that he knows what he wants and takes the most reasonable steps to achieve what he wants to do. His leadership mindset of people being learn-it-all also piqued my interest. I'd also love to learn a thing or two from him, too.

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