Early Friday morning round-up.

I’m off to Philippine Science High School in a couple of hours for the Future Summit entitled “Technology: Where are we taking it? Or is taking us?“. So, while I’m away for the larger half of the day, I’ll leave you with some interesting readings and snippets around the sphere.

• The guys in-charge of the Canon brand emailed me with the Suggested Retail Price of the EOS 40D: Php62,950 for the body only, Php66,950 with the 18-55mm kit and Php85,000 for the 17-85mm kit. Also interesting to note that the digital camera gray market is hurting Canon’s business in the Philippines. That doesn’t include Hidalgo in Quiapo, right?
• William Yu has successfully unlocked the iPhone to work with Smart and Globe SIM cards. He brought it earlier during our JesCom Convention and showed it to me. T’was a real beauty. However, I might just go for the iPod Touch instead.
• Arnold shares 5 tips for a successful paid blogging gig. He blogs for one of my favorite SEO blog, the Search Engine Journal.
• Lawrence Casiraya of Inquirer.net blogs about the Smart Bro killer. He was the one who tipped me about this ZTE HSDPA modem Globe is releasing soon during the last Press Con we attended. Incidentally, the guys from Globe went here yesterday to do some signal testing. Will do a separate post on that later.
• The Jester-in-Exile writes about the Cris Mendez issue and adds that UP Students do not have the right to be apathetic, pointing to a certain blogger named Ria who publicly admitted she had no remorse over the death of her batch mate Cris Mendez. Another sensitive issue about freedom of expression? But what if the UP system made her that way? As one commenter says, it has become the norm in UP that a lot of students have gone numbed about it.
• The 2007 SEMCON is fast approaching but the Php8,500 price tag for the two day conference might be expensive for bloggers. Here’s one way to get 2 FREE passes to the conference this October. Grab it why it’s hot!
• Luis discovers that when a commenter says “Good work. Nice site.”, it must be spam.
• Eugene thinks that The Deck Ad Network is the best advertising platform as it provides the most focused service to advertisers while publishers get premium fees. But what if you’re TechCrunch that has an asking price of $10,000 for a 125×125 banner ad per month? Sometimes the price of the ad is not proportional to the amount of traffic you have but the quality and influence of the audience you attract.

Another tech blogger has left the block.