Your comments cover 2 very important points:

1) Can a web app coming out of the Philippines succeed?
2) Why aren’t Filipinos more innovative?

On the first point, absolutely. Users/customers don’t care where you are from. As long as the service/app you provide solves a problem and your app scales properly. The problem is we don’t have such an example and thus you really believe that the West will not use a third world product.

On the second point, this is a much longer answer (and could qualify for an actual paper). But to summarize, Filipinos have generally had more things to worry about than just innovation - food, shelter, medicine, clothing. When you are barely making necessities in life, you don’t worry about other things. Many years of this leads parents to tell their kids to go work for a big corporation for stability and security, not to go out and do something innovative (and thus riskier).

However, with more recent direct foreign investment and the ease and low cost of starting a web company, hopefully things will change. Having a “flickr” here will only help.

if flickr did come out of the philippines from a philippine company, it won’t be as big as it is now. i think your giving too much credit on the democratizing power of the internet. people in the west, i believe would be apprehensive in using a product off a third world country. it’s a cultural thing i believe.

i think one important hindrance to a would-be filipino silicon valley is the filipino mentality. filipinos are generally thinking like worker bees not as trailblazers. we always like to say we can do what the west are doing. well, we’ve been saying and doing that for more than a decade now and we are still in doubt of ourselves. we’re perenial followers to our former colonial masters.

LOL, you could say that Flickr somewhat did come out of the Philippines. Catherina Fake has Filipina blood.

We need a bottom-up approach, not a top-down approach. And a bottom-up approach can be spurred by a couple of “minor” hits.