You know that the digital industry is here to stay when you spot some unique scenarios of use for the mobile and online web.

Take for example the parking in the streets of the central business district of Makati. Parking attendants now have PDAs with customized software that allows them to track each car’s parking status. The moment you park on a side street, they input your car’s plate number, and the exact spot you parked on, and everything is wirelessly uploaded to a central server. Tow trucks are quickly alerted the moment any car exceeds the allotted 3 hour parking limit.

St. Peter Chapels, which is a funeral homes based in Quezon City offers customers 24/7 online viewing of all their rooms. Their free e-Burol service allows relatives and friends overseas to view their loved ones’ internment from any web enabled device.

Different churches have started to harness the power of digital to service their parishioners.  Union church provides MP3 downloads of their sermons while Victory Church ( http://victoryfort.org ) makes available for download some Podcasts and Videos of their events. Even the Catholic Church introduced an online Visita Iglesia service during the Holy week for Catholics to go through a virtual Stations of the Cross through an online connection.

Multiply.com houses over 50,000 Filipino online merchants which makes them larger than any offline shopping mall in the world. If each online store merchant averages a very conservative 5 USD in sales each day, that’s 250,000 USD in daily revenue. Imagine how that is affecting the sales of traditional merchants who have not yet established an e-commerce presence.

As the cost of connectivity and the price of access devices drop, more and more users will gain access to digital services. It will be exciting to see what new digital innovations are in store for us in the future.