Bariles (meaning Tuna) is the alias of this blog's author during the early days, Avel Manansala who would like nothing than to write about his beloved city by the bay and share it with his kababayans from all over.
Avel is a top Google Local Guides volunteer and a proud Google Evangelist, the Convenor of the Blogfest Soccskargen, the organizer of the Soccsksargen Experience Tour for Bloggers since 2011 and the co-founder & self-proclaimed mother hen of the Soccsksargen Bloggers, established in 2008. Before his present volunteer capacity as Manager of Google Business Group (GBG) - GenSan, he was the Media Affairs Officer of the City Mayor's Office & before that, travelled with the Royale London Circus in Southeast Asia, as its Marketing & Communications Director. Even earlier, he worked for over 10 years with Procter & Gamble, in Mindanao.
Google flew Avel to the US in 2014 for the Global GBG Summit in Googleplex, Mountain View, California, with the Managers of the Top 10 GBG Chapters worldwide, with GBG Gensan ranked as #2.
He also took part in the 2-day Google I/O conference in San Francisco along with 6,000 attendees.
His volunteer work for Google has also brought him to Singapore, Hyderabad in India, Yogyakarta in Indonesia and Colombo in Sri Lanka.
In Sept 2016, he was the country's representative to the Google Local Guides Summit 2016 in San Francisco.
Avel is a Social Media Consultant, an Online Presence Mentor & much-sought after speaker on these topics; and can be found usually working in one corner of the cafes of Gensan.
