Gaspar (Gus) Vibal

GASPAR VIBAL is executive director of Vibal Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Vibal Publishing House. He is the founder of Filipiniana.net (a digital library), WikiPilipinas.org (an encyclopedia), ThePOC.net (a recommendation filter) and E-turo.org, the Philippine education portal. He worked for two decades in the Philippine and American publishing industries. In 1983 Vibal moved to New York to study at the New York University Book and Magazine Publishing Institute. He holds a bachelor's degree in business economics, cum laude, from the University of the Philippines.

Gus is a cultural and business maverick, willfully giving away thousands of articles, books and images for free. His energies for the past two years have been directed at building up four revolutionary Philippine knowledge portals. After a career as an international book publisher in New York with companies as diverse as Simon & Schuster, Prentice Hall and Pearson Education (the world's largest educational publisher), Gus has come home to do something completely different. He is determined to assemble and share with the nation and the world the four biggest repositories of knowledge on Philippine education, heritage and culture.