The words, without the fog.

Every term a business owner runs into when commissioning software, defined in plain English. No jargon used to explain jargon, and no definition that exists to sell you something.

15: AI & Automation
16: Creative & Video Production
14: E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)
11: Philippine Business & Compliance
14: Product & Delivery
14: Search, AEO & AI Visibility
14: Web & Software Engineering

A

8 terms

AI Agent
An AI agent is a system that uses a language model to decide which actions to take, then takes them through connected tools: reading a database, sending an email, updating a booking record.
AI & Automation
AI Operations Audit
An AI operations audit is a structured review of how a business actually works, ending in a ranked list of tasks worth automating with estimated time saved, required data and build effort for each.
AI & Automation
AI Overviews
AI Overviews are Google’s generated summaries shown above the traditional results for many queries, assembled from multiple web sources and displayed with links to them.
Search, AEO & AI Visibility
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer engine optimization is the practice of structuring content so that AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, Google AI Overviews — cite it inside their generated answers.
Search, AEO & AI Visibility
Answer-First Content
Answer-first content resolves the question it poses in its opening lines — typically a 40 to 70 word paragraph containing the direct answer and a specific figure — before any background or setup.
Search, AEO & AI Visibility
API (Application Programming Interface)
An API is a defined way for one piece of software to request data or actions from another: a checkout asking a payment gateway to take a GCash payment, or a dashboard pulling yesterday’s sales from an accounting system.
Web & Software Engineering
Aspect Ratio (Platform Ratio)
Aspect ratio is the proportion of a video frame’s width to its height, written as two numbers: 16:9 for landscape, 9:16 for vertical, 1:1 for square, 4:5 for a tall feed post.
Creative & Video Production
AVP (Audio-Visual Presentation)
An AVP, or audio-visual presentation, is a short branded video that explains an organisation, product or programme to an audience in one sitting.
Creative & Video Production

B

4 terms

B-Roll
B-roll is supporting footage cut around the main subject: the product in use, hands at work, the room, the street outside.
Creative & Video Production
Barangay Business Permit
A barangay business permit, usually called a barangay clearance, is the certification issued by the barangay where a business operates.
Philippine Business & Compliance
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)
Business process outsourcing is the practice of contracting a business function, such as customer support, finance and accounting, back-office administration or IT services, to an external provider rather than staffing it internally.
Philippine Business & Compliance
Buyout
A buyout is a one-off payment that purchases the right to use a performance, a piece of music or a finished video without further fees, for the term, territory and media the contract names.
Creative & Video Production

C

12 terms

Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment is a shopper adding items to a basket and leaving before completing payment.
E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)
Cash on Delivery (COD)
Cash on delivery is a payment arrangement where the buyer pays the courier at the doorstep and the courier remits the proceeds to the merchant later.
E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)
Chargeback
A chargeback is a card payment reversed by the cardholder’s issuing bank after a dispute, pulling the funds back from the merchant along with a fee.
E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)
Chatbot vs AI Agent
A chatbot responds within a conversation: a message arrives, an answer goes back, and the exchange ends there.
AI & Automation
Colour Grade
A colour grade is the pass in post-production where the colour of every shot is adjusted: first corrected so exposure and white balance match across the edit, then graded to a deliberate look.
Creative & Video Production
Commissioned Work & Copyright Ownership (Philippines)
Under the Philippine Intellectual Property Code (Republic Act 8293), a client who commissions and pays for creative work owns the work itself, but copyright stays with the creator unless a written stipulation says otherwise.
Philippine Business & Compliance
Computer Vision
Computer vision is software that interprets images and video: identifying objects, counting items, reading a gauge, spotting a defect on a production line.
AI & Automation
Consumer Act of the Philippines (RA 7394)
The Consumer Act of the Philippines (Republic Act 7394) is the country’s principal consumer protection law.
Philippine Business & Compliance
Content Management System (CMS)
A content management system is software that lets non-technical staff create, edit and publish website content without touching code.
Web & Software Engineering
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are three metrics Google publishes to measure page experience: Largest Contentful Paint (loading, good at 2.5 seconds or under), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness, 200 milliseconds or under) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability, 0.1 or under).
Web & Software Engineering
Custom Software vs Off-the-Shelf Software
Custom software is built for one organisation’s specific process; off-the-shelf software is a finished product many organisations subscribe to, such as Shopify or QuickBooks.
Web & Software Engineering
Cutdown
A cutdown is a shorter edit of a finished video, built from the same material to fit a placement that will not take the full length: a 30-second film reduced to 15 and 6 seconds for paid social.
Creative & Video Production

D

6 terms

Data Privacy Act of 2012 (RA 10173)
The Data Privacy Act of 2012 (Republic Act 10173) is the Philippine law governing how organisations collect, store, use and share personal information.
Philippine Business & Compliance
Database
A database is the structured store behind an application: customers, orders, bookings and stock held in a form software can query reliably.
Web & Software Engineering
Direct-to-Consumer (D2C)
Direct-to-consumer is selling straight to the end customer through channels the brand controls, rather than through distributors, retail chains or marketplace listings.
E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)
Discovery Phase
A discovery phase is a short, paid engagement that precedes a build and produces the artefacts a build needs: a written scope, user flows, a technical approach, and an estimate grounded in something other than a guess.
Product & Delivery
Domain Name
A domain name is the address people type to reach a site, such as blackbyrds.digital, rented from a registrar in yearly terms rather than bought outright.
Web & Software Engineering
DTI Business Name Registration
DTI business name registration is the Philippine process by which a sole proprietor registers a trade name with the Department of Trade and Industry.
Philippine Business & Compliance

E

4 terms

E-Commerce Act (RA 8792)
The Electronic Commerce Act of 2000 (Republic Act 8792) is the Philippine law that gives electronic documents, data messages and electronic signatures the same legal recognition as their paper equivalents.
Philippine Business & Compliance
E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust)
E-E-A-T is the framework in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines used to judge content quality: demonstrated first-hand Experience, subject Expertise, recognised Authoritativeness, and Trust.
Search, AEO & AI Visibility
Electronic Signature & Digital Signature
An electronic signature is any mark, sound or process in electronic form that identifies a signatory and indicates their approval of a document.
Philippine Business & Compliance
Entity SEO
Entity SEO is the practice of making a search engine resolve a business, person or product as one distinct thing rather than a set of unconnected mentions.
Search, AEO & AI Visibility

F

3 terms

Featured Snippet
A featured snippet is a block at the top of a search results page that reproduces an extract from one page — a paragraph, list or table — as a direct answer to the query, with a link to the source.
Search, AEO & AI Visibility
Fine-Tuning
Fine-tuning is further training of an existing language model on a set of example inputs and outputs, so it adopts a specific style, format or classification behaviour by default.
AI & Automation
Fixed-Scope vs Time-and-Materials
Fixed-scope and time-and-materials are the two standard ways to price software work.
Product & Delivery

G

4 terms

GCash
GCash is a Philippine mobile wallet operated by G-Xchange, Inc.
E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Generative engine optimization is the practice of increasing how often a brand or page is used as a source by generative AI systems.
Search, AEO & AI Visibility
Google Business Profile (GBP)
A Google Business Profile is the free listing that determines whether a business appears in Google Maps and the local map results, and what shows in its knowledge panel.
Search, AEO & AI Visibility
Guardrails (AI)
Guardrails are the controls that constrain what an AI system may say and do: topic limits, validation of output against an expected structure, blocked actions, spending caps, and filters on both the incoming request and the generated response.
AI & Automation

H

5 terms

Hallucination (AI)
A hallucination is output that is fluent, plausible and false: an invented citation, a policy the company never wrote, a confidently wrong figure.
AI & Automation
Headless CMS
A headless CMS stores content without controlling how it is displayed: editors work in an admin interface, and the content is delivered to a website, mobile app or in-store screen through an API.
Web & Software Engineering
Hook
A hook is the opening of a video, usually the first few seconds, whose only job is to stop a viewer scrolling past.
Creative & Video Production
Human-in-the-Loop
Human-in-the-loop is a design pattern where an AI system prepares work and a person approves, edits or rejects it before it takes effect: drafted replies queued for a one-click send, extracted invoice fields shown for confirmation.
AI & Automation
Hybrid Production
Hybrid production is a video method that combines live-action filming with AI-generated material, giving each a defined job.
Creative & Video Production

I

2 terms

Inference Cost
Inference cost is what a business pays each time a model produces an output, billed by most providers per token of input and output, where a token is roughly three-quarters of a word.
AI & Automation
InstaPay vs PESONet
InstaPay and PESONet are the two automated clearing houses under the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ National Retail Payment System.
E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)

L

4 terms

Large Language Model (LLM)
A large language model is a neural network trained on large volumes of text to predict likely continuations, which lets it write, summarise, classify and translate without being programmed for each task.
AI & Automation
Legacy System Migration
Legacy system migration is moving a business off software it has outgrown, such as an unsupported CMS version or a custom application nobody remembers building, onto a current platform with its data intact.
Web & Software Engineering
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at a site’s root that offers language models a curated map of its most useful pages, in Markdown, without navigation and boilerplate.
Search, AEO & AI Visibility
Local SEO
Local SEO is optimisation for searches with geographic intent — queries naming a city, or carrying implicit "near me" intent.
Search, AEO & AI Visibility

M

5 terms

Marketplace Inventory Sync
Marketplace inventory sync is the practice of keeping one stock figure accurate across every channel a business sells on, its own store plus Shopee, Lazada and TikTok Shop, so a unit sold in one place stops being offered in the others.
E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)
Maya
Maya is a Philippine digital payments brand covering a consumer wallet and a merchant acceptance business, alongside a Bangko Sentral-licensed digital bank under the same name.
E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)
Minimum Scalable Product (MSP)
A minimum scalable product is a first release built narrow in features but sound in architecture, so the same codebase carries the product from launch through growth without a rewrite.
Product & Delivery
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
A minimum viable product is the smallest version of a product that delivers real value to a real user and returns evidence about whether the idea works.
Product & Delivery
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
The Model Context Protocol is an open standard, published by Anthropic in November 2024, that defines how AI applications connect to external tools and data sources.
AI & Automation

N

2 terms

NAP Consistency
NAP consistency means a business publishes exactly the same name, address and phone number everywhere it appears online — its own site, its business profile, directories, and social pages.
Search, AEO & AI Visibility
National Privacy Commission (NPC)
The National Privacy Commission is the Philippine government body created by the Data Privacy Act of 2012 to administer and enforce it.
Philippine Business & Compliance

O

3 terms

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
Optical character recognition converts text in images and scans into machine-readable characters, turning a photographed delivery receipt into data a system can file and search.
AI & Automation
Order Management System (OMS)
An order management system is the software that holds an order from capture to delivery: recording it once, checking stock, routing it to a warehouse or courier, tracking its state, and handling cancellations, returns and refunds.
E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)
Overselling
Overselling is accepting an order for stock that is not actually available, usually because a unit sold on one channel before the other channels were updated.
E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)

P

9 terms

Payment Gateway
A payment gateway is the service that carries a customer’s payment details from a checkout to the institutions that authorise and settle the money — card networks, banks, e-wallets.
E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)
PayMongo
PayMongo is a Philippine payment gateway built around a developer API and hosted checkout, aggregating cards, wallets including GCash, Maya and GrabPay, online banking and over-the-counter payments behind one integration.
E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)
PEZA (Philippine Economic Zone Authority)
PEZA is the Philippine Economic Zone Authority, the government agency that develops and administers the country’s economic zones and registers the enterprises operating inside them.
Philippine Business & Compliance
Photoreal Board
A photoreal board is a storyboard frame rendered at finished quality rather than sketched, showing the lighting, casting, wardrobe and product detail the final shot will carry.
Creative & Video Production
Product Roadmap
A product roadmap is a sequenced plan of what a product will do next and why, grouped by outcome rather than by feature list.
Product & Delivery
Progressive Web App (PWA)
A progressive web app is a website that behaves like an installed app: it can be added to a phone’s home screen, work offline through cached files, and receive push notifications, while still loading from a URL.
Web & Software Engineering
Project Handover
Project handover is the transfer of a finished system and the knowledge needed to run it: production access, hosting and domain accounts, environment variables, deployment steps, and documentation of how the parts fit together.
Product & Delivery
Prompt Engineering
Prompt engineering is the practice of writing model instructions that produce the required output reliably: stating the role, the task, the constraints, the output format, and one or two worked examples.
AI & Automation
Prototype
A prototype is a clickable simulation of a product that behaves enough like the real thing to be tested with users, while containing no working back end.
Product & Delivery

R

4 terms

Reference-Driven Generation
Reference-driven generation is the practice of conditioning an AI image or video model on supplied images rather than on words alone, so a real product, face or set appears the same in every generated shot.
Creative & Video Production
Responsive Design
Responsive design is a single website built to reshape itself for whatever screen requests it, rather than maintaining a separate mobile site.
Web & Software Engineering
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Retrieval-augmented generation is a technique that searches a private collection of documents for passages relevant to a question, then passes those passages to a language model as context for its answer.
AI & Automation
robots.txt
robots.txt is a file at a site’s root that tells automated crawlers which paths they may request.
Search, AEO & AI Visibility

S

11 terms

Scope Creep
Scope creep is the gradual expansion of a project’s requirements after the scope is agreed, usually through small additions that each seem too minor to renegotiate.
Product & Delivery
SEC Registration (Philippines)
SEC registration is the process of incorporating with the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission.
Philippine Business & Compliance
Server-Side Rendering (SSR) vs Static Site Generation (SSG)
Server-side rendering builds each page when a visitor requests it, so the content reflects the database at that moment.
Web & Software Engineering
Shot List
A shot list is the numbered inventory of every shot a video needs, recording for each one the subject, framing, camera movement, location and approximate duration.
Creative & Video Production
Software Requirements Specification (SRS)
A software requirements specification is the written document defining what a system must do: functional requirements as testable statements, non-functional requirements such as performance and access control, plus constraints and assumptions.
Product & Delivery
Sound Design
Sound design is the construction of everything an audience hears other than dialogue: music, room tone, effects, transitions and the mix that balances them against the voice.
Creative & Video Production
Sprint
A sprint is a fixed working period, commonly one or two weeks, in which a development team commits to a defined set of work and ends with something demonstrable.
Product & Delivery
SSL/TLS Certificate
An SSL/TLS certificate is a file installed on a server that encrypts traffic between a browser and a website, turning http:// into https:// and removing the browser’s "Not secure" warning.
Web & Software Engineering
Staging Environment
A staging environment is a private copy of a live system, running the same code and configuration, used to test changes before they reach customers.
Product & Delivery
Storyboard
A storyboard is a sequence of drawn or rendered frames that maps a video shot by shot before production begins, each panel showing framing, action and the line of script or narration that plays underneath.
Creative & Video Production
Structured Data (Schema Markup)
Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD following the schema.org vocabulary, that states explicitly what a page is about: that this string is a price, that one an opening time, this entity the organisation publishing the page.
Search, AEO & AI Visibility

T

1 term

Technical Debt
Technical debt is the future cost of a shortcut taken now: code that works but is structured for speed rather than for change.
Product & Delivery

U

4 terms

UGC Ad
A UGC ad is a paid advert made to look like a post from an ordinary user rather than from a brand: handheld framing, a person talking to camera, natural light, unpolished delivery.
Creative & Video Production
Uptime and Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Uptime is the percentage of time a service is available; a service level agreement is the contract stating the target and what happens when it is missed.
Web & Software Engineering
Usage Licence
A usage licence is the written permission setting where a video may run, for how long, and in what media, normally stated as term, territory and channel: twelve months, Philippines, digital only.
Creative & Video Production
User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
User acceptance testing is the stage where the people who will actually use a system verify it against the agreed requirements before launch, working through real scenarios on a staging environment.
Product & Delivery

V

1 term

Voiceover
A voiceover is recorded narration laid over picture by a speaker who is not seen on screen, carrying the script a video’s images cannot state directly.
Creative & Video Production

W

4 terms

Warehouse Picking
Warehouse picking is retrieving the items on an order from storage so they can be packed and shipped.
E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)
Web Hosting
Web hosting is the paid service that keeps a website’s files on a server connected to the internet so visitors can load them.
Web & Software Engineering
Wireframe
A wireframe is a low-fidelity layout of a screen showing structure, hierarchy and content placement without colour, typography or imagery.
Product & Delivery
Workflow Automation
Workflow automation is software that runs a defined sequence of business steps without a person moving data between systems: a submitted form creates a record, notifies the right team, files the attachment and schedules a follow-up.
AI & Automation

X

2 terms

Xendit
Xendit is a Southeast Asian payment infrastructure provider operating in the Philippines and neighbouring markets, offering one API for cards, e-wallets, bank transfers, virtual accounts, over-the-counter payments and outbound disbursements.
E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)
XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a machine-readable list of the URLs a site wants crawled, usually with a last-modified date for each.
Search, AEO & AI Visibility

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