The idea: you spot a pair of pink hello kitty slippers in a boutique mall in Japan’s trendy Shinjuku shopping district to die for, and you want to let all your friends know. You whip out your phone, snap it, and upload it where all your friends can goggle over your latest purchase.

Except that with Shoplette (beta), the whole world can find out what and where you like to shop.

“Shopping is a very social thing,” said Shoplette founder Shannon Low Shen-Li, 32, in an interview with Techgoondu. “If you spot a good buy, you are often excited to tell others about what you have bought!”

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Another one bites the dust.

By the time you read this, news has probably spread – through the Net, no less – about the latest casualty resulting from the double whammy of lower advertising revenues and the current credit crunch.

The Tribune Co., which publishes the renowned Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, officially declared bankruptcy today (US time Dec 8), after reports over the weekend had hinted at its financial troubles.

Even with the current doom and gloom, the news of the biggest bankruptcy of a news outlet in years still ranks as one of the most alarming to come from troubled US newspapers of late. …

Yebber is a Singapore-based website that aggregates reviews by end users and provides a mechanism for users to search for them.

So far, pretty standard. The catch? It pays you to have an opinion.

How does it work? You create an account, hammer out a review, and it pays you Yebber dollars, which can be exchanged for gifts or hard cash.

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I often hear laments from my friends about the dead tech innovation scene in Singapore.

“There is nothing new in tech coming out of Singapore”, they cry. Singaporeans in IT are nothing but glorified tech sales and marketeers for big name MNCs who have set up shop in this little dot that we call home. Or, they work for GLCs (government linked companies) or statuary boards trying to copy technology from elsewhere. And failing miserably on innovation.

Contrary to the belief that Singapore has no tech innovation and we only have Creative to talk about (and that was before its star started falling), there are lots of interesting small tech start-ups here. We have a bevy of innovators experimenting with business ideas tapping on social media concepts, web-based services that provide useful services to Singaporeans, and a small but growing games and media industry.

One of the biggest problems? Getting publicity.

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Social media platforms have disruptively changed the environment in which big media works. It is now possible for anybody to reach out to millions, at very low-cost, on the web. We here at Techgoondu, are doing just that in this tech blog.

But the process of gathering information – arguably the core of journalism – is distinctly separate from the technology (enablers like twitter and plurk), or from the final product (like these blog pages that you read here).

Take a look at Spot.US. This recent media experiment, officially launched 10 Nov 2008, uses crowdfunding to pay professional journalists, and crowsourcing to get ideas. The video below by David Cohn, the founder of Spot.US, lays out what the project is about.

David was also founder of the now defunct Assignment Zero project, an experiment with Wired, on “open sourcing” journalism – a really interesting read. Guess we’ll have to wait and see how the Spot.US experiment unfolds.

Right after Sony Ericsson shipped its Xperia X1, along comes Nokia’s new N-series “hero” product, the N97, that comes with, surprise, a slide-out keyboard.

But unlike the Xperia, which runs on Windows Mobile, Nokia’s N97 uses Symbian OS, the company behind which it recently acquired.

Notably, from early hands-on first-looks here at the Nokia World show in Barcelona, the N97 has a few promising features. …