It’s no surprise for anybody who went down to last weekend’s Licence2Play that Starcraft 2 was the biggest thing there.
Blizzard and IAHGames had a big booth showcasing Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty at the gaming fair, which was held this year from 28th to 30th May at the Singapore Expo. Besides this, not much else has changed compared to last year’s event, except that it is not held at Suntec anymore.
I was tempted to get it, but the S$109 pre-order price for the game and beta key was a little steep. The dog-tag souvenir was not enticing enough for me to pay upwards of S$100+, so without more shiny stuff, I passed. Hopefully, when the game comes out on July 27th, it will be more reasonably priced.
Firstly, a big thank you to all the fans and supporters of our scrappy little blog here.
Thanks to all the attendees who took the time and effort to come down to Techgoondu’s first indepedent and wireless event UNWIRED last Thursday 27 May at the Singapore Management University.
Time for a little shameless plug here.
Organised by chief goondu Alfred Siew, the event was a success due to the excellent crowd and overall quality of speakers. Registered attendees numbered over a hundred-odd, and there were lots of friends from both media and PR in attendance. For a first-time event that no one had heard of a month and a half back, it certainly met and exceeded some of our attendees’ expectations.
Said Daniel Goh, PR and media manager at Samsung Asia, and owner of the excellent start-up blog YoungUpstarts: “I’m quite surprised with the crowd. They actually asked a lot of questions!”
There were so many questions being asked that time overran on many of the sessions on that day.
Alf will probably add on a blog post on this baby of his, but I thought I would do a quick wrap-up of the “Mobile applications: the future driver of wireless technologies?” panel that I moderated.
In a smartphone market crowded with gizmos of all shapes and functions, first impressions count. A lot.
Unfortunately, despite being called a “pocket rocket” by LG, the Korean electronics giant’s newly launched Mini GD880 fashion phone did not get my hopes sky high at first glance.
Its main screen menus are a noticeably slow when you swipe your finger across the display to move them, especially when you compare the phone to an iPhone or Nexus One. And for many users, that is as good a test as any they will carry out at a store.
Okay, if you have the patience to try out other features, there are some nifty ones. One of them is the ability to control the phone from your desktop using Bluetooth or USB. In other words, you can see what your phone is seeing, including its camera, from your PC. A nice way of spying on your colleagues at work, without looking like you are looking at them, perhaps? …
In Salesforce.com’s case, that villain is Microsoft, who is the poster boy for enterprise software.
Or so that is the narrative that Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff wanted to keep forefront and centre during his excellent presentation at the Cloudforce Tour 2 event in Singapore today.
It is a story of how traditional on-premise software behemoths — e.g. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM — are going to have their lunch eaten by nimbler Internet companies who started from the cloud, i.e. the Salesforce.coms, Amazons and Googles of this world.
Here’s why you might want to do it yourself instead of waiting for the Google update which could take weeks:
You get Flash on your phone – and suddenly the PC web is finally on your phone. iPad/iPhone lovers who still claim that Flash is no big deal can either ignore the reality or face up to the facts.
Flash games will now finally work on our phones. Porn, which you should not watch, apparently will now work (I didn’t see any since I am like John Marsten, a married man). My friend Alex who had to use an iPhone with a StarHub line to connect his laptop to the Web to check on his castles in Lord of Ultima needs to know that he can now do it on a smartphone without any laptop.
You can use your Nexus One as a mini 3G router (you could do this before but you had to root the phone) – which means your friends on laptops connect to your N1 over Wi-Fi and your N1 connects them to the Net over 3G.
You can now install your apps on the micro SD card, finally ending fears that we might run out of space for apps.
As official details of Google’s new smartphone OS finally came from the company’s I/O conference in San Francisco yesterday, it must have dawned on most users – including Steve Jobs and his cult of ardent iPhone lovers – that this was a key turning point in smartphone development.
While the iPhone, through good tech and not a little hype, has drummed up interest in smartphones among even non-techies in the past two years, the arrival of Android 2.2, known as Froyo, from June this year clearly pushes Google-based phones ahead of the early leader.
Fancy your internet business being powered by cow dung?
According to a recent research paper by HP, this is not a pipe dream. At the 4th ASME International Conference on Energy Sustainability in Phoenix, Arizona, which started May 17th this week, HP outlined how a farm of 10,000 cows could fufill the power requirements of a medium-sized 1-megawatt (MW) data center. The research was done by HP Lab’s sustainable IT ecosystem division, which seeks to design efficient green data centres using renewable energy resources.
Instead of a book, my bedside reading at the end of every day now is on the small screen on my Google Nexus One phone, checking out friends on Facebook and reading up on football news.
When I awake, it’s again on the small screen, reading e-mail from early risers who have been up earlier than me. During the entire day, my phone gobbles up megabytes of data, using up almost 1GB a month, or 100 times what I used before I bought my first smartphone two years ago.
It was with this in mind that I recently asked SingTel’s vice-president for consumer products, Ying Lai Chang, what Singapore’s biggest telco is doing to cater to this explosion in demand. …
New developments in Linux are about to emerge from Asia with the Linux Foundation’s heightened focus in the region. Last week, the foundation appointed Cliff Miller as its new director of China operations and Alex Lu, who will hold the same job in Taiwan.
Miller co-founded TurboLinux in 1992, bringing commercial Linux to Japan and China in the 1990s. He also co-founded Mountain View Data in 2000, which provided Linux-based data storage software and server provisioning software to the enterprise.
Miller’s counterpart, Lu is a co-founder at DeviceVM and, as the senior vice president of business development, continues to close worldwide contracts with leading OEMs to bring Linux to netbooks, notebooks and desktop PCs.
The choice of China and Taiwan to unleash a fresh wave of innovation in the Linux platform on servers and mobile devices is hardly surprising. …
Well, I’m glad I did not wait for the HTC Desire to come to Singapore!
The twin of the highly-successful Google Nexus One is hitting shops here only at the end of this month, killing earlier rumours that it was going on shelves this weekend.
I say I’m glad I didn’t wait because I would have enjoyed my Google Nexus One (which is made by HTC as well, for those who don’t know) for almost half a year before the HTC Desire comes to town.
Still, for those who wait, there are rewards for your patience. Topmost is the fact that the Desire will be sold through telecom operators, which means discounts for signing up a subscription plan. …
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