SingTel added Justin Timberlake, Jay Chou and a number of other Sony Music artistes to its AMPed mobile music download catalogue last Wednesday, boosting the number of tracks on sale to its users to over 1 million.

The 150,000 new tracks will be accessible to more than 70 different mobile devices, including the Apple iPhone and Android numbers such as the Samsung Galaxy S and Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.

Why I wanted to post this piece of news, despite missing out on it last week, is the fact that SingTel has pressed ahead when other music stores that employ DRM (digital rights management), such as Soundbuzz, died a long-overdue death in the past couple of years. …

Hitachi celebrates 100 years as a company this year, and I was invited to Japan to attend their annual uValue event, where they had some fanfare for this occasion. This year the event runs from the 22nd to 23rd July at the Tokyo International Forum (near Roppongi).

One thing I learnt from the uValue event is that Hitachi is a sprawling technology conglomerate that spans many divisions: from IT and telcos, to transport, to consumer devices.

Yes, I know they are a high tech company that builds computer and consumer electronics, but I didn’t know they also build train systems, elevators and nuclear power plants.

The company generates US $100 billion in annual revenues and it’s the third largest high-tech company in the world in terms of revenues, behind Samsung and HP.

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Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Asus showed off a number of new notebooks featuring Bang & Olufsen’s Icepower audio amplification technology at a glitzy launch party here today.

The audio technology, which has been the talk of audiophile circles because of its use in a number of highly-rated power-efficient amplifiers, promises improved sound over existing laptop offerings.

Icepower will come in a number of Asus’ N-model laptops as well as its top-of-the-range NX90 Multimedia Notebook. There’s a reason why it’s called that, instead of a laptop, because you’d not want to place this 4.8kg machine on your lap (a small bag of rice weighs 5kg). …

Starhub has quietly introduced a “redirection service” that takes MaxOnline broadband customers to a Yahoo search page if you happen to enter an invalid URL in your browser. Prior to this, you would typically get an error message from your browser telling you that the invalid domain’s server cannot be found.

According to a Starhub FAQ list, the service does not track individual Internet usage patterns. The service “simply redirects queries to non-existing domain names to a useful search results page instead of a cryptic error message page or browser-defined page”. Users can also choose to opt out of the service at a preferences page.

What Starhub is effectively doing is DNS hijacking, a controversial practice that has led to security breaches by hackers. Some ISPs in the United States have had their users open to cross-site scripting attacks due to lax Web programming techniques by some search partners.

In 2003, Verisign also directed users to paid search results, a move which led to an investigation by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Among its findings, ICANN noted that DNS redirection “disturbed a set of existing services that had been functioning satisfactorily. Names that were mistyped, had lapsed, had been registered but not delegated, or had never been registered in DNS were resolved as if they existed.

“As a consequence, certain e-mail systems, spam filters and other services failed resulting in direct and indirect costs to third parties, either in the form of increased network charges for some classes of users, a reduction in performance, or the creation of work required to compensate for the consequent failure”.

As the World Cup got underway last month, I finally succumbed to a long-suppressed itch to buy a new TV – one that could be mounted on the wall to free up my TV console and one which provided better contrast and clarity over my entry-level Full HD screen.

Thus began a long afternoon at Audio House, where I tested and re-tested several TVs, changed my mind a few times, before finally settling on a 55-inch Samsung C7000 (UA55C7000WM).

The C7000 is part of Samsung’s new Series 7 entry-level 3D LED TVs and it comes with your usual array of Internet-based features, such as the ability to watch YouTube (over a wired Ethernet link or optional Wi-Fi dongle).

More importantly, for me, the C7000 provides excellent contrast and smooth, natural motion.

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There has been quite a bit of talk over the new public transport distance fare calculations that have been put in place in Singapore since July 3rd.

There have been the usual government overtures that in general people pay less and the system is fairer under the new distance fares.

From the opposite camp, irate citizen bloggers claim that this isn’t true at all.

I find the official LTA fare calculator a pain to use, so if you’re interested in how much more (or less) you’re paying, go use Gothere’s mapping and directions tool. I use Gothere often to get directions, so the extra functionality is just groovy.

Thanks to this post on DK’s blog, from which I first came across this!

Hmmm. Gothere folks, if you’re reading this, perhaps with your data collected on searches done by Singaporeans you can probably do a good estimate on the question everybody is dying to know: Are Singaporeans paying more or less for transport under the new system?

If you send this in to the various local media, I’m certain they will love to know!

In the past, when I went to one of IBM’s Smarter Planet events I found it hard to write something and distill the message for readers.

At the back of my brain was always this burning question: Just what is IBM selling here? I have difficulty connecting their really big picture green IT story to what they do as a technology company.

Let me set the context and take a short detour to explain why. I’m better known as a technology journalist-blogger hybrid, but I worked for a very brief time at the Centre for Liveable Cities in Singapore. In that short stint I gained an appreciation of the complex problems facing cities.

Different cities face different problems, depending on how developed a city is. A developed megalopolis like New York or Tokyo will face vastly different challenges than say, Hanoi, Vietnam or Sao Paulo, Brazil. And this is only one one aspect of a city. Culturally, economically, politically, every city is different and will have different issues.

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Though 4G LTE (long term evolution) looks like the future for mobile broadband, the rival WiMax technology got a small boost yesterday with the launch of laptops in Malaysia that come with the wireless technology built in.

The likes of Acer, Dell and MSI launched a number of netbooks and notebooks that will let users log on, out of the box, to the wireless broadband service run by the country’s WiMax operator, PacketOne. …