An overwhelming majority of Singaporeans bring their personal devices to work, with half of them using the devices for work-related tasks, a new survey has found.

According to the VMware New Way of Work study released today, 88 percent of workers in Singapore remain tethered to their personal devices in the workplace. Those who use them in their jobs tend to enjoy greater job satisfaction, lower stress levels and increased productivity. …

It’s April Fools’ Day and Google is playing a prank on users with an 8-bit version of Google Maps. The pixelated maps are meant to emulate the low-resolution graphics of the original Nintendo and Famicom video game consoles that many of us grew up with.

To switch to the retro-looking “8-bit Quest Maps”, click on the Start Your Quest box at the bottom left hand corner of the screen in Google Maps. In a dig at users, Google says the “8-bit Quest Maps is our Beta Maps technology and has certain system requirements. Your system may not meet the minimum requirements for 8-bit computations”. …

What if you could edit business documents stored on the cloud using the apps on your mobile devices? OneCloud, a new cloud-based service by online storage provider Box, was built to to do just that.

Making its debut this week, OneCloud is touted as the first enterprise mobile framework to bring together your mobile content and productivity apps. What this means is that you can host your Word documents on Box, edit the files using, say, Quickoffice on an iPad, and save them back to the Box cloud. …

Like all computing devices, tablets are not immune to malicious apps and other software created by cyber criminals waiting to pounce on unknowing consumers.

While the Android malware threat is somewhat overblown, it is undeniable that the number of rogue apps targeting the wide spectrum of Android devices is on the rise. As we spend more time browsing the Web, playing games, connecting with friends and store more information on tablets, it becomes a no-brainer to secure these devices — like how we would with our PCs. …

“While it is only one day, this is a milestone,” said Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter in a statement Wednesday, adding that Chrome still faces a battle to unseat rivals such as IE and Firefox in countries like China, United States and Germany. StatCounter based its numbers on some 15 billion page views per month (4 billion from the US) from its network of over three million sites. …

Dubbed BizCloud, the service lets companies install a preconfigured private cloud on their own premises using virtualisation software from VMware, networking, security and computing gear from Cisco, as well as storage, security and management technologies from EMC.

These building blocks, which form the Virtual Computing Environment’s (VCE) vBlock infrastructure platform, are used by CSC’s own data centres. That means enterprises can also opt for a hybrid cloud by keeping core business applications on premise with BizCloud, and use CSC’s public cloud for disaster recovery or set up test environments.

With BizCloud, CSC says it “has taken the work out of implementing a private cloud and overcome the objections that security conscious organisations usually raise around cloud adoption”. It also claims that businesses can get their private clouds up and running in just 10 weeks. …

Our insatiable demand for cloud computing services may have created a data centre boom, but cloud service providers and enterprises are still figuring out ways to build cheaper and more efficient data centres.

Indeed, the rising cost of power, cooling equipment and other data centre facilities has been plaguing the IT industry for years. According to Gartner, an average of US$8 million a year is spent on manual IT operations such as installing server updates. Additionally, the tons of energy needed to power the servers and keep the lights can cost companies up to US$29 million over three years. …

In the first of this new series, we interviewed Cameron Purdy, vice president for development at Oracle, to hear his views on the company’s new WebLogic Server 12c, an application server designed to help enterprises move their applications to the cloud.

The software supports the latest Java standards including Java Standard Edition version 7 and is the first to comply with the full Java Enterprise Edition 6 platform profile. …

SAP beefed up its cloud applications portfolio this week with the global launch of SAP Business One OnDemand. The announcement follows its earlier acquisition of SuccessFactors, a cloud-based software for managing employee performance.

In a media statement Tuesday, the German software giant said BusinessOne OnDemand is planned for availability in 18 countries, including Australia, China, France, Germany, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

SAP intends to provide Business One OnDemand through partners that will offer the cloud-based software for a monthly subscription fee. It’s odd that SAP is only announcing Business One OnDemand now, as the software has been available through SingTel’s PowerON cloud service since August 2011. …

Current Parallels Desktop 7 users can get the update by selecting the Parallels Desktop menu and clicking “check for updates”. Besides Windows 8, Parallels Desktop 7 also runs Windows 7, Google Chrome OS, as well as Fedora and Ubuntu flavours of Linux.

Die-hard Mac users may scoff at the idea of running Windows on a Mac, but hey, there are also folks who don’t mind having the best of both worlds. We are currently setting up Windows 8 Consumer Preview on Parallels Desktop 7, so stay tuned for our review!