Who would bet against Facebook today, as it readies for the largest initial public offering (IPO) in the United States in the coming months?

Yet, amid the excitement, one thing that investors will read about is this troubling reminder of the threat coming from rival social networking efforts from the likes of Google, which can take away key advertising dollars.

Even while Mark Zuckerberg and company are expected to raise an initial US$5 billion from a red hot IPO, there is worry that Google will expand its offerings to target the activities that make loads of money for Facebook now.

Facebook’s 845 million active users upload 250 million photos a day, make 2.7 billion comments or “likes” a day and are part of 100 billion friendships online, according to details released for the IPO. Together, they made the eight-year-old company a neat US$1 billion  profit last year – an achievement, since users don’t always equal dollars.

Facebook’s cash cow? Advertising, which contributes 88 per cent of the company’s revenues. Yes, those little tiles on the side of the page that your friends “like” or recommend. The rest of the revenue comes from Zynga, which creates those addictive – and sometimes annoying – social games for Facebook users.

The issues? The mobile version of Facebook does not display ads, so the company could conceivably lose a stream of revenue as more users go online with their smartphones. The question then becomes one of making mobile users view the ads without irritating them enough to force them to quit using Facebook altogether.

The other issue has to do with the company’s focus on advertising, say analysts. This means it is susceptible to the fortunes of the advertising market as well as moves from rivals like Google, which has been gaining traction with its Google+ efforts of late, said Ovum’s Jan Dawson.

He pointed out: “As Google seeks to ramp up Google+, it will eat into Facebook’s share of the social networking market and with it Facebook’s share of related advertising. In addition, since much of Facebook’s revenue comes from gaming apps, as Google expands the gaming platform it is building with Google+, it threatens to dilute Facebook’s relationships with Zynga, which accounts for 12% of its revenue, and other major partners.”

Indeed, Facebook admits the threat from rivals as much in its IPO documents to the US authorities. Besides Google, it includes Microsoft and Twitter on a long list of rivals going forward.

Most industry watchers say Google+, the closest competitor, still has some way to go to shake Facebook from its deeply-entrenched position, but the search and advertising king’s alternative is ramping up fast.

Google+ already has 100 million users today after just seven months, according to one analyst, and the figure is expected to go up to 400 million by the end of 2012.

Cellphone users in Singapore can expect extended coverage in buildings, on roads and when travelling in an MRT train underground, when stricter rules on 3G coverage unveiled today by the government regulator kick in as soon as April 2012.

Following a number of high-profile network outages last year, the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) today spelt out the new rules, which will include 85 per cent coverage for each building here. Currently, telcos only have to cover 85 per cent of “public access areas”.

For commuters, the coverage will now include all road and MRT tunnels as well as the CTE by 2015, extending from the previous requirement of 95 per cent across road and MRT tunnels tested. In all, about 99 per cent of the outdoor space on the island is to be blanketed by 3G signals. Previously, the requirement was only 95 per cent across all roads.

And each time any of the three telecom operators here – SingTel, StarHub, M1 – fails to meet one requirement, they can be fined up to S$50,000, instead of the previous “slap on the wrist” S$5,000 per indicator per month.

Immediately, telcos are expected to react by setting up more equipment in the additional areas they have to cover. They might also check their existing 3G coverage by going to popular locations, like shopping malls, to test out the experience.

But it remains to be seen if the tougher rules will solve a bigger problem – the quality of service expected by users, even as more of them start logging on with smartphones and clog up networks with minute-by-minute Facebook updates.

Already, SingTel has proactively listed “typical” broadband speeds on its 3G mobile data plans and promised a “priority” lane for customers who pay more for high-tier plans. But there is still no “guarantee” of what a user can get, because the experience on the go is ultimately still determined by the number of users in an area – think of Suntec City and the hordes of people there during a computer bazaar, for example.

Still, the new rules will mean that telcos would have to prevent a repeat of the outages that M1 and SingTel users suffered last year.  They should also push telcos to fix another problem – this dumping of users back on 2G at places which are expected to offer 3G speeds.

Know a place that consistently doesn’t offer 3G data? Share in the comments!

Singapore is so small that if you don’t know how to get around town, you really shouldn’t be driving around much. That was my response to in-car GPS kits in the past, being the smart driver that I thought I was.

Then I started using Google Maps on my Android phone to start getting around town. I realised the suggested route sometimes helped me rethink how I always went around town – it often got me there without me testing out routes and missing a turn to a building’s car park, for example.

Thus when I placed the TomTom Go 2050 in my car a few weeks ago, I was more than happy to hear a friendly female voice tell me how best to get from, say, Takashimaya shopping centre to Alexandra Road.

The first thing that impresses you about TomTom’s in-car GPS is the easy click mount. Instead of just “pasting” a big piece of rubber on your wind screen, TomTom’s mounting system lets you screw it tightly down as well. It’s as solid a mount I have seen.

Then there’s the screen. The 5-inch display on the TomTom Go 2050 is bright, sharp and simply a joy to use even in sunny Singapore. During my tests, there was no question of a washed out screen even on bright afternoons.

The capacitive touch screen is also generally responsive when you tap on the large touch-friendly menus or pinch and zoom in and out of maps. Just don’t expect the same level of smoothness as your smartphone, of course. Thankfully, that’s not that much of an issue as most times, you’d just be tapping in your destination name or postal code.

How useful are the Southeast Asia maps? I only managed to drive around in Singapore and I’d say the unit tracks pretty accurately and speedily – once it is logged on to a navigation satellite, there is little lag in telling where you are and giving the right instructions. It works even though Singapore’s roads often include multiple turn-offs close by and are hardly the simpler, grid-like system, say, in New York City.

For folks driving through city traffic, it helps too that the TomTom unit comes with the company’s IQ technology that smartly takes the inputs of fellow drivers – taken when they sync their units – to estimate where the usual bottlenecks are.

The only issue I have using it in Singapore – and this probably stumps other GPS units too – is the constant changes on Singapore roads. It’s just so hard to keep track of the changes because roads are often dug up, filled up and soon dug up again for laying cables, road diversions and other works.

I was at the busy Upper Serangoon junction near Macpherson a few weeks ago and the GPS did not offer the right directions. The reason: the lanes seemed to have changed, which is not surprising, given the amount of works that have been going on for months now.

If there’s something I think the TomTom Go 2050 can improve on, it’d be the time taken to locate my position via a satellite link. Driving out from my apartment building’s basement car park, I had waited up to a few minutes for the GPS unit to get a signal and start finding the location.

If you are turning out from a shopping centre onto busy Orchard Road, you’d better have instructions ready before you commit to a wrong turn and end up paying unnecessary road toll.

Still, I’m generally satisfied with the TomTom Go 2050. Though it’s not quite cheap at S$399, it’s literally plug and play and does the job admirably. It’ll be a useful companion to have on a drive to Malaysia. Even when you’re driving overseas, you can download the latest travel maps so you can drive, say, in Margaret River in Australia with more confidence than the old, outdated GPS units provided by the rental companies.

Of all the things that can happen during Chinese New Year this week, I accidentally made the data on my network attached storage (NAS) device unreadable – and could easily have wiped out all the years of reports, financial statements and holiday pictures I’ve stored on those two 1TB drives.

After days of pulling hair out, I eventually salvaged everything. But the entire episode prompted me to ask if I was really as prepared as I thought if I had accidentally deleted my data or, in this case, plugged my drives into a new NAS without backing things up.

The answer lies in a series of software tools you can use at home, before really going to the pros in data recovery for help. Here are a few that I tried out while panicking through my attempt at rescuing my data.

Before we start, let’s remember to always back up important data, like your wedding day photos or your personal financial records.

A note to all small business owners like me – RAID – or mirroring your data on multiple hard drives on your NAS is not backup. You have to have more than one copy of your data on another DEVICE, not just another drive. That means even if your NAS dies, you have a portable drive somewhere with an up-to-date copy of the data.

Looking back, I don’t know what possessed me to plug two 1TB drives from an old QNap TS-209 II NAS into a new QNap TS-419P+ NAS. Perhaps it had to do with the retailer at the store confidently telling me that sure, I can just plug in the drives and they’d be recognised by another QNap NAS. Or perhaps I was overly confident about QNap.

Either way, I ended up with two 1TB drives that could not be recognised by the new NAS or the old one, when I tried plugging them back in. Not even with QNap’s Live CD, which boots up your PC with the company’s version of Linux, or when I plugged a drive into a Windows PC supporting the Linux EXT2/EXT3 file system, could I try to extract the data on the disks, which had not been formatted.

The reason: the disks had been re-partitioned by the new NAS during setup and the partition information for the portion of the disk containing the data could not be read by almost any other device.

1. iCare Recovery
The first tool I used, fearing the worst that the data on my drive cannot be read again, was iCare Recovery and the plan was to go “nuclear”. Heck, just read me the sectors on the drive and see what you can recover. That’s what this tool, iCare Recovery, does quite well in.

Like with other such demo versions, I could see some of my files with a test and I was super elated to be able to save a couple of them at least. I bought the software digitally for US$62.95 in my haste. Hey, having some data back is better than none. At this time, I had given up hope of folks from QNap replying (it was during Chinese New Year earlier this week, but they still haven’t replied today at the time of writing) or from help from its online forum.

So I went ahead and scanned one of the drives with iCare Recovery. It found loads of stuff, really too much in the end. These included long-ago deleted files when one of the drives was used in another computer. Now, that should tell you how scary things are – “delete” and “format” don’t really wipe data, not all of it anyway.

The main problem, though, was that iCare worked more or less in the assumption that this was a last gasp solution. It sorted things out according to the type of files it thinks the bits and bytes are. So, you get thousands of files, all renamed to something unrecognisable and ordered as, say, JPEG files or PDF documents.

At least with pictures, I could still run them in thumbnails, but I had to recognise ALL the hundreds of thousands of files individually. Worse, I had to open some of the files, like PDFs, to see what they were first. I gave up after an evening doing this. Getting a whole load of data in a mess was just slightly better than no data at all.

2. R-Studio
I looked to R-Studio, another application which took an even more detailed look at the hard disk and could return everything in the right directories with the right filenames.

I was suffering from tonsillitis during this time, and you can imagine, even with that, my mood lifted knowing I could get at least most of my data back. I clicked on the “buy” button immediately when I found that I could recover several files – like my yearly statements to the tax man – with R-Studio.

The bad news about R-Studio was that it took a lot of system memory to do the job. It would take my quad-core i7 CPU three hours to scan one disk, but worse, it would crash for lack of memory when trying to enumerate and list the many thousands of files in the drive. I stuck a spare 4GB RAM module into my existing 6GB machine to make 10GB but I still had problems showing all the files I wanted to recover.

It was frustrating being so close yet so far. The software would stop and do nothing for half an hour if I tried to list more than, say, 40 per cent of the files. It had detected an astonishing “17TB” of data – most of it including repetitive entries – from a 1TB drive and was trying to load that data in the PC’s memory because it doesn’t want to write to any of the disks to prevent more damage.

The downside: my machine was too slow to run R-Studio. Stopping the file listing halfway, I could get back perhaps 70- 80 per cent of the data but I was not sure they were the latest versions (several versions could have been detected when I stopped the process).

TestDisk
Finally, more in hope than expectation, I downloaded TestDisk, an excellent open-source recovery tool (free!) after reading the experiences of fellow QNap users in the forum. I hadn’t expected much from a small 3.3MB application after supposedly more sophisticated tools had not been the answer.

To my surprise, TestDisk even has a “GUI” that lets you avoid typing in commands by moving through the options available on a menu with your keyboard. It’s easy to use and guess what, it managed to find the lost partition on the disk “troubled” by the QNAp installation procedure.

This meant I could mount the drive and read the partition containing my data files and select them to be copied elsewhere. All I had to do was simply select the folders which I wanted to back up to an external drive and that’s all, 100 per cent of my data could be returned to what it was.

The only advice I’d have here is to hide the deleted files – otherwise you’d also copy over deleted files that include the annoying temporarily files that Microsoft Office generates when you have an open Word document, for example.

I’m just so glad that I managed to get the data out of the corrupted disks. Indeed, I learnt that there are many ways to get your data back. Unfortunately, instead of trying the least desperate measure, I panicked and went straight for the nuclear option and ended up spending unnecessary dollars.

Still, this somewhat illuminating episode also shows that you can sometimes save the data on your own drives, before deciding to send them to third-party companies. Okay, not everyone has Edison Chen-type photos but hey, it’s always better if you can solve things yourself, say, when you need the data over a long holiday, for example.

Share your own data recovery stories here and give others tips!

If 2011 was remembered for shiny new tablets that made people part with their hard-earned cash, then 2012 may just be the one where the craze for these thin and light yet powerful and affordable ultrabooks takes off big time.

At the annual CES show just concluded earlier in the week, a good number of laptop makers joined the fray with their takes on what people would be carrying to meetings and classrooms in the coming months.

Perhaps having seen Asus, Acer and Lenovo whip up demand for such ultra-light PCs in the closing months of 2011, the likes of Sony, Dell and HP showed of their versions of the ultrabook at CES this year. Lenovo too came up with a quite surprising “yoga-like” ultrabook cum tablet.

Here’s a sneak peek.

Sony Vaio Ultrabook

credit: Engadget

The venerable Vaio brand finally has an ultrabook join the family, after Sony showed off a Vaio Ultrabook at CES. Actually, “Vaio Ultrabook” is what journalists have called the device so far, as it is really still unnamed yet.

Little more is known about this new entry except that it’s a 13-incher with a glossy screen and has the typical chiclet keyboard common on many Vaios.

From what observers seem to have discovered, there seems to be a Ethernet port along with a VGA port, a sorely missing feature on some ultrabooks that lets you connect your machine to a projector.

Early photos from CES do seem to suggest that Sony’s new Vaio looks very much like a thin MacBook Pro, but that’s not a bad thing, considering many people buy Macs and install Windows and Parallels on them. Just watch out for lawsuits, Sony!

Dell XPS 13

Looking pretty too is Dell’s new XPS 13, the US laptop maker’s entry into the ultrabook market. What distinguishes it from others here is a machined aluminium finish, coupled with a carbon fibre composite base, which gives it rigidity while keeping relatively light at just 1.36kg.

It boasts a 13.3-inch screen (1,366 x 768 pixels), which seems like regular issue, but this is protected by a piece of hardy Corning Gorilla glass that will come in handy for a bit of rough and tumble on the go.

Like many ultrabooks before it, the XPS 13 will feature both Core i5 and Core i7 chips, and will sport 4GB of RAM as well as 128GB or 256GB solid state drives.

No indication of prices yet from Dell Singapore, but the XPS 13 is expected to go on sale in March. We expect this sleek-looking ultrabook to be quite popular this year.

HP Envy 14 Spectre
Perhaps the prettiest of them all is HP’s Envy 14 Spectre. It breaks the mould here by having a 14-inch screen instead of a regular 13.3-incher, yet manages to keep things slim and light by having an ultra-thin frame around the display.

It’s slightly heavier than the Dell at under 4 pounds (1.8kg) but for a laptop with a 14-inch screen, it is surely one of the lightest. Powered by Intel’s Core i5 and i7, and with 128GB and 256GB solid state drives to choose from, the Envy 14 Spectre really ups the ante for the already respectable Envy line.

No word yet on availability in Singapore, though the machine is up for pre-order in the United States. I’m sure many Envy users would love to see the Envy 14 Spectre come in black as well!

Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga
Finally, we have the IdeaPad Yoga, which is a pretty innovative take on the increasingly common “transform” device. At first glance, it looks like another slim 13-inch ultrabook, but that’s because you haven’t discovered the hinge design here that lets the screen flip around all the way back – like a yoga master – to transform into a tablet.

Once it’s in this position, the pre-installed Microsoft Windows 8 OS automatically runs in tablet mode. Here, a 10-point finger or gesture input gives you the convenience of a regular tablet touch interface.

The screen runs at a sharp 1,600 x 900, according to a report by Geek.com. Plus, the “target price”, according to its video, is under US$1,200, which makes it very attractive when it is launched later this year with Windows 8.

A year of choices
The good news is, whatever form or shape you prefer in an ultrabook, you’ll have a lot to choose from in 2012. It has taken a while for PC makers to challenge Apple’s innovative MacBook Air, but the next 12 months should see a lot of them wowing back users with both sexy machines and an innovative edge provided by the laptop- and tablet-friendly Windows 8 OS.

Motorola is putting up a lighter, more powerful follow-up to its Xoom tablet for sale here in Singapore from today, but with a rather hefty price of S$978.

The new Xoom 2, which will come with both 3G and Wi-Fi, sports a 10.1-inch screen and a faster processor, but will run only on Android Honeycomb (3.2) for now. It should likely be upgradeable to the newest Android 4.0 later in the year, if Motorola Singapore follows the practice of its US headquarters.

The original Xoom hit the stores in Singapore as one of the first Android 3.0 tablets early in 2011, but had a tough time overcoming Apple’s iPad 2 and fellow Android tablets from Samsung that were slimmer and lighter.

This time round, the Xoom 2 has shed some of its weight and tips the scales at 608g instead of the 700+g of the original Xoom. Performance wise, it also boasts a faster 1.2GHz dual core processor instead of the original’s 1GHz chip.

Interestingly, it has curved corners, a departure from the regular squarish tablet design we’ve become used to seeing. More practically, Motorola has included a hardy Corning Gorilla Glass to protect the screen and a splash-resisting coating that protects against accidentally spills, much like what we saw in the Motorola Razr.

But the Xoom 2 will face competition from Samsung and Asus, which has already started selling the Transformer Prime in Singapore for S$899. The Asus tablet should already get an Android 4.0 update in January 2012 and weighs a light 586g, not to mention that it has a new Tegra 3 quad-core processor.

And that’s not also mentioning the many other tablets unveiled this week at CES in Las Vegas that will hit the stores in a few months.

Okay, its eyes don’t light up in red and it doesn’t breathe digital fire, but a gaudy golden dragon – as cheesy a “Chinese” symbol as you can find – is going to adorn the face of Vertu’s new Signature phone specially designed for the Lunar New Year.

According to CNet Asia, it is part of a trio of phones aimed at the Chinese and these customers can choose a set of fittings from a) stainless steel and emerald, b)black stainless steel and c) ruby or yellow gold and diamond models.

Apparently, the centrepiece – the dragon – is exquisitely hand-crafted. Says the CNet report:

Vertu’s Signature collection gets the royal treatment with precious stones and top-grade metals, plus a garish hand-engraved four-claw dragon on the battery cover. It’s not to be sniffed at; the dragon takes four craftsmen over a day to complete engraving. The yellow gold version is even sent to Switzerland for certification, then returns to the workshop for its precious stone adornment.

Pity there’s no hint of jade in this Vertu. It’d have been a perfect phone to place on the table for visiting relatives to catch an envious glimpse of, don’t you think, towkay?

The much-awaited Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the next “Google phone” featuring the new Android 4.0 operating system, will only reach Singapore stores in February 2012, a month later than expected.

Samsung Singapore today said the units would be sold at S$948 (without contract), as it revealed earlier in November. However, the delay will not be good news for folks here who have been waiting for the latest and greatest from the Android camp.

The Galaxy Nexus, following in the Nexus One and Nexus S tradition, would come with a “clean” interface without any add-on software, which is a boon to those who want a “pure” Google experience without clunky extras. It has another plus: being a Nexus phone, it will be the first to get the latest updates direct from Google.

Android 4.0, or Ice Cream Sandwich is also desired for several new features, for example, a nifty face unlock, improved task-switching, and an updated Gmail interface. (See our hands on test for the Galaxy Nexus here)

The Galaxy Nexus naturally is expected to compete with the current flagship from Samsung, the Galaxy S II, which sports a smaller 4.3-inch screen compared to the Nexus’ 4.65-incher.

The Galaxy S II runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and is slated to be upgraded to Android 4.0 in Q1, according to Samsung HQ. However, the Korean firm’s Singapore representatives were tight-lipped about any timeline for software updates for Singapore users, when queried by Techgoondu today.

At the launch event today, Samsung also showed off a number of other devices for the new year. The S$768 Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, out in January 2012, is an update on the original Tab, sporting a 7-inch screen and a faster 1.2GHz dual-core chip, while the slightly broader but slimmer and more attractive Galaxy Tab 7.7 with a dual-core 1.4GHz chip will go for S$898 when it arrives in February 2012.

A new mid-end phone also worth checking out is the Galaxy W, which runs Android despite the “W” moniker, which usually means Windows Phone in Samsung-speak. Out this month, it sports a 1.4GHz CPU and costs an attractive S$498. With operator discounts sometimes at about S$400 to S$500 for high-end plans, this could be a S$0 ph0ne well worth looking out for.

Samsung is dangling the same attractive price tag on its Omnia W. Similar to the Galaxy W, specs wise, this phone will be noted for running Windows Phone “Mango”. For folks who are looking for a Windows phone, the Super AMOLED display makes it stand out from the competition when it hits the stores this month.

As technology users welcome 2012 everywhere, it’s clear the year that had just passed was filled with no little controversy and memorable incidents.

From Steve Jobs’ death to the delay of the much-awaited iPhone 5, from the rise of Android devices to Nokia’s return with its Windows Phone devices, and finally, with the potent mix of mobile devices and social media that  helped ignite protests in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, but also encouraged the thuggery of the London riots, 2011 was a big year in technology.

The next 12 months look to be just as interesting, as existing technologies mature and grow, while other new trends emerge. Here are five things to look out for in 2012:

1. The arrival of the “transform” device
Just a few years ago, it was unfathomable that people would junk their desktop PCs for laptops. Because the portable device had a smaller screen and usually lesser computing prowess, the portable device never matched up to the silent giant under the desk.

These days, however, with power-efficient yet advanced CPUs and graphics chips, laptops can do the job just as well, plus they can be hooked up with a monitor, keyboard and mouse easily to transform into a desktop PC in a jiffy.

The same is happening with tablets and smartphones. In 2012, there will be more devices like the Motorola Atrix, first unveiled in early 2011, that basically turns into a laptop once it is docked with a laptop dock. The Atrix taps on its dual-core chip to run Webtop, which is based on Ubuntu Linux, to give users a regular desktop OS look and feel. It runs the OS you prefer at any time, all in one device.

Essentially, you only need one smart device – your phone or tablet – to do everything you need in future. What you will have are many docks or keyboards and screens to hook up to this increasingly powerful (expect quad core gizmos in 2012, starting with the Asus Transformer Prime) yet portable device in your hands.

Desktops and laptops will definitely still be around, but the mobile gadget is set to be the central device in your life.

2.  Windows 8 brings “touch” on everyday PCs
Related to this portable device rush is Windows 8. The upcoming Microsoft OS, expected this year, is being billed as the biggest upgrade in years for one reason – it is going to unify both mobile devices and PCs with one OS.

It works with touch, and features a Windows Phone-like tile system, where users will be given a panel of information and the ability to go into the nitty gritty only if they wish to. The big icons and friendlier interface also mean that this is the first time the Start button and taskbar – at least in their present forms – will be out of the picture.

Along with Windows 8′s arrival, expect computing of all types – from smartphones to laptops to desktops – to tap on the novel OS.

What to expect? Look to something like the Samsung Slate PC, which crams a powerful Intel dual-core CPU into a thin, portable tablet that can be hooked up with a keyboard and screen to become a full-fledged desktop. It runs Windows 7 now, but come next year, devices like these will sport the even more touch-friendly Windows 8.

3. Tougher times for Apple
It’s not just Steve Jobs’ passing that will affect Apple for the coming year, but also the fact that it is a company that wins big because of the very sharp innovation curve that it sets out each year.

When the iPod was commoditised, the iPhone became the next big thing; when Android smartphones managed to grab huge chunks of market share in 2010, the iPad became the market-conquering portable gizmo in a class of its own.

The question in 2012 is: what next? Surely, there’d be new versions of the iPhone (after the disappointing iPhone 4S) and iPad (which still has a good lead over all over Android rivals). But can these upgrades keep Apple at the top of the pile, or will it see its innovation and design lead cut short in 2012?

The emergence of the Windows-based Ultrabooks in 2011 from Asus, in particular, is a clear answer to how fast the competition is catching up, in this case, with the MacBook Air.

In the next 12 months, Apple will find the going even tougher. Users are often willing to accept Apple’s closed “my way or the highway” approach because of the perceived better design and innovation from the company, but it has to keep coming up with new winners to redefine the field. In 2012, it needs another big winner to pull away.

4. Say hi again to a smart TV
It’s been prophecised several times before, but 2012 could finally see the arrival of smart TVs that do more than just show your cable TV programmes or Blu-ray movies in all their 60-inch Full HD glory. These TVs could be the conduit to many services and apps that were just becoming common in 2011.

Yes, Facebook will be there, as will Twitter and other PC-based services and apps that you had seen on your 2011 Samsung or LG TV when you were free enough to venture into some of its sub menus. But what about YouTube, or rather, a YouTube-type service – on steroids?

Think of an app that is smart enough to offer the same multi-tasking you’d expect on a PC screen, say, talk to a friend on a chat window while watching a live football match, or checking out background information from Wikipedia on the JFK assassination, if you are watching a documentary on it on a National Geographic app, for example.

Not so new, I hear you say? The main difference this time is that the intelligence is built into the TV and possibly delivered straight to the screen – over the TV’s Net link – instead of via a third-party set-top box and third party broadcaster.

Sure, it’d be a leap of faith for content executives who have always preferred to work with their favoured “platform partners”, i.e. broadcasters like StarHub and SingTel.

But for indie channels and content owners looking to jumpstart their work by showing their programmes direct to viewers, they can now create their own content and app and reach out to viewers – in the same way cellphone app developers sell their apps direct to users.

Creating a smart TV programme would thus involve skills needed to develop an app for, say, the mobile phone or tablet. Will this model work for TV? Well, it’s already proven already by Apple and Google in their respective app marketplaces, and what’s there to stop you paying S$2 for a movie on a smart TV, just like you’d buy an app on your phone?

If rumours hold true and Apple decides to create its own TV set in 2012 or if Google takes YouTube to the big screen by signing up more content creators as it has done in 2011, then the next 12 months could see big changes in the way video content is created, delivered and consumed in the big screen in the living room.

5. Fibre broadband takes off in Singapore
This is a banker of a trend, because we know that 95 per cent of the city will be covered by the fibre optic network this year. Going by the long waitlist to turn on a fibre broadband service now – up to a month with M1, we are told by users – the demand for light-speed downloads is going to be even higher in 2012.

It helps, of course, that the network has finally forced open a market that once was dominated by SingTel and StarHub.

Take M1, for example. It used to have to rent the network from the two telcos, but now it can get wholesale access at the same price as its bigger rivals, and it can price its services competitively, as a result. Its S$39-a-month 100Mbps fibre plan sold at computer expos in 2011, for one, has become the benchmark to follow in 2012.

In a statement to the stock exchange hours ago, SPH said the United States Internet company had plagiarised its articles by “substantially reproducing the words and expressions used in SPH’s articles without permission”. 

SPH alleged that Yahoo! had reproduced ”identical paragraphs, sentences, phrases and/or words of SPH’s articles and the paraphrasing of sentences, phrases and/or words in SPH’s articles by merely replacing them with synonyms”.

The Singapore publisher also said that it could bring up more evidence of further copyright infringements, beyond the 23 instances it had raised earlier, after it filed its defence in the High Court on Wednesday to a Yahoo! counter-suit.

The legal dispute first broke out in November, when SPH sued Yahoo’s Southeast Asia outfit and claimed that the online group had reproduced 23 of its newspaper articles without permission. Yahoo! swiftly denied this and counter-sued SPH for copyright infringement, alleging that SPH’s Stomp citizen journalism site had infringed on its copyright on at least two occasions.

To this, SPH claimed on Wednesday that Yahoo! had only acquired the copyright to the content a day before it counter-sued, and thus did not own the content when they were first posted by third parties on the SPH site.

As the two media giants lock horns, the tussle is being closely watched as the first such challenge between old and new media here.

The dispute is also played out against a backdrop of increasingly tight competition for Internet “eyeballs”, as more of Singapore’s well-connected news consumers head online for the latest breaking stories and commentaries.