“There is no such thing as an SMB market. It does not exist.”

At the Parallels Summit 2013 in Las Vegas this week, Tim Harmon, principal analyst at Forrester Research, proclaimed this during his keynote.

He was referring to the fact that the SMB market is an incredibly diverse pastiche of niche markets comprised of 250 million SMBs around the world. …

If you’re a hosting company looking for an inexpensive cloud storage solution, Parallels just might have a solution for you.

At the Parallels Summit 2013 in Las Vegas this week, the cloud technology vendor announced the launch of Parallels Cloud Storage, a virtualized storage solution for service providers.

Said Parallels CEO Birger Steen at the Summit media briefing: “It looks and talks like a SAN, but is disk storage.” …

Rare is the game that can really, really move me.

The sublime exceptional game that has such great storytelling that you remember it long after the credits are done rolling.

The ones powerful enough to make you cringe in horror, heart race with excitement, and make you bawl like a child because you really care about the characters in the story being told.

Telltale’s Walking Dead is one such game.

The last episode in the five part arc was just released last week for this adventure game.

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Marketing skills capability scored only 1.4 out of a scale of 10, whilst mindset that digital marketing is important scored 6.7. The result? A talent crunch, according to the CMO Council.

Digital marketing in Asia Pacific is facing a serious talent crunch.

This was one of the key insights drawn from the “APAC Digital Marketing Performance Dashboard”, a research report done by the CMO Council, a worldwide professional association of senior marketeers.

The research, which was conducted over Q2 and Q3 of 2012, spanned both qualitative one-on-one interviews and an online survey that 295 Asia Pacific respondents completed. 23 brand leaders in Asia Pacific from companies like Toyota, CitiGroup and Nokia participated in the interviews.

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According to a LinkedIn “Dream Jobs” study released today, Singaporeans are a pretty sedate lot when it comes to their dream jobs.

The top dream job for Singapore men was to be an engineer and for women was to be a teacher.

This online survey ran globally, where more than 8,000 people participated, including 393 professionals from Singapore.

Here are the top-ranked dream jobs for Singaporean men, compared to other professionals around the world:

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Singapore is a big believer in cloud computing initiatives, according to the latest 2012 VMware Cloud index.

According to the annual index, 84 percent of senior IT practitioners in Singapore are currently using or planning to use cloud computing initiatives at the workplace.

This is higher than the 75 percent average through Asia Pacific, and is one of the highest in the region, together with India and Australia.

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In the war to win mindshare on Big Data, SAP certainly is not pulling its punches.

In a sit-down session with the media two days ago, SAP put out its own campaign on why they were the right vendors to go to for Big Data compared to a competitor like Oracle or EMC.

It certainly seems like the vendors are really bullish about Big Data in the region in early 2013.

Head of database and technology marketing, Karim Mohamed, SAP Asia Pacific and Japan, gave three reasons why it made sense to go with SAP HANA (High Performance Analytical Appliance) for big data over their competitors.

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It’s fair to say that never has global warming been given the centre stage as much as in recent days.

With all eyes on the aftermath of superstorm Sandy, which wreaked havoc on the north-eastern coast of USA, story after story in major newspapers have come out to discuss global warming.

Politicians like mayor Bloomberg have come out strongly saying that he endorses Obama for a second presidential term because he believes Obama will do something about global warming.

About time.

Global warming is definitely one of the biggest problems humanity faces, and if we don’t deal with it in some way or other, it will lead to major misery on this planet we call home.

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Big data is like the cloud-season all over again circa early 2009.

Having hit a threshold of mainstream respectability, every major IT vendor was talking about cloud in 2009 and trying to put their mindshare stamp on the space.

A few years down the road, the cloud is firmly entrenched in the lexicon of IT folks and even mainstream media.

The current hot IT meme of choice for 2012?

Big Data, as every big IT vendor — especially those in the storage and software space — is talking about some form of it.

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On first impressions, the Jabra Solemate impresses with it’s packaging and design aesthetics.

Jabra’s foray into wireless bluetooth speakers ain’t priced at the mass consumer (read: inexpensive) market though. This speaker, which was released about a month and a half back, costs S$288 at recommended retail prices.

So how is the quality of the product? I’m not an audiophile like Aaron is, but even to a sound goondu like myself, the Jabra Solemate sounds pretty good.

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