If Nvidia gets its way, enterprise desktops and games could soon be served off the cloud, thanks to new cloud technologies unveiled by the graphics chip giant this week.

Based on the company’s new Kepler GPU (graphics processing unit) architecture, the new technologies — Nvidia VGX and GeForce Grid — are designed for large-scale data centres and tout virtualisation capabilities that allow GPUs to be simultaneously used by multiple users.

The Nvidia VGX platform can be used by enterprises in remote computing that allows applications to be streamed to notebooks or mobile devices through virtualised desktops, while Nvidia GeForce Grid is targeted at gaming-as-a-service (GaaS) providers for delivering rich gaming experiences. …

PayPal is offering a shopping cart plug-in that can help turn e-commerce sites meant for desktop PCs into a mobile-optimised store in less than an hour, as part of its efforts to make payment easy on the phone.

This “Mobile Commerce in a Box” concept means that potential customers who browse to the site on a smartphone will be automatically redirected to the mobile-optimised site, where they can then proceed to shop and check out with PayPal. …

If you ask the towkays of many small and medium enterprises in Singapore if they had some of their most important data backed up, chances are they would give a blank look (“what’s backup?”) or say they have a network drive that they save everything in.

The reason why they haven’t put their customer contacts, invoices and blueprints – the very lifeblood of their businesses – in more secure places is often cost, or the lack of know-how. In particular, small companies often don’t have the manpower to plan for business continuity, should a fire or flood hit the office, or even if a user accidentally erases data on a server.

This is where Singapore backup firm Kronicles is proposing to come in with its backup service, which offers both local and remote backup of customers’ most important data.

Unveiled today, this “backup as a service” is offered from S$5,000 a month (down to under S$2,000 after Singapore government tax rebates for using innovation) and uses Quantum tapes to keep up to three copies of the most recent data. …

The Internet Society has opened an office in Singapore to promote the adoption of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) in the region, among other key initiatives.

While Asia-Pacific became the first region in the world to run out of IPv4 addresses last April, many businesses have not warmed up to IPv6 as existing addresses are expected to be in use for a long time. Moreover, without consumers hooking up to IPv6 through Internet service providers (ISPs), there is little incentive for companies to jump on the bandwagon. …

SAP’s Business All-in-One enterprise software is now certified for deployment on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. The software, which lets companies manage business operations across industries, mostly resides within the confines of an organisation’s IT infrastructure.

In an announcement Friday, SAP and AWS said the certification, which applies to Windows and Linux AWS instances, will allow companies to quickly implement SAP’s business software on Amazon’s platform without spending on IT infrastructure.

According to VMS, a German consulting firm, running SAP applications on AWS provides infrastructure cost savings of up to 69 per cent compared to the housing the same software on-premise. …

Starting a business for the first time can be a daunting task, given the financing, logistics and administration involved. Then, there’s also the IT infrastructure.

What PC to buy? Which networked printer should I install? How should I store and back up my data? Here are some suggestions from the first of our Techgoondu SME Toolbox guides to get your business started with some basic IT gear. …

In a belated move to lure governments onto the cloud, Salesforce.com introduced a dedicated service to allay the security concerns that governments may have over cloud computing.

Dubbed Government Cloud, the new service is built on a dedicated instance of Salesforce.com’s cloud infrastructure located in the United States. Users will have access to dedicated databases and supporting infrastructure that meets the regulatory and compliance needs of the U.S. government.

Salesforce.com is one of the last major cloud vendors to introduce a dedicated government cloud. Google, IBM and Microsoft have been offering government cloud services from as early as 2009, while Amazon Web Services launched its AWS GovCloud last year. …

Well, it’s not strictly a complete computer- you’ll still need to stick in an SD card with Linux on it. Yet, the tiny Raspberry Pi, costing just £21.60 (S$43) plus £4.95 for worldwide shipping, has been getting lots of love from the geek community since it went on sale in February.

One of the distributors, RS Components, told reporters in Singapore on Thursday that it had sold the first 700 units in mere hours and has a waiting list no fewer of 200,000 orders.

What’s so hot about this new machine, besides the cost?

For S$43, it has a British-designed Arm-based processor running at 700MHz, a graphics core that can decode 1080p Full HD videos, an HDMI port and a USB port, plus it runs with 256GB RAM and boots from a memory card that you slide into the included SD card slot. …

The rumours surrounding the mysterious Google Drive were finally put to rest when the Internet giant formally announced the online storage service yesterday.

“Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard the rumors about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually does exist”, said Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president for Chrome and Apps, in a blog post.

With 5GB of free storage, Google Drive offers more online real estate than the free tier of widely popular Dropbox. If you need more space, just fork out US$2.49 a month for 25GB of storage, US$4.99 per month for 100GB, or US$49.99 per month for up to 1TB. In addition, when you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage gets bumped up to 25GB. …

Microsoft today opened a S$23 million technology centre in Singapore to enable companies to test out new technologies such as cloud computing and unified communications before rolling them out at their own premises.

The first in Southeast Asia, the centre joins another 26 worldwide in showcasing and concept-proofing the software giant’s new offerings to corporate customers.  …