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. …

When thin, fragile-looking cables are being laid in thousands of drains, risers and other ducts in Singapore for its fibre broadband network at such pace, you expect the occasional hiccup.

Who would blame Opennet, the contractor laying the cables to 95 per cent of the island, if once in a while a cable or two are not patched correctly?

Certainly, with fibre broadband prices at a low and a variety of options for savvy Net users, Singapore consumers never had it so good before. Intense competition has brought a 100Mbps fibre service to under S$50 and there are now services catering to gamers and video buffs.

Yet, a number of issues with Opennet now threaten to spoil the experience for users. And if not tackled, they could put the brakes on the competition that has benefited the newly-opened up market. …

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. …

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. …

There’s now a way to watch the latest American TV drama serials like Glee cheaply and easily, by signing up for a fibre broadband service that lets users Singapore log on to video-on-demand services like Hulu and Netflix that are 0nly offered in the United States.

Internet service provider ViewQwest is offering its broadband services with a low-cost VPN (virtual private networking) option that enables Singapore users to easily connect to these United States-based services. …

The newly-opened up broadband market in Singapore has seen the entry of new players such as MyRepublic, which promises to cater to niche markets such as gamers with its differentiated fibre broadband offerings.

Just how do these smaller players get their game going and can they continue to prosper as the Big Three telcos in Singapore slash prices in an all-out fibre broadband war?

In this month’s Q&A, we speak to Malcolm Rodrigues, the CEO and co-founder of MyRepublic, the new kid on the block in the broadband market, for his views. …

Dr Tan Tin Wee, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS), has been honoured as a “Global Connector” in the Internet Society’s inaugural batch of Internet Hall of Fame inductees for his instrumental role in the internationalisation of the Internet.

Tan’s list of achievements and awards over the course of his professional life is a long one. He has been working with the Internet since the 1980s when he was training as a biochemist and molecular biologist in Cambridge and Edinburgh.

One of Tan’s key contributions was support for the Chinese and Tamil languages on the Web. …

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. …