If you are signing up or renewing a broadband, mobile or pay-TV service these days, the questions you face can sometimes be rather daunting, given big changes – mostly positive – that have shaken up the telecom market in the past few years.

Who has the best broadband deals in Singapore? Who has the best bundled “triple play” deals with all three services packaged nicely and billed in a single envelop? And, of course, how do I switch all my plans over to one operator?

Answer these questions well and you could be on the way to substantial savings by buying wisely and also enjoy the convenience of having fewer bills from so many operators.

About four years ago, I’d have told you, if you watch live football, the choice was simple: go for StarHub, because it had the fastest (cable modem) broadband, per-second billing for its mobile services and of course, the crown jewel – English Premier League (EPL) on its cable TV channels.

But things have changed so much in the past few years that consumers are sometimes spoilt, perhaps even confused with choice.

Fibre broadband has truly given users better deals – S$39 a month for an unheard of 100Mbps, for starters. The upcoming three seasons of the EPL could well be shown on both SingTel and StarHub, and possibly even M1, thanks to Singapore’s new pay-TV rules. And let’s not forget number portability, which lets you keep your mobile number while switching telcos.

With so many changes in the past few years and more upcoming, what should you be aware of when you next sign up for those two-year contracts? Here’s a little guide, gleaned from my own experience buying these services. …

Consumers signing up for fibre broadband services in Singapore got one more alternative to the big three of SingTel, StarHub and M1 earlier this week, with the entry of MyRepublic, an upstart that promises to sell services based on what users do online, instead of  simply promising top speeds.

A S$69-a-month package, for example, will target gamers and offer a “low latency experience” for those who connect frequently to, say, the World of Warcraft servers worldwide to get their role-playing game fix.

The new service provider also offers online tutorials and exam preparation tools for Primary 1 to 6 as part of its S$89“Tutor” fibre broadband package, to attract parents who want their kids to go beyond the standard curriculum in school.  …

When the going gets tough, business will often cast their eyes on the next big thing to boost the bottomline.

The current hype in IT happens to be cloud computing, with nearly every player — telcos, data centre providers, software makers and IT consultants — jostling for a slice of the pie.

It almost seems like a gold rush, except we’re dealing with services powered by electrons that traverse fibre cables at the speed of light.

This week, web hosting companies, a segment of the IT industry whose margins are known to be razor-thin, gathered in Florida to hear about Parallel’s delivery platforms that promise to help them different themselves from the pack. …

If Parallel’s founder Serguei Beloussov gets his way, the technology landscape in 2022 will be dominated by mobile and social technologies, big data and the cloud.

People would interact through social networks in new ways, with 80 percent of Internet transactions taking place on ubiquitous smartphones. Mobile operators such as China Mobile may also drop per minute billing for voice calls, in favour of mobile data plans. …

According to Parallels’ SMB Cloud Insights report, SMBs will continue to lead the cloud computing wave, with small businesses three times more likely than large enterprises to choose cloud services over on-premise software. …

Nokia Singapore is rolling out the Belle version of its Symbian operating system for 12- to 18-month old phones like the N8 and E7 from today, showing that it has not forgotten users who have yet to abandon the “burning platform“.

Recently unveiled on new models like the N700, Belle comes with improvements like bigger live widgets and promises a smoother, faster interface than the rather outdated experience on previous Symbian editions. …

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.

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Symantec has discovered over a dozen apps with malicious code that could cede control of your smartphone to perpetrators.

In a recent blog post, the security company said the apps, which are hosted on the Android Market, can be used to propagate a “bot-like threat that can receive commands to carry out certain actions, as well as steal information from the device”. …

With the Evernote and Skitch add-ons, features that were once available through separate apps can now be accessed directly through the Dolphin browser. …

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched DynamoDB, a cloud database service designed to meet the growing needs of demanding Web-based applications.

DynamoDB will allow developers to launch new database tables and moderate their database capacity without downtime and performance overheads. All data is housed on solid state drives and replicated across multiple AWS availability zones to ensure high availability and durability of data. …