It’s the oldest trick in the book when it comes to scamming: Play on people’s greed.

Take a look at a current one involving free iPads for beta testing :

The difficulty lies in telling whether a freebie giveaway is a scam sometimes. Some are scams, and some are supposedly real contests giving out free iPads, like the one here at freeipadgear.

When in doubt, it’s probably wise to reconsider: If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

The inaugural Youth Olympic Games, or YOG for short, is running in Singapore this year from 14th to 26th August.

As part of the worldwide promotion to create buzz around the event, the Singapore Youth Olympic Games Organising Committee (SYOGOC), together with the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), is creating a virtual world called Singapore 2010 Odyssey.

Said RADM(NS) Ronnie Tay, Chief Executive Officer of IDA at the official launch on Saturday 6th March: “The Singapore 2010 Odyssey is a unique virtual world platform offering many possibilities for learning, social networking and entertainment, as it reaches out to the youths from all over the world in a fun and interactive way. The development of the 3D virtual world is testimony to Singapore’s infocomm capabilities in innovatively harnessing digital media technologies to support major events like the Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games.”

Of course, what’s more important is the content of this virtual world. I had a preview of the world last Wednesday at a media/blogger session (the news was embargoed till today) but to see how it really was working out, I decided to give it a real life test.

There has always been rivalry in the tech industry, but it’s not that common when a tech giant chooses to name and launch a direct assault on an opponent.

Take a look at the following YouTube video, which was just put up yesterday by Microsoft on YouTube, on why their solutions are better than Google’s cloud ones. Basically it charges that Google only has cloud-based solutions, whilst Microsoft has a mix of on-prem and cloud solutions that fit its customers better.

My comment is that the world is migrating towards cloud-based solutions (with some caveats as kinks are being worked out), so vendors either evolve or be rendered obsolete. And with Google in the driver’s seat on this, it can’t be fun for others having to play catch up.

Hard to log in. Keep getting disconnected.

If those problems have kept you from surfing the Web with Wireless@SG, you’ll be happy to hear that the free Wi-Fi hotspot service islandwide is now going to be a breeze to use.

With a new secure sign-on system announced today, you will only need to sign in once on your PC or phone and never have to do it again when you next visit a Wireless@SG hotspot.

The Internet has been abuzz with Google’s announcement of Buzz, their new social networking platform that they just announced about a day ago.

Of course, Facebook is the king of the hill in the social networking space that Google is going after.

Reams of commentaries and news analysis has been written about this — here are some excellent ones by PC Mag and TechCrunch — so I’m not going to delve into the history and just go straight to the point with my comments.

With Buzz bundled in Gmail natively, my gut feel is that it has a good chance of taking off, especially with the huge Gmail install base. Went to the Buzz website to find out more, but apparently it’s not available for Singapore yet.

Here’s their statement on the site:

We’re still rolling out Buzz to everyone, so if you don’t see it in your Gmail account yet, check back soon.

*Update*: It’s now up for me. That was fast!

That’s about it for the newspoint. The story I really want to write, however, is how Google has been taking over all the tools I’ve been using.

NETS, the Singapore electronic payment vendor, just launched their iNETS mobile service, in which you can pay your bills via your mobile phone in Singapore.

The story was covered by quite a few of the main papers in Singapore, like the Straits Times, Today, and My Paper, as this story broke yesterday.

What struck me when I read the story in the Straits Times is that the iNETS mobile payment platform supports “all mobile phones save the iPhone and the Android platform”.

When I read this, I almost fell out of my chair thinking: Errr, aren’t these some of the more popular platforms? And Android phones will definitely be set to grow in the market this year, with the Google Nexus One, Samsung Galaxy Spica, and Motorola Dext already out since February with more to come.

So you have ripped apart your DHL package and started messing around with your spanking new Nexus One from Google.

Wait a second, I hate to spoil your party, but this “Superphone” needs a lot of extra fiddling with for you to get the absolute best out of it. For example, getting MMS to work with it – especially on StarHub – is still something of a mystery to many users. Trying to call someone requires you to scroll through the Contacts list.

Well, we don’t want that! After playing with my own Nexus One for over a week, I’m glad to have found ways to get around these little irritating moments in an otherwise excellent phone.

Here’s an all-in-one guide to get you quickly off the blocks:

Scenic sightseeing tours – not tanks making minced meat out of hapless civilians – are the results you will find if you do an online search for “Tiananmen Square” or “Tibet” while in China.

Propaganda, not reality, is what you get when looking for information behind the Great Firewall of China, so goes the Western view of China’s Internet censorship regime.

Thus, Google’s threat today to pull out of China altogether and to provide a search that is unfettered by the communist government’s censorship regime, has been greeted by some Western commentators as a good thing for freedom of speech in the awakening giant.

Question is: are things that simple? Dig deeper and you will find that this story of Google versus China has a lot more questions than answers.

Tiny Singapore finally joins the ranks of countries with Street View today, right on the heels of the roll out in Hawaii and large parts of Spain in November.

This also makes Singapore the third Asian country after Japan and Taiwan (Taipei city only) to be mapped in 3D by the Mountain View firm.

Often a tolerant lot, Singaporeans can accept a lot of things – slow broadband speeds, lack of full number portability (until last year) and even not being able to choose their government (in some wards).

But one thing they can’t stand, joked a journalist pal of mine, is to have their weekend football fix taken away. Should that happen, he declared, there’d be a “RIOOOOT!”

That perhaps explains why the Singapore media authorities did a stunning U-turn yesterday, saying that they might just  make SingTel share its fresh-in-the-bag Barclays Premier League rights with StarHub come next year.

Acting Minister for Information, Communication and the Arts Lui Tuck Yew, even went so far as to say the government was considering an universal pay-TV set-top box for Singapore homes, so that people don’t have to get two set-top boxes to watch BPL on SingTel and other popular channels that StarHub carries.