The Singapore government is running a competition to encourage local Web and mobile developers to come up with useful apps that tap on its huge amount of publicly-available data.  …

Seven nursing homes in Singapore have turned to cloud and mobile technologies to cut down on day-to-day manual processing, raising productivity by a claimed 10 per cent.

Developed by local healthcare IT vendor PulseSync, this IngoT II project uses a mix of several Microsoft technologies including Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SQL Server, Silverlight, and .NET framework to make the running of such facilities smoother.

The project costs S$2.65 million – S$2 million of which is funded by the philanthropic organisation Lien Foundation.

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Partners of SAP will be able to get hands-on experience in cloud computing, mobility, big data analytics and in-memory computing with a new lab that the corporate software and services company has set up in Singapore.

This Co-Innovation Lab unveiled last week is the latest in a network that includes facilities in the United States, Brazil, Germany, Russia, India, China and Japan.

Like many such proof-of-concept labs from other companies, SAP’s new facility provides a place for developers using SAP technology to test out their offerings before selling them to the market. …

For folks who are thinking whether it’s safe to put their precious data on the cloud, the latest news this week of Facebook being hacked must have raised alarm bells.

The security breach, it must be stressed, does not seem to have compromised any consumer data. The social networking site was quick to point that out, as it revealed that some employees had infected their laptops with malware when accessing a developer website last month.

Yet, the breach will challenge the recent conventional wisdom that it’s safer to keep your data online with big companies with high firewalls, such as Google and Facebook, than to store them on your own PC and network.  …

“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. …

As we launch into 2013, SolarWinds’ has marked their IT and business predictions for the coming year as more evolutionary than revolutionary. For a large number of IT managers and business leaders, the new year will see acceleration in trends that are already influencing their organizations and performance.

The most important of these is the conversion from client-side servers to cloud-based resources and architecture. If IT professionals want to succeed in 2013, they need to develop their skills around the cloud, and use those skills to get the best, most cost-effective IT deployments into different business units. They’ll also play a vital role in monitoring and managing those IT deployments in real time. …

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.” …

Companies will spend more on cloud-based services in the next few years, but the growth for one of the biggest technologies to greet the workplace in recent years is expected to slow down, according to research firm Analysys Mason.

It predicted that the global market for such services will grow from US$18.3 billion in 2012 to US$31.9 billion in 2017. However, the 17 per cent year-on-year growth rate it expects for 2013 is likely to be lower in the next five years, even as the market expands.

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Photo credit: RocketTheme

Christmas is just round the corner, and if you are still fretting over the right tech gift to get for yourself and your loved ones, we’re here to help! So, here’s a list of gifts mooted by us: …

HP is setting its sights on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with HP Cloud Compute, an enterprise public cloud offering based on the open source OpenStack cloud computing system.

While AWS is leading the pack in public cloud services, its offerings are largely pitched at developers. With HP Cloud Compute, HP is targeting IT head honchos who demand high levels of support and reliability from cloud services to power critical business operations. …