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.  …

Those in the late Steve Jobs camp might adamantly discredit the importance of Flash in tomorrow’s Web, but who said the two can’t co-exist?

Definitely not Adobe, for Flash is still one of the creative software company’s most important products. Still, Adobe is not ignoring the iPad phenomenon and it would be silly to brush aside the legion of developers jumping onto the HTML5 bandwagon.

Unveiled yesterday in Singapore, Adobe’s Creative Suite 6 comes jam packed with new features, among them a brand new application called Adobe Muse which enables designers to create and publish HTML5 websites without writing a single line of code.

The good ol’ Flash Professional CS6 now also allows users to easily translate and transition their skills to HTML5. …

After years of complaining about slow connections, Singapore’s broadband users can now join a study that uses their actual day-to-day experience to offer a clear snapshot of just how fast their Internet service is.

One of the long-standing problems here is that much of the content that users access is based overseas, and links to these sites seldom reach the advertised speeds, say, 100Mbps, that service providers promise. Now, instead of second-guessing or asking for advice from strangers in a forum, users can get a better sense of the actual speeds from real users’ feedback.

Some 900 volunteers are now sought to participate in a study conducted by well-known research firm SamKnows, which has carried out similar research in Europe and the United States. Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) is backing this survey in Singapore.

While the IDA has been publishing monthly throughput results based on its own tests, the new tests will have users collecting the information from their homes. This promises a more realistic look at how fast things are in the real world. …

Sometimes, fear-mongering can have the opposite effect – it makes you feel that you are safe because the people crying wolf seem to have raised the alarm once too often. Then, one day, the wolf really turns up.

Last week, I found a strange thing happening on my wife’s two-week-old Samsung Galaxy Note. There was a notification message that kept popping up sporadically, asking her to join a contest to win an iPad.

It seemed suspicious, but these days, with the endless spam SMSes from property agents in Singapore, you’d think it’s just another piece of spam and to just click on the notification to delete it. Instead, doing so brought me to the browser, which had its homepage changed to a strange-looking search engine.

I sat up immediately. I realised later, from searching up the Internet, that my wife’s phone had been infected by ad-ware, which had probably been hidden in some of the games she downloaded a few days ago.
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Healthcare service providers in the Asia-Pacific region are planning to turn to cloud computing to improve patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes, a new survey has found.

According to IDC Health Insights, 69 per cent of IT decision makers across the region indicated that they have allocated budgets to cloud computing. None of the respondents intend to reduce cloud spending, while more than half plan to spend more within the next three years. …

The story is all too common.

Tired of clearing his inbox all the time because he only has 100MB of storage, an employee signs up for a Gmail account and forwards all his office e-mail to his private mailbox, which gives him more than 7GB of space and never bugs him to delete anything.

Separately, another employee, who hates it that his company does not let him read e-mail on the go, also forwards his office e-mail to a Google account, which can be retrieved easily on his iPhone.

The result of such exploits, common in so many organisations, is a breach of security and, in some industries where information has to be kept under lock and key, a breach of their compliance with local laws.

“Shadow IT”, however, is not only caused by rogue users in an organisation, but can be part of a poorly-planned cloud rollout that could compromise a company’s security and compliance, according to a survey conducted by HP Enterprise Services.

While cloud computing offers agility and fast response, the study revealed a worry among top executives that a “free rein” could lead to users tapping on IT resources that jeopardise the organisation they work for. …

If you’re an aspiring technopreneur based outside Silicon Valley, you can do a lot worse than Singapore, where there are plenty of opportunities. And if creating mobile app experiences is your sort of thing, you ought to check out Mobile Ventures (MoVe) Fellowship 2012.

Initiated by Standard Chartered Bank, in partnership with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the fellowship is looking for 10 software engineers to undertake a traineeship programme in mobile app design and development.

The one-year programme is part of the bank’s in-house mobile development team, and the positions will be based right here in Singapore. …

A recent survey commissioned by anti-virus maker Norton found that 76 per cent of Singaporeans would rather say no to US$1 million than allow strangers unlimited access to their computers. …

Music lovers can now check out new artistes with downloadable mobile music albums that stream the music to them smoothly by adapting the quality to either online or offline use.

Called Orastream, the technology was first tested by Techgoondu back in December 2011. It will play back at a lossless CD-like quality if a track is streamed, say, over Wi-Fi at home, but it will switch to a less demanding compressed quality if the user decides to stream the tracks over a cellphone network while on the move, for example.

Three artistes, including award-winning composer pianist Tze from Singapore, have now signed on to release their music on these mobile albums, which come in the form of downloadable iOS apps. The Singapore firm behind the technology, MP4SLS, calls these albums or apps digital catalog LPs (DLPs), in a tribute to the old record format. …

Fraser & Neave (F&N) became the latest large enterprise to hop onto the cloud computing wave when it announced plans to move 3,000 employees in Singapore to Google Apps.

The move follows an earlier effort by the producer of Tiger Beer and energy drink 100 Plus to move 2,000 employees in its Malaysian subsidiary F&N Holdings Berhad to Google Apps last year.

In a media statement, Google said F&N had sought a secure, accessible cloud-based email solution that could scale for new devices and keep up with their fast-moving, far-ranging employees.

F&N was using Lotus Notes as its e-mail system, which could not be accessed by employees who were on the move, according to Leong Yin Hoe, manager of manufacturing systems at F&N Holdings Bhd. …