There’s a rather unhelpful argument going on right now in Singapore, and it seems to be between new and old media.

On one side are professional journalists whose credibility depends on the stories they deliver daily. On the other, social commentators who run independent blogs, watching over the mainstream media for mistakes and highlighting them whenever one is spotted.

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Marketing skills capability scored only 1.4 out of a scale of 10, whilst mindset that digital marketing is important scored 6.7. The result? A talent crunch, according to the CMO Council.

Digital marketing in Asia Pacific is facing a serious talent crunch.

This was one of the key insights drawn from the “APAC Digital Marketing Performance Dashboard”, a research report done by the CMO Council, a worldwide professional association of senior marketeers.

The research, which was conducted over Q2 and Q3 of 2012, spanned both qualitative one-on-one interviews and an online survey that 295 Asia Pacific respondents completed. 23 brand leaders in Asia Pacific from companies like Toyota, CitiGroup and Nokia participated in the interviews.

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About 52 per cent of companies in Singapore already have a corporate social network in place, while another 23 per cent plan to roll out one in the next 18 months, according to a survey released today by research firm IDC.

These walled-off services, an alternative to the free-for-all public services like Facebook or Twitter, are ranked so high in the priorities of organisations in Asia-Pacific that those who have embarked on rolling them out see them as more important than deploying core networks or business intelligence, according to the study sponsored by Microsoft. …

If you’ve received event invitations or seen pictures posted by friends on Facebook with links that claim to let you change the background colour of your profile, it is most likely a scam.

According to IT security firm Sophos, such links may redirect users to a page that claims to allow Facebook users to switch the background colour of their profiles from blue to black, pink and other colours by participating in an online survey. …

When she posted those insensitive remarks on Facebook, Amy Cheong probably never expected, in even her worst nightmares, that she’d be sacked the next day and hounded out of the country by an angry online community.

Yet, the former NTUC executive is now in Perth, where she has flown off to avoid the backlash, according to The New Paper.

How did a foolish rant about a wedding in the void deck bring such swift and angry reactions? Needless to say, she should not have said those hurtful remarks that have now been condemned as racist.

But there’s a lesson here for anyone using the Internet, that is, a random rant to vent after a long day at work can be amplified many times over online. Sometimes, on social media, the lines between private and public are not so clear. …

More than a decade ago, business intelligence (BI) was lauded as the holy grail to help companies make sense of the growing deluge of data housed on employee PCs and corporate data centres.

Despite the promises, many BI projects failed because companies often faced difficulties in integrating disparate islands of data. BI systems were also built to provide answers to predefined queries, rather than help companies glean useful insights into their business. …

At the annual Dreamforce conference today, Salesforce.com will unveil the Marketing Cloud, a new service that aims to address this challenge by providing a unified platform for businesses to listen, analyze and engage with customers on social media. It will be available from today at prices starting at US$5,000 per month. …

Singapore Post has come up with a new app that turns the photos in your Android or iOS smartphone into a physical postcard that can be mailed automatically to anywhere in the world.

Called Post-a-Card, its functionality is pretty basic. You either pick a photo from your camera roll or take a new one, slap on a template, add text, add your message and recipients, pay up, and SingPost will print and send the card for you automatically. …

There are new social networks sprouting all the time, each trying to carve a niche to build on Facebook’s popularity.

One that has been gaining traction lately, and looks quite interesting is Qiito, a service started by a team in Singapore, which lets users easily share their travelogues and plan trips for the future. It’s a little like Pinterest meets Facebook meets Trip Advisor. …

If you’ve been intrigued with Google’s Project Glass, the Epson Moverio BT-100 may just offer a glimpse of what wearable computing could entail in the future.

First conceived by Steve Mann and developed further at the MIT Media Lab, wearable computing is touted to change the way we interact with computers. Rather than having machines perform task-oriented functions initiated by users for a small fraction of a day, wearable computers will interact with us based on the context of the situation. …