If you’ve always wanted to visit Nepal but never got on the plane for some reason, here’s a way to visit one of the most beautiful places on earth – virtually in 3D.

A Singapore company has come up with an online tour, called 3rd Planet, that takes a user on a visit to places like Nepal’s Patan Durbar Square. Here, you can get a virtual fly-through or walk-through in a high-resolution 3D world complete with temples and other places of interest like in a game. …

Google will retire its Wave collaboration platform for good next year in an “off-season spring cleaning” exercise.

In a e-mail to Google Wave users yesterday, the search giant said all waves will be read-only by January 31, 2012, followed by a complete shut-down of the service on April 30, 2012. Users can continue to export individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. …

Singapore is set to see a rare face-off between old and new media, after news emerged yesterday that Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) had sued Yahoo!, claiming that the digital media company had reproduced 23 of its articles without permission from November 2010 to October 2011.

Yahoo! has since denied the claims, with managing editor for Southeast Asia Alan Soon saying yesterday that the company intends to “vigorously” defend itself and that its editorial business model is proven.

The case pits the old against the new. In one corner is SPH, one of the most profitable media companies in the world that publishes a 166-year-old newspaper called The Straits Times; in the other, Yahoo is a “grandfather” of dot.coms but still a relatively young company when it comes to media and content.

More importantly, it highlights the increasingly tough competition facing the online content business in Singapore, especially as established media giants like SPH, which just reported S$1.25 billion in revenues, seek to defend their turf against “over-the-top” or online challengers with leaner operations.

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Twitter may already possess a large portion of the pie serving up bite-sized pieces of information, but a bunch of developers based in Singapore is taking square aim at the micro-blogging service with a location-based twist.

Like Twitter, the app lets users feature – or feecha – an event or an object that’s close to him/her, which friends of that user can discover. Unlike Twitter, however, these feechas are all visualised on a map, and are colour-coded based on popularity.

It is currently possible to add your location to a tweet, but Twitter treats that as a secondary and optional feature. Feecha seeks to highlight that very feature and make it central to the app’s experience. …

The Health Sciences Authority (HSA) has asked the developers of Lobangclub to remove information on tobacco products and prices from its iPhone app that offers information on deals contributed by shoppers.

In an e-mail to users, Lobangclub founder Shen Guyi said he was contacted by a HSA officer who warned him that it is illegal to advertise tobacco in Singapore.

As Lobangclub has up to today to remove all tobacco related material from the app, Shen urged users to stop contributing tobacco related deals. …

Google has launched a dedicated YouTube site for Singapore in a bid to grow its inventory of localized video content. Prior to this, the search giant has been offering localized YouTube services in 34 other countries including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, India and more recently, the Philippines.

Users can visit the localized site by choosing “Singapore” as the location setting at the bottom of the YouTube.com homepage, or by heading directly to youtube.com.sg. …

Salesforce has unveiled a slew of new tools and services to lure developers to its cloud-based platform.

Leading the pack is Database.com, a cloud database that can power apps built for Android and iOS-based devices. These apps can be hosted on Salesforce’s own Force.com or other cloud-based platforms including Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure.

Database.com can also be used to run social media applications using a social data model that holds and manages data for social feeds, user profiles and status updates. Developers can specify followers for database records or request data feeds to display real-time data updates through social APIs. …

Salesforce.com is deepening the social connections that underpin its suite of cloud computing products.

Starting this October, its customer relationship management (CRM) customers will be able to see social profiles of customers with data mined from social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

Chatter, Salesforce’s enterprise social networking tool available for almost two years now, will also support instant messaging for the first time.

This means Chatter users will soon be able to chat with fellow workers, share screens, collaborate with partners and approve requests directly from their Chatter feeds. …

Help Sparky the dog reunite with his long lost love.

No, not by choosing a mate from a dog breeder, but through following his story on TV, playing games on your mobile phone, and finding hints on Facebook.

It’s a virtual love story that StarHub, who is running Singapore’s first interactive commercial, hopes will create lots of brand publicity for them. The commercial was unveiled on the big screen at a media preview held at GV Vivocity cinemas today.

The catch is that it doesn’t only play out on TV, YouTube or the cinema screen, but also on mobile phones and computers through interactive gaming — the first time it is done here locally. It’s not exactly a full-blown alternate reality game (ARG), but it contains some elements of it.

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When this year’s canned-at-the-last-minute Funpack song at Singapore’s National Day Parade 2011 went viral, many people commented that there were lots of great National Day songs and there was no need to rip off Lady Gaga.

Very true.

I’m not even talking about parodies, but the official ones that have been written every year since the 90s.

Thus, with tomorrow being National Day, and in the spirit of things, we here at Techgoondu have come up with a song list after trawling YouTube.

If you’re a fellow Singaporean, here’s a list sure to put you in the mood for patrotic nostalgia.

All of these songs are written and performed by Singaporeans, of course. I am partial to certain singers, so although songs like “In a Heartbeat” (2011) and “Reach for the Sky”(2005) can be said to be good in their own right, they don’t make this list here. Feel free to agree or disagree in the comment sections below!

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