So what is a condom maker like Okamoto to do?

Create a social media campaign around being naughty in Singapore. Watch:

The tongue-in-cheek campaign, which was just launched last month, sources for ideas from the public to create products that help Singaporeans have fun naughty sex more often.

One of the more interesting ones that came to Techgoondu’s attention was the Okamoto iPhone app TipOff. A motion-sensing app that detects when a door is opened, the TipOff app calls a number (presumably your lover’s one) when a door is opened.

This notification is supposed to give you and your lover some reaction time. Depending on the scenario, you could compose yourselves, hide in a closet, or even escape out of a window.

Useful when you’re doing something indiscreet and don’t want your spouse/parents/children to walk in on you and your lover.

There’s even a YouTube tutorial on how this works:

The app retails for US$0.99 on the iPhone app store. The app does not come with complimentary Okamoto condoms, of course.

As technology users welcome 2012 everywhere, it’s clear the year that had just passed was filled with no little controversy and memorable incidents.

From Steve Jobs’ death to the delay of the much-awaited iPhone 5, from the rise of Android devices to Nokia’s return with its Windows Phone devices, and finally, with the potent mix of mobile devices and social media that  helped ignite protests in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, but also encouraged the thuggery of the London riots, 2011 was a big year in technology.

The next 12 months look to be just as interesting, as existing technologies mature and grow, while other new trends emerge. Here are five things to look out for in 2012:

1. The arrival of the “transform” device
Just a few years ago, it was unfathomable that people would junk their desktop PCs for laptops. Because the portable device had a smaller screen and usually lesser computing prowess, the portable device never matched up to the silent giant under the desk.

These days, however, with power-efficient yet advanced CPUs and graphics chips, laptops can do the job just as well, plus they can be hooked up with a monitor, keyboard and mouse easily to transform into a desktop PC in a jiffy.

The same is happening with tablets and smartphones. In 2012, there will be more devices like the Motorola Atrix, first unveiled in early 2011, that basically turns into a laptop once it is docked with a laptop dock. The Atrix taps on its dual-core chip to run Webtop, which is based on Ubuntu Linux, to give users a regular desktop OS look and feel. It runs the OS you prefer at any time, all in one device.

Essentially, you only need one smart device – your phone or tablet – to do everything you need in future. What you will have are many docks or keyboards and screens to hook up to this increasingly powerful (expect quad core gizmos in 2012, starting with the Asus Transformer Prime) yet portable device in your hands.

Desktops and laptops will definitely still be around, but the mobile gadget is set to be the central device in your life.

2.  Windows 8 brings “touch” on everyday PCs
Related to this portable device rush is Windows 8. The upcoming Microsoft OS, expected this year, is being billed as the biggest upgrade in years for one reason – it is going to unify both mobile devices and PCs with one OS.

It works with touch, and features a Windows Phone-like tile system, where users will be given a panel of information and the ability to go into the nitty gritty only if they wish to. The big icons and friendlier interface also mean that this is the first time the Start button and taskbar – at least in their present forms – will be out of the picture.

Along with Windows 8′s arrival, expect computing of all types – from smartphones to laptops to desktops – to tap on the novel OS.

What to expect? Look to something like the Samsung Slate PC, which crams a powerful Intel dual-core CPU into a thin, portable tablet that can be hooked up with a keyboard and screen to become a full-fledged desktop. It runs Windows 7 now, but come next year, devices like these will sport the even more touch-friendly Windows 8.

3. Tougher times for Apple
It’s not just Steve Jobs’ passing that will affect Apple for the coming year, but also the fact that it is a company that wins big because of the very sharp innovation curve that it sets out each year.

When the iPod was commoditised, the iPhone became the next big thing; when Android smartphones managed to grab huge chunks of market share in 2010, the iPad became the market-conquering portable gizmo in a class of its own.

The question in 2012 is: what next? Surely, there’d be new versions of the iPhone (after the disappointing iPhone 4S) and iPad (which still has a good lead over all over Android rivals). But can these upgrades keep Apple at the top of the pile, or will it see its innovation and design lead cut short in 2012?

The emergence of the Windows-based Ultrabooks in 2011 from Asus, in particular, is a clear answer to how fast the competition is catching up, in this case, with the MacBook Air.

In the next 12 months, Apple will find the going even tougher. Users are often willing to accept Apple’s closed “my way or the highway” approach because of the perceived better design and innovation from the company, but it has to keep coming up with new winners to redefine the field. In 2012, it needs another big winner to pull away.

4. Say hi again to a smart TV
It’s been prophecised several times before, but 2012 could finally see the arrival of smart TVs that do more than just show your cable TV programmes or Blu-ray movies in all their 60-inch Full HD glory. These TVs could be the conduit to many services and apps that were just becoming common in 2011.

Yes, Facebook will be there, as will Twitter and other PC-based services and apps that you had seen on your 2011 Samsung or LG TV when you were free enough to venture into some of its sub menus. But what about YouTube, or rather, a YouTube-type service – on steroids?

Think of an app that is smart enough to offer the same multi-tasking you’d expect on a PC screen, say, talk to a friend on a chat window while watching a live football match, or checking out background information from Wikipedia on the JFK assassination, if you are watching a documentary on it on a National Geographic app, for example.

Not so new, I hear you say? The main difference this time is that the intelligence is built into the TV and possibly delivered straight to the screen – over the TV’s Net link – instead of via a third-party set-top box and third party broadcaster.

Sure, it’d be a leap of faith for content executives who have always preferred to work with their favoured “platform partners”, i.e. broadcasters like StarHub and SingTel.

But for indie channels and content owners looking to jumpstart their work by showing their programmes direct to viewers, they can now create their own content and app and reach out to viewers – in the same way cellphone app developers sell their apps direct to users.

Creating a smart TV programme would thus involve skills needed to develop an app for, say, the mobile phone or tablet. Will this model work for TV? Well, it’s already proven already by Apple and Google in their respective app marketplaces, and what’s there to stop you paying S$2 for a movie on a smart TV, just like you’d buy an app on your phone?

If rumours hold true and Apple decides to create its own TV set in 2012 or if Google takes YouTube to the big screen by signing up more content creators as it has done in 2011, then the next 12 months could see big changes in the way video content is created, delivered and consumed in the big screen in the living room.

5. Fibre broadband takes off in Singapore
This is a banker of a trend, because we know that 95 per cent of the city will be covered by the fibre optic network this year. Going by the long waitlist to turn on a fibre broadband service now – up to a month with M1, we are told by users – the demand for light-speed downloads is going to be even higher in 2012.

It helps, of course, that the network has finally forced open a market that once was dominated by SingTel and StarHub.

Take M1, for example. It used to have to rent the network from the two telcos, but now it can get wholesale access at the same price as its bigger rivals, and it can price its services competitively, as a result. Its S$39-a-month 100Mbps fibre plan sold at computer expos in 2011, for one, has become the benchmark to follow in 2012.

In a statement to the stock exchange hours ago, SPH said the United States Internet company had plagiarised its articles by “substantially reproducing the words and expressions used in SPH’s articles without permission”. 

SPH alleged that Yahoo! had reproduced ”identical paragraphs, sentences, phrases and/or words of SPH’s articles and the paraphrasing of sentences, phrases and/or words in SPH’s articles by merely replacing them with synonyms”.

The Singapore publisher also said that it could bring up more evidence of further copyright infringements, beyond the 23 instances it had raised earlier, after it filed its defence in the High Court on Wednesday to a Yahoo! counter-suit.

The legal dispute first broke out in November, when SPH sued Yahoo’s Southeast Asia outfit and claimed that the online group had reproduced 23 of its newspaper articles without permission. Yahoo! swiftly denied this and counter-sued SPH for copyright infringement, alleging that SPH’s Stomp citizen journalism site had infringed on its copyright on at least two occasions.

To this, SPH claimed on Wednesday that Yahoo! had only acquired the copyright to the content a day before it counter-sued, and thus did not own the content when they were first posted by third parties on the SPH site.

As the two media giants lock horns, the tussle is being closely watched as the first such challenge between old and new media here.

The dispute is also played out against a backdrop of increasingly tight competition for Internet “eyeballs”, as more of Singapore’s well-connected news consumers head online for the latest breaking stories and commentaries.

According to YouTube, this is the top list of most watched music MTVs by Singaporeans in 2011. Enjoy, and check it out:

1. LMFAO – Party Rock Anthem ft. Lauren Bennett, GoonRock

2. Jennifer Lopez – On The Floor ft. Pitbull

3. Bruno Mars – The Lazy Song [Official Video]

4. Jessie J – Price Tag ft. B.o.B.

5. Chris Medina – What Are Words

6. Nicki Minaj – Super Bass

7. Pitbull – Give Me Everything ft. Ne-Yo, Afrojack, Nayer

8. Super Junior 슈퍼주니어_Mr.Simple_MUSICVIDEO

9. Katy Perry – Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)

10. Avril Lavigne – What The Hell

And to contrast, here are the most-watched music videos on YouTube in 2011 globally:
1. Jennifer Lopez – On The Floor ft. Pitbull
2. LMFAO – Party Rock Anthem ft. Lauren Bennett, GoonRock
3. Bruno Mars – The Lazy Song [Official Video]
4. Nicki Minaj – Super Bass
5. Pitbull – Give Me Everything ft. Ne-Yo, Afrojack, Nayer
6. Pitbull – Rain Over Me ft. Marc Anthony
7. Jessie J – Price Tag ft. B.o.B.
8. LMFAO – Sexy and I Know It
9. Katy Perry – E.T. ft. Kanye West
10. Katy Perry – Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)

Not that many differences, as 7 out of the top 10 global videos appear on the Singaporean list, and it would seem that a lot of us consume US culture and music.

1. Nice Guys
2. Daily Life of Rustin Hieber
3. Yam Ah Mee Election Club Mix (GE 2011)
4. Strangers, again
5. plastic bottle heartbreak on valentine’s day (Original)
6. Angry Birds Rio Trailer
7. Nyan Cat [original]
8. POKEMON IN REAL LIFE!
9. The iNavigator
10. Greatest Marriage Proposal EVER!!!

It’s an eclectic mix. The only two really Singaporean videos are the Yam Ah Mee Election remix and the plastic bottle heartbreak video. I would have expected more content from Singaporeans, but these are the stats from YouTube.

Here’s the Yam Ah Mee remix:

As for the rest of the content they are mainly sourced from the US. Yes, Ryan Higa (nigahiga) is a big YouTube personality, but seriously three videos (Nice Guys, Daily Life of Rustin Hieber and the iNavigator) in the top 10 for most watched community video in Singapore for 2011? Interesting what Singaporeans are watching.

Wong Fu productions — a talented bunch of Asian-American aspiring film producers — came up on the list with Strangers, again. Of all their shorts, I liked their older short When Five Fell the best though.

And last, but not least, if you have never heard of Nyan Cat, let me be the first to foist this distardly Internet meme on you. This video has attracted 55 million views based on the picture of a cute animated cat spliced with a pop-tart and a Japanese soundtrack. Don’t ask.

I now can’t get this annoying song out of my head, so here it is in all it’s glory.

With a successful initial public offering and the recent opening of its Asia Pacific (APAC) headquarters in Singapore under its belt, professional networking website LinkedIn is gearing up for more growth in the coming year despite a projected economic downturn looming on the horizon.

In fact, you might even say the company is counting on it.

“Talent remains key to how companies compete,” said Arvind Rajan, Managing Director and Vice President of LinkedIn in Asia Pacific and Japan. LinkedIn aims to elevate the role of these “talents” to be an important source of competitive advantage for companies.

For the individual, this means that maintaining a robust professional network of trusted contacts will be an important advantage. And with 135 million members around the world, LinkedIn is positioning itself as the ideal social network for this purpose.

Nowhere is LinkedIn’s growth more apparent than in APAC. Research firm comScore reports that LinkedIn visitors from the region grew by 132 per cent from March 2010 to March 2011, and its number of APAC members exceeds 18 million. Update: The most recent number of LinkedIn members in APAC is more than 20 million.

Members accessing the service from their mobile devices also saw a huge jump of 400 per cent.

In preparation for its regional push, LinkedIn will be embarking on a hiring spree, aiming to double its current local base of around 10 employees.

The website, currently available in 14 languages, will also be localised for more markets.

In addition, the company will be looking into developing apps for more mobile platforms. Currently, the official LinkedIn app is available on the iOS, Android, BlackBerry and webOS platforms, but is conspicuously absent on Microsoft’s up-and-coming Windows Phone 7.

In a short interview with Techgoondu, Rajan also revealed that while LinkedIn does keep tabs on growing competing services such as Facebook app BranchOut, it is still confident of leading the pack. “We do look at what they’re doing, but I don’t think they’re really taking off, so we’re not that worried at the moment,” he said.

“People still generally see Facebook as a personal social network, not a place for work,” he added.

The recent SMRT debacle has provided lots of juicy fodder for spoofs of every sort.

Rather than stew in anger or rage in impotence, some people have gotten creative instead.

This #SMRT YouTube parody has been steadily clocking in tens of thousands of views — currently around 62,000-odd — since it was launched two days ago on December 18th. Watch:

Mr Brown (aka Lee Kin Mun) is one of the best known bloggers in Singapore, and is behind the extremely funny Mr Brown Show. It’s no surprise that his hilarious “Limpeh not happy” take on the issue is clocking above 175,000 views as of now.

Side note: to fully understand the parody you will need to watch the infamous Aaron Tan (no relation to Techgoondu’s Aaron) video.

Aaron is one of several notorious Singapore social media personalities who are reviled for their posts, like Adelyn Hosehbo and Steven Lim. Bleargh. Non-Singaporeans, please note that they don’t represent the majority of us.

This YouTube SMRT spoof song — set to the music of “Apologize” by One Republic — is pretty fun as well:

Of course, the parodies go beyond YouTube. Facebook has seen some action with their fake SMRT(feedback) Facebook page, which Alfred has already written up a great post about.

On Twitter, one of the most viral memes on the SMRT issue has been on the topic of “Who broke that MRT window?”. Blogger Darryl Kang at dk.sg has one of the better roundups on this particular issue, featuring angry birds and the Marvel’s Hulk.

Angry bird smashes glass! RAAAGH!!!

Even celebrities have taken to lampooning SMRT, from The Noose’s (a popular Singapore fake news comedy series) Barbarella and Leticia Bongnino on Twitter.

And lastly, to round things off, here is a nice series of tongue-in-cheek SMRT “announcements” by Gweekspeak that has been circulating on the Internet. Enjoy.

Google Singapore has unveiled its list of top search terms used by Singaporeans in its annual Zeitgeist that offers a glimpse of the year’s major trends and events.

Topping the list of personalities were Tin Pei Ling, Nicole Seah and George Yeo, underscoring the nation’s interest in the watershed General Election 2011. Searches on the elections also figured prominently in this year’s top news searches.

Singaporeans were also on the hunt for information on the iPad 2, the iPhone 5 that didn’t materialize, as well as Samsung products. The gamers in our midst were googling for Dragon Nest, DotA and Wolfteam. Of course, there’s also the PC Show this year, where we were hungry for deals to feed our insatiable appetite for all things tech.

We also tried to keep up with the major events that took place this year, including the devastating earthquake in Japan and the uprisings in Libya and Egypt. Closer to home, many wondered about the changes to the subway system with the addition of new stations on the Circle Line.

Singaporeans also relied on local bloggers to make sense of what’s going on around them, get fashion tips and check out the latest happenings in the lives of their favourite online personalities. The honours for the top local blogs went to mrbrown, Beatrice Tan and Yankaykay.

This year, we also tuned in to the latest celebrity gossip, with American reality TV star Kim Kardashian — famed for her 72-day marriage to NBA star Kris Humphries — topping the list of celebrity searches. The Justin Bieber fever has infected Singaporeans too – the teen star led the red carpet list, with girlfriend Selena Gomez closing in from behind.

Singaporeans also scoured the Web for places to get their fix of pizzas, grilled seafood, cupcakes, waffles and nasi lemak. We love places that marry great food with great shopping. So, it wasn’t a surprise that Hong Kong emerged as the top travel destination for Singaporeans, though a good number of us are also on the lookout for beach destinations like Maldives, Phi Phi island and Hawaii.

“The year-end Zeitgeist is a cultural barometer showing us what quickened our national heartbeat and drove our curiosity,” said Google spokesperson Sana Rahman. “Singaporean searches for sun-soaked travel, good food, gadgets and games show we’re a nation that knows how to have fun any day of the year,” she added.

Here’s a quick overview of Singapore’s top searches:

Every once in a while, a technology emerges that makes you wonder why you haven’t thought about it before. The Singapore-made Orastream app is one such example.

It enables music players to stream the songs at as high a quality as possible, depending on the network that is delivering the songs. This means you always enjoy the highest quality music, without worrying about the dreaded break in transmission – a boon to future music services on the go.

Let’s take your phone, for example. When you are at a cafe and you can receive a good 3G signal, it can stream at a high bit rate of, say, 800Kbps, but if you step into an underground mall, you may only get a slower 2G network link, which means the songs will then be streamed at a much lower bit rate, say, as low as 24Kbps.

Either way, the music continues playing, because the technology adapts automatically to the network conditions. There are not breaks in songs even if you switch from, say, 3G to 2G, as the folks behind Orastream showed in a demo to Techgoondu last week.

First developed at Singapore’s government-funded A*Star labs several years ago, Orastream is the brand name for an adaptive streaming music format called MPEG4SLS. This, incidentally, is also the name for the company spun off from A*Star that now develops Orastream.

The uses for the technology are numerous. For starters, the company is looking to offer a Dropbox-like service where musicians can upload their songs – at the highest lossless quality – to potential record company partners. Instead of sending various demo tapes or CDs or storing different formats of the same song, they can continually update the catalog of songs easily.

To do this, the Singapore firm has even developed simple tools for the musicians to create an app that plays back the music automatically from this library.

Needless to say, this can be applied to consumers as well, as a sort of cloud-based music locker service. You can essentially upload your entire library – at a cost, of course – to the cloud and have the Orastream technology stream the music to your PC, MP3 player and even hi-fi (if someone develops a Squeezebox plug-in, for example).

This means you don’t have to keep separate copies of your library, like MP3s for your portable players and FLAC lossless tracks for your hi-fi or PC. You can just stream them all in one format using Orastream. In countries with well-connected mobile and fibre broadband networks, this is an ideal solution, and better than the other cloud-based music offerings out there which usually only support the “lo-fi” but common MP3 format.

To be fair, there is still a lot more to be done for Orastream before this becomes reality. But the technology is out there and the business model is already proven, so the potential is clear.

And compared to rival technologies from, say, Microsoft, Orastream is truly dynamic, as in, it does not have to be set with a few pre-determined bit-rates, but is fine-tunes the bit rate or quality according to the network quality. If a network offers 300Kbps, the stream will be as close to 300Kbps as possible, perhaps at 290Kbps.

One more thing: Orastream can stream songs at up to 24 bits/192kHz, which is higher than a regular CD’s 16/44.1kHz. This will be a boon for audiophiles looking to stream their songs both over Wi-Fi at home (at high quality) and over the Net to their portable players.

Do check out the Orastream app available for the Mac, iOS and Android. Still very much like demos, these simple players show the potential of a technology that could change the way you enjoy music in future.

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.

In September, Google announced that it was pulling the plug on a number of services that haven’t had the impact the company had hoped for. Apart from Google Wave, Google is also shutting Bookmarks List, Friend Connect, Google Gears, Search Timeline, Knol and Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal.

Hailed as a groundbreaking technology, Google Wave had the potential to change the way we communicate online by mashing up e-mail, photo and video sharing, instant messaging (IM) and document editing features. It was launched with much fanfare in May 2010 but only gained a million users in over a year.

In contrast, Twitter rival Google Buzz gained tens of millions of users since it was launched in February 2010, though that service was also shuttered last month, along with Jaiku and Code Search.

There are several reasons for Google Wave’s demise. Chief among them is the lack of integration with Google Docs, where users could potentially benefit from Wave’s collaboration features such as IM and live editing. Moreover, the learning curve was so steep that Lifehacker founding editor Gina Trapani produced an extensive guide on the service.