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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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.  …

Yet another year filled with surprises and no less interesting technology products and services has passed us by, perhaps too fast for some of 2012′s winners and not too soon for the strugglers.

The past 12 months have seen a great variety of tablets, from the Google Nexus 7 to Apple’s iPad mini, while Microsoft and partners tried their best to jump on the mobile bandwagon by bringing touch screens to everyday PCs with Windows 8.

In many ways, the much-talked about convergence of computers and mobile technologies has brought about some of the keenest competition that hasn’t been seen in years.

That’s not even mentioning the other big headlines of the year, like Facebook going public, Apple and Samsung’s courtroom joust and in Singapore, the arrival of cheap and fast fibre broadband.

Now, just hours away from 2013, users could well be staring at another year of great tech gadgets, sometimes frustrating technologies that fail to live up to expectations, and oh, winners and losers, definitely. Here are eight trends to look out for in the new year. …

Instagram made itself the most unpopular social media network this past week when it trotted out new privacy terms that could let it take users’ pictures and sell them off. Its subsequent U-turn, after a public backlash, probably won’t win it back all its fans.

If you belong in the group of unhappy Instagram users hoping to jump ship, here are three alternative photo-sharing apps to check out. …

Watching the Instagram story unfold this week, you’d be hard-pressed to find what’s funnier – outraged users threatening to delete their accounts or company executives squirming at the unexpected backlash and back-tracking on their original terms.

National Geographic threatened to close its account. Kim Kardashian said she was reviewing the terms, reported the BBC. Many others are not applying the image filters anymore.

In truth, both users and the company are denying reality when they set on this collision course. And if you’ve seen how the Internet works, things will be back to normal in time.

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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. …

According to a LinkedIn “Dream Jobs” study released today, Singaporeans are a pretty sedate lot when it comes to their dream jobs.

The top dream job for Singapore men was to be an engineer and for women was to be a teacher.

This online survey ran globally, where more than 8,000 people participated, including 393 professionals from Singapore.

Here are the top-ranked dream jobs for Singaporean men, compared to other professionals around the world:

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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. …

Less than a week ago, crowdfunding site Kickstarter just concluded one of their biggest, most funded projects: Open-sourced Android gaming console Ouya.

With over US$8.5 million raised for the console in a month — more than eight times over the original expectations of a million — the project has been a smashing success and shows the power of crowdfunding.

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