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.

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:

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.

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.

To create a feecha, users take a photo or video of the activity – such as a plate of mouth-watering char kway teow at an less-known hawker centre – and upload it to the map. A one-eyed monster will then pop up over the location for others to see.

For the feecha to grow, it must receive attention from other users, such as views and comments. A feecha which just isn’t interesting will slowly discolour and disappear from the map. This ensures that only the most updated and interesting happenings stay on the map.

The potential uses of Feecha are undeniable. Ever wondered what’s happening within those quaint shop houses as you amble down Ann Siang Hill? Ideally, you should be able to fire up the app and explore what other people are feecha-ing in your vicinity. You can then decide spontaneously to hop into a coffee shop for a book signing, for instance.

Of course, the app depends on complete spontaneity, and there’s the possibility that you’ll find zero feechas around you, especially now in the app’s early days.

Feecha also requires the user to enjoy and actively seek out serendipitous encounters. However, most Singaporeans will probably have a destination in mind, and won’t take the time to scan their surroundings for feechas. Businesses will also be unlikely to depend too much on such an inconsistent audience for their custom.

The biggest challenge, then, is to establish a large base of users as quickly as possible. To help push the numbers along, Feecha has announced that the user with the biggest feecha by 18 December will win S$8,888 in cash.

Feecha is available on the iPhone only, and an Android version will come by June 2012 (No S$8,888 for Android users, we suppose). The developers are also exploring the viability of a Windows Phone 7 version, and have no plans for a BlackBerry version.

This story first appeared on Techtalk, our technology content partners at Yahoo! News Singapore

When Straits Times first broke the news of the bee attack at Ngee Ann Poly yesterday, with 35 students and three staff stung and taken to various hospitals, I thought the story would be big and that there were going to be interesting reactions in our social media space.

So the kaypoh in me decided to run JamiQ, a social media software monitoring tool, to track the incident.

It didn’t turn out to be such a big story, but “Ngee Ann Poly” did manage to trend yesterday in twitter. The data, to a data geek like me, was interesting. Data from JamiQ showed up almost 250+ tweets on this topic since yesterday afternoon to today.

The biggest spikes were around 2pm, when the news broke on ST Straits Times, and initially consisted of retweets of the breaking news, queries on the safety of friends and family, and questions on whether this was why classes were shutdown at the Ngee Ann Polytechnic campus yesterday.

When it became clearer that it was not as serious as it seemed later that day, all the jokes started to come out:

“My friends from SP keep complaining that their school so boring unlike NP. E.g Flood, Bee attack” said one poster.

“Ngee Ann Poly on front page of wan bao for the bee attack. Lolol why our school so exciting?!” said another.

After the bees, the birds

Many people found out about this breaking story through STCom, Straits Times official twitter channel or through Google News, judging by the number of retweets of that story.

The interesting thing was that when people checked to see if “Ngee Ann Poly” was trending in Singapore (it was), people started spotting that “ITE Simei” was trending as well and asking why it was trending.

In fact, “Simei ITE” is still trending, and has been slowly trending for a few days. No mainstream media has picked up this story as far as I can tell though.

It turns out that the buzz on Simei ITE is a sex tape video of a sports management guy and his girlfriend doing the quick and dirty in a toilet stall. Yes, it sounds raunchy, but the video really isn’t much. I’ll leave you chee ko peks to find a copy of the video on the Net (Hint: try twitter search)

The point I want to make in this rambling post is that Singaporean youths don’t get their news from a newspaper. They get it by being directly plugged into the social network of twitter and FB. They receive, disseminate, create, mash-up, argue and poke fun at issues and topics that spread on social media.

This tweet on recent Singapore twitter trends captures this spirit: “Yesterday Ngee Ann Polytechnic, today ITE Simei. Tomorrow will be some JC lohh”

Disclaimer: I used to work for JamiQ but am no longer employed by them as I’ve moved to another company.

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.

“Even though we’re only launching a localized site for Singapore today, Singaporeans have already been an extremely large and important audience on YouTube,” said Adam Smith, director of product management for YouTube in the Asia-Pacific region, in a media statement today.

“Through localizing YouTube in Singapore, the site will deliver more of the content Singaporeans want to see, and we hope the world will continue to discover the amazing culture and talent that exists in Singapore today,” he added.

YouTube Singapore features a local interface that makes it easy to find videos that are most relevant to Singaporeans, including content from global partners and local media agencies such as Refinery Media and Oak3 Films. Interactive SG, a local web design and interactive agency, is also showcasing Angel’s Gate, a new reality TV show on entrepreneurship, on the site.

According to YouTube, partners can take advantage of the localized site to distribute their content, grow their audience and generate revenue when advertisements are displayed against their videos in the YouTube Partner Program. Independent content creators can also apply for the program to monetize their work.

In addition, YouTube has signed a licensing agreement with the Composers and Authors Society of Singapore (Compass) to allow music artists to earn revenue on YouTube. Under this agreement, artistes can now receive payments for content that’s distributed through the video sharing site.

“Reaching an agreement with YouTube is a step forward that creates major new opportunities for our members and affiliates,” said Edmund Lam, CEO and director of Compass. “From now on, they will receive fair payment for the use of their works on YouTube which is a very positive step for our songwriters and publishers, and, more broadly, the Internet.”