What’s one of the best ways to go one up on the competition? Hire their former CEO.

That’s just what StarHub announced today, when it said that its current CEO Terry Clontz will be retiring in January 2010, and former M1 CEO Neil Montefiore has surfaced to fill his shoes – pending regulatory approval.

Earlier this year on Feb 1, Neil stepped down from M1 and its then CFO Karen Kooi stood in as acting CEO, only to be confirmed as CEO a little more than two months later.

Now Neil, whom Terry has known “on a professional and personal level for ten years”, will take the reins of the number two telco in Singapore – a position which he probably wanted M1 to reach during his tenure.

Will this fuel further speculation of consolidation in the local telco scene? You bet. StarHub and M1 were already partners in the Infinity consortium, which put in a failed Netco bid in the Next Gen NBN project. And M1′s fixed broadband service essentially rides off StarHub’s cable modem infrastructure.

And if being pals doesn’t work out, StarHub can have the dirt on M1 – where they are good, and where they can hit it hard.

StarHub, 1 – M1, 0.

With the telco regulator in Hong Kong giving its stamp of approval for fixed mobile number portability last Friday, fixed line phone numbers here can finally be set free. Right off, I can think of a couple of scenarios where its useful to port fixed to mobile.

• You can move your business fixed line to a mobile and not miss any calls without the need to subscribe to call forwarding.
• Stop paying for your monthly fixed line fees just because you feel nostalgic about the number – port it to a prepaid mobile number.
• Going from fixed to a prepaid mobile might actually lower your phone bills if you’re an extremely infrequent voice user.

I’m sure there’ll be more scenarios and benefits, but unfortunately, this is expected that it will take a while before the fixed line carriers here actually let you do it, as the regulator’s left it to the telcos to sort it out commercially.

And I can’t think of too many reasons why the fixed line folks here would be wanting to open the floodgates to the fixed line exodus, but hey, at least they can start the conversation on how they want to do this and work out fixed to mobile migration options.

Now that’s what I call true number portability.

Meanwhile in sunny Singapore, can someone tell me where we are on our quest for telco liberalisation and true number portability? Since the implementation of “full mobile number portability” in 2008, I still can’t port my post-paid mobile to pre-paid *sigh*! Worse still, a review on number portability doesn’t seem to be on the horizon!

Rest in peace, moonwalker.

On the day when an iconic part of music died, I dug out Off The Wall and Thriller from my record stash, cued them up and listened for hours – something I had not done for years.

And I marveled at the purity and joy of the music created and delivered by young Michael Jackson back then.

Those were exuberant days for MJ. His music blended R&B hooks, clever pop, daring rhythms, emotional and extraordinarily beautiful singing, funk, disco and rock, and yet all of that delivered free of schmaltz.

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Here’s a secret. Normally you need to have an online ST subscription to read the full length of ST articles online. Those that you get to access for free are usually only short snippets of the full version.

But there is Red Nano. (rednano.sg) Red Nano is SPH’s (the media giant which owns ST, BT, TNP, Zao Bao, etc) search and directory service which lets you view any SPH news article that was published in the last 12 months and any reviews of products with no time limit. The articles will appear under Red Nano’s archives a day after the news went to print. If you search for it on the day itself, you will be directed to say straitstimes.com. Once you are out of Red Nano, you cannot view it for free.  Unfortunately, Red Nano needs some training to learn how to use it this way. Here’s how to do it.

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Singapore’s Ministry of Health has sent expired Tamiflu supplies to the general practitioner’s in Singapore.  Tamiflu, which comes in boxes of 10 pills each, is the anti-viral drug for the H1N1 flu. According to the report and to my own sources as well, these Tamiflu meds hve expiry dates of 2007, and was manufactured in 2003. MOH has added a sticker that says that these meds can be used beyond their shelf life – to 2010.

MOH’s circular to the GPs say this:

“We would like to assure you that the extension is with the approval from the manufacturer (Roche), U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and our Health Sciences Authority. This extention  is  made possible due to our stringent conditioning and maintenance requirements in our storage facilities. The efficacy of the drug is not compromised in any way and is fit for usage.”

Straits Times has done really well to get doctors to give their response. 

Dr Wong Tien Hua, a general practitioner in Sengkang, said an expiry date can vouch for a drug’s effectiveness only for that period. ‘If it is past the expiry date, the effectiveness of the drug might not be good,’ he said, adding that someone with the H1N1 virus might take longer to recover if given ‘expired’ medication. (from ST)

Agreeing, Dr Vincent Chia, deputy director of Healthway Medical, said although it is a national stockpile, the onus will still be on the doctor to explain to patients. ‘Tamiflu is not without its side effects…so when that happens we won’t know if it’s because the drugs are expired or because of the side effects,’ he said. (from ST)

For the full story, go to ST.com here, if you are not a subscriber use red nano here.

Yes, the star were there – Pierre Png, Flying Dutchman, Andrea D Cruz, Dick Lee and some magician called Cyrus from Japan.

But for me, this was the worst phone launch I have attended this year. The media invite says 4pm, so I reached there at 4.15pm. But the doors were closed and like many other tech journalists there, we had to wait like idiots while Sony Ericsson got ready to start.

At about 4.45 pm, the celebrities turned up while the local tech journalists,  who were basically ignored by the PR minders, went to buy their sugar cane at the nearby hawker stalls and at Pacific Coffee at Red Dot Museum, waiting for the damn show to start. …

Microsoft, as you may have heard, is launching a new search engine called Bing.com. What a horrendously silly name. Now I know why.

Dr Qi Lu, President of Microsoft’s Online Services Group just explained 5 mins ago in a worldwide press conference call that the word Bing comes from two Chinese characters – bi and ing (sorry my hanyu pinyin is crap) and that together the two words mean “to be very certain in your answer.” They also want to make bing into a verb!

Microsoft’s strategy to fight Google? It says it’s by building loyalty with users by winning them over one at a time.

Differences vs Google and Yahoo – three key areas:

>>Delivering of best results: type in UPS, and you will get back an UPS link and tracking application, type BT and you get back a customer service number.

>>Bringing new level of organisation: type Bill Gates, you see his pictures, video, speeches,
going deep in four verticals – shopping, travel and local (one more i missed, maybe food?)

Thus the technology approach is more focused on the intent of the user, that is, according to Microsoft, to bring search to “new frontiers”, and to give more satisfying results to users.

If you have been anywhere near the internet these few days, you know the airwaves have been plastered with news of the H1N1 swine flu virus.

Besides getting information from typical news outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian, or official sources like the WHO (World Health Organization) and CDC (Centre for Disease Control and Prevention), the internet is buzzing with bottoms-up grassroots efforts to track the spread of the virus.

From the 2009 Swine flu wikipedia page, to swine flu alerts on twitter, there’s lots of ways to keep informed — or to feed our paranoia, depending on how you look at it — about the spread of the virus. There’s even a Singapore-based swine flu website (www.swineflu.sg) that does a great job of tracking the virus.

I was scheduled to go Las Vegas last Saturday for about a week for work. But I ended up canceling the trip because of the swine flu, not because I feared getting the disease — the chances of that happening are vanishingly minuscule — but because of potential travel disruptions should anything happen.

Just over the weekend the Hong Kong authorities decided to quarantine the Metropark Hotel in Wanchai based on one confirmed H1N1 case, disrupting tourists and travelers, seven Singaporeans included. Singapore itself has taken a decidedly strong stance on the issue, enforcing a home quarantine order for travelers returning from Mexico or US, beginning today.

Not a fun time to travel at all, I think. Still, I’m curious. Would you travel?

Electronic Art’s new game is basically Magic The Gathering Online turned into real-time-strategy and is a fantastic game. But it has one HUGE problem – there is a bug which makes you lose your virtual assets and currency. The problem becomes serious when you realise that the exchange rate is 1 battleforgepoint (bfp) = 2 singapore cents. So when I saw 1050 bfps disappearing from my account, it means I lost the equivalent of S$21.

In my case what happened was that I had sold an ultra-rare card called enlightenment for 1050 bfps. I saw the money going into my game account but when I relogged into my account, both the card and the 1050 bfp was gone! Turns out that I am not the only one and that there are at least five other chaps who have had different problems.

This things are not a problem when gamers raise a ticket to customer support to remedy the situation but going by what the forumers are saying, some have been waiting for over THREE WEEKS for this issue to be resolved but still no sight. The problem with this bug is that it has affected the confidence of many gamers to continue trading until they get a resolution on their first bug. I recently paid $80 for additional BFPs to buy more cards but unless Phenomic (the studio which developed the game) can get its act together, it will be losing some customers pretty soon.

Check out Musicgoondu, a purely fun-seeking project by two Business Times scribes – Christopher Lim and me – and joined by our close circle of music-mad friends, including one who readers of Techgoondu will be familiar with: limbeer, aka Roland Lim. It is a blog on music, gear and musings. Believe it or not, Singapore has its own music scene, so this is also a place to rant and rave about what’s going on in this tiny island we call home. Check us out. We love to hear your comments.