Echelon, one of Singapore’s most prominent start-up launchpad, has opened their doors for this year’s submissions from aspiring entrepreneurs. Re-branded as the “Startup Marketplace”, this pre-Echelon call-to-action will close on 31 March, 2012.

An as yet unconfirmed panel of judges will be reviewing the submissions and shortlist qualified start-ups to perform their pitches at one of four cities: Singapore, Jakarta, Manila, and Hong Kong.

Finally, 50 start-ups will be hand-picked out of the lot to exhibit at the main Echelon event in Singapore on 11-12 June.

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Imagine mashing up a RPG with a poker game.

This, in theory, shouldn’t work.

But with Runespell Oveture by Mystic Box, it does.

This oddball game melds Yahtzee-style poker (an interesting variant called Mystic Poker) with a good old fantasy RPG story set in the Nordic eras. As the story progresses, you “level-up” by unlocking collectible spells and allies, which help you in battle.

And how do you battle? By playing poker, of course.

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Android might not be the smoothest of mobile operating systems – I’ve seen it slow down even on dual-core chips – but that’s all about to change with the ASUS  Eee Pad Transformer Prime and its brand new quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor.

A brief hands-on I had earlier in the week revealed that it truly is a sea change in the responsiveness of Android, even more so than the Sony Tablet S, which until now is the smoothest Android tablet I’ve tested. With a whole range of goodies packed into this tablet, the Transformer Prime is easily the best Android tablet on the market right now.

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If 2011 was remembered for shiny new tablets that made people part with their hard-earned cash, then 2012 may just be the one where the craze for these thin and light yet powerful and affordable ultrabooks takes off big time.

At the annual CES show just concluded earlier in the week, a good number of laptop makers joined the fray with their takes on what people would be carrying to meetings and classrooms in the coming months.

Perhaps having seen Asus, Acer and Lenovo whip up demand for such ultra-light PCs in the closing months of 2011, the likes of Sony, Dell and HP showed of their versions of the ultrabook at CES this year. Lenovo too came up with a quite surprising “yoga-like” ultrabook cum tablet.

Here’s a sneak peek.

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Enterprises using Equinix’s data centres in Singapore and Tokyo can now connect directly to Amazon’s public cloud service.

Through Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect, Equinix customers in the Asia-Pacific region can establish private network connections with Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, paying only for the network ports used and data transferred out of AWS. Data transfer into AWS is free.

Equinix, a global data centre operator, said the connectivity option will help companies cut network costs into and out of AWS, by lowering bandwidth commitments to ISPs …

The Nintendo 3DS not the handheld gaming console of your choice?  Take heart, for Sony’s newest handheld PlayStation Vita will be heading over to our sunny shores on February 22, in less than 2 months’ time.

Retailing at S$399 for the WiFi-only version, the PS Vita will be accompanied by 27 launch titles, including Uncharted: Golden Abyss and FIFA Soccer.  However, the connectivity-junkie will have to wait longer for the 3G version, as there is no word on when that will be released.

The price is definitely quite surprising, given the challenges that the 3DS faced at a similar price point. But unlike the 3DS – which is too similar to its predecessors to generate a high-level of excitement – the PS Vita is a completely different beast that previous PlayStation Portables. …

Motorola is putting up a lighter, more powerful follow-up to its Xoom tablet for sale here in Singapore from today, but with a rather hefty price of S$978.

The new Xoom 2, which will come with both 3G and Wi-Fi, sports a 10.1-inch screen and a faster processor, but will run only on Android Honeycomb (3.2) for now. It should likely be upgradeable to the newest Android 4.0 later in the year, if Motorola Singapore follows the practice of its US headquarters.

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eBay has partnered with SingPost and the United States Postal Service (USPS) to offer a new shipping service for eBay Singapore sellers.

Dubbed ePAC, the service lets sellers track the delivery of lightweight goods sold to American customers within six to eight working days. This service is part of eBay and SingPost’s ongoing efforts to boost trade from Singapore to the United States. …

Today’s unveiling by HTC and Nokia at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) should send shivers down the spines of Windows Phone fans all over the world.

For starters, the long-rumoured Nokia Lumia 900 is finally a reality, and it’s every bit as awesome as I had imagined. The new Nokia flagship smartphone features a 4.3-inch ClearBlack AMOLED display (800 x 480), a 1.4GHz processor, 512MB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. No word on whether there will be other storage options, and 16GB just seems so 2008.

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One digital camera that might be worth reserving your spare cash for this year, is the Lytro – the unlikely offspring of a dissertation by a Stanford University researcher, and fuss-free point-and-shoot consumer photography.

Looking vaguely like a Jedi’s preferred weapon slash compact camera, the Lytro light field camera is not your typical digital camera.

A micro-lens array combined with an image sensor captures 11 million rays of light in a light field, which is defined as “the amount of light travelling in every direction through every point in space”.

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