A third of a group of about 2,800 youths told a survey conducted by networking vendor Cisco earlier this year that they considered the Internet as important as some of the most basic needs for survival. More than half of them said they could not live without the Internet, citing it as something that was “integral” to their everyday lives.

The findings are part of the second annual Cisco Connected World Technology Report, which surveyed college students and young professionals in 14 different countries, including the United States, Brazil, India and Australia, in May and June this year.

Besides showing how tethered these young users between 18 and 29 were, the survey also highlighted interesting facts about social media, the use of mobile devices, and the privileging of the Internet over other material luxuries.

Four out of five of those polled consider the Internet to be “vitally important” and part of their “daily life’s sustenance”. Up to 62 per cent say they cannot live without the Internet, and 40 per cent would rather hang out on the Internet than go on dates or hang out with friends.

Interestingly, more than one in four college students globally (27 per cent) said staying updated on Facebook was more important than partying, dating, listening to music, or hanging out with friends, according to the study done between May and June 2011.

And Mark Zuckerberg must be feeling real good- 91 per cent of college students and 88 per cent of employees globally said they have a Facebook account. Of those, 81 percent of college students and 73 per cent of employees check their Facebook page at least once a day.

The costs of productivity can be hefty though. College students tend to be interrupted at least once per hour due to online media. The prevalence of social media has also blurred the line between work and private life, with 66 per cent of employees who use Twitter follow either their bosses or colleagues.

For the full details of the study, hit up http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns1120/index.html

Salesforce has unveiled a slew of new tools and services to lure developers to its cloud-based platform.

Leading the pack is Database.com, a cloud database that can power apps built for Android and iOS-based devices. These apps can be hosted on Salesforce’s own Force.com or other cloud-based platforms including Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure.

Database.com can also be used to run social media applications using a social data model that holds and manages data for social feeds, user profiles and status updates. Developers can specify followers for database records or request data feeds to display real-time data updates through social APIs.

The database is already used by over 100,000 Salesforce customers and is now generally available to all enterprises. It managed over 36 billion transactions and 13 billion custom objects in the second quarter alone.

A free account will support up to 100,000 records, 50,000 transactions per month, with support for three enterprise users. Additional capacity, transactions and users can be purchased at prices starting from US$10 per month.

“Database.com is the heart of the social enterprise,” said George Hu, Salesforce’s executive vice president for platform, marketing and operations.

“Just like Salesforce is reborn social, databases need to be reborn social,” he added. “That’s why we’ve redesigned our multi-tenant cloud database to be social, mobile and open”.

Salesforce has also beefed up Force.com with a new visual workflow designer that lets companies model and deploy business processes entirely on the cloud.

Users will be able to easily collaborate on business workflows using simple drag-and-drop features. The tool also lets partners and independent software vendors create new capabilities and to integrate with third-party apps.

Also new to Force.com is touch.salesforce.com, a feature that renders Salesforce apps using HTML5 to fit smartphones and tablet displays. What this means is that developers will no longer need to develop mobile versions of their apps to fit smaller screens.

One such app is Seesmic CRM, which lets users search their Salesforce accounts as well as look up and create leads, contacts and sales opportunities on Android phones. On the record, Seesmic says the app does not compete with touch.salesforce.com, but it’s hard to buy that line given the similarity between the two.

To entice the large community of Java developers to create apps for the Salesforce platform, the company announced Java support for Heroku, the app development platform that Salesforce plans to acquire for US$212 million.

Heroku, a Ruby on Rails cloud application platform, was created in 2007 with the aim of making deploying and managing cloud apps as easy as developing them.

The application platform features a workflow and interface designed to mirror how developers work. Because the platform is delivered as a service, there are no virtual machines, software and hardware to manage.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had said earlier that the Heroku acquisition was driven by calls for the company to embrace open development platforms such as Ruby on Rails and Java.

The vendor’s own Apex programming language, which employs syntax that is similar to Java, had been criticized for being too proprietary.

During a demo at Dreamforce 2011, Salesforce executives showed the ease with which a Java program can be deployed as a Facebook app in a few clicks with Heroku. The program, which allows Facebook users to purchase Harry Potter movie merchandise, was developed by Warner Bros.

Techgoondu had the chance to be at unConference 2009 held yesterday at the Biopolis, thanks to the kind folks at e27 who had put together an excellent program that brought together some of the top forward-thinkers in the region. Here’s a recap of what I felt were the highlights of the event:

Panel discussion: Innovation in Asia and where is it heading?

The panel was chaired by Benjamin Joffe, founder and CEO of +8* (Plus Eight Star). Participants included Scott Rafer, CEO at Lookery, Dr Gang Lu, co-founder of OpenWeb Asia, Dr Lai Kok Fung, co-founder and CEO of Buzzcity, and Wong Hoong Ann, founder of HungryGoWhere.com.

Each panelist was asked to share how he spotted the opportunity that led them to start their companies. Scott, who started MyBlogLog and sold it Yahoo later, noted that his venture was “almost accidental”, while Hoong Ann of HungryGoWhere identified the need for a marketing channel catered to F&B establishments, particularly among small restaurants. His business and ad model was changed many times, because “you need the flexibility to start a business.”

Dr Lai of Buzzcity, which started as as dotcom company specializing in WAP mobile communications, said his company did not plan for the company’s current successes in South Africa and Indonesia. It was only after the rapid rise in the number of users accessing the Web on the cellphone some time later that spearheaded Buzzcity’s business in the two countries.

Dr Gang Lu, shared his experience with start-ups in China, which comprises three groups. The first are the copycats who will copy successful products and business models, but “the problem is everyone else will be doing the same thing”. It will be hard for copycats to stand out from the pack. He noted that at one point, there were over 150 YouTube clones in China, but only 10 are surviving today.

The second group will take successful products and localize them accordingly in their target markets – an example would be Xiaonei.com, which is now more popular than Facebook in China. Finally, the last group of entrepreneurs would chart their own path through innovation that would eventually lead to their own unique products.

The panelists largely agreed that selling to businesses is always more profitable than selling to consumers, since consumers are typically unwilling to pay for Internet services – advertising is thus the most common way of monetizing their services. In some market segments, selling virtual goods has proven to be a viable as exemplified by Xiaonei.com and Kaixin001.com.

Panelists were also quizzed on what they were doing to mitigate the dependency on search engines, particularly Google, for their site traffic. Hoong Ann of HungryGoWhere.com shared his company’s brush with Google which reduced his business by half in a single day after his website was placed on page 945 in the search results. Dr Lai suggested that start-ups should grow their organic traffic, while Dr Gang added that they try to grow traffic from social media platforms, which allow them to seed communities and build their brands without Google.

Techgoondu also checked out some promising products and start-ups, and these caught our eye.

iTwin was born out of Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) and will be commercialized by Exploit Technologies, A*Star’s marketing and commercialization arm. Essentially, it is a device that can be split into two halves. By plugging each half via a USB port into a home and remote PC respectively, a secured communication channel is established to allow the remote PC to access files on the home PC. In fact, the solution is so elegant that no password is required. The communication is encrypted and authentication is provided through a random key generated by the home PC’s device.

The folks behind iTwin expect the device to be launched by Fall 2009 at a price of between US$40 and US$50. Work is for the device’s software for Windows XP is almost completed, and there are plans to support Windows Vista and Mac OS X. The product roadmap also includes video conferencing applications and even mobile device file transfer.

Fusion Garage was founded by R. Chandrasekar, a familiar face in the Singapore tech circle. Chandra was the founder of Radixs, which previously developed the Motion Experience Interface (MXI) operating system and the Velvet Puffin integrated online service that marries social networking and instant messaging.

The company is currently developing the software for the CrunchPad, a web tablet hardware device conceived by the folks at Techcrunch:

The idea is to get a new type of device into people’s hands for as cheap as possible (we were aiming for $200, it looks like $299 is more realistic). It fits perfectly on your lap while you are sitting in front of the TV, so you can look up stuff on Wikipedia or IMDB as you channel surf. It plays Flash video flawlessly so you can watch movies and TV shows on Hulu or Joost or wherever. Or listen to music on MySpace Music. Or use TokBox to have a video chat with your parents. Then check email and call it a day. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Hulu, Wikipedia, Google Docs and Gmail are the killer apps for this device.

Because the device skips the resource-sucking parts of the operating system and focuses on one application – the browser – very low end hardware can be used and still give users a desktop-like Internet browsing experience.

The team from Fusion Garage did not show off any working prototypes of the Crunchpad at the event. For more information, check out this video:

Bruce Branit’s nine minute World Builder short film is poignant, brilliant and beautiful. A work of art that fires on all cylinders — concept, storytelling, music.

If you’re a sci-fi fan or computer geek, it’s definitely worth a look. Super cool.

The story of how World Builder became a viral internet video is also pretty interesting. According to this excellent story on NewTeeVee by Wagner James Au, Bruce sent out his video last year to various film festival circuits, but it drew little attention.

Dejected, he put it up on the internet as a portfolio, and a high quality video was put on both Vimeo and YouTube about a month ago. Within days it became a viral hit and spread via word-of-mouth and blogs (like this one here!). It is still drawing traction, as the Viral Video Charts can attest.

It’s quite obvious what these guys are trying to do – they are trying to fight piracy. But they end up alienating the users. I have played RTS since the first Dune 2, and I have never had to go online to fight against the computer. In fact, I have never played a PC game that requires me to do this, unless it is an MMOG like World Of Warcraft.

I understand that piracy is really killing the PC business, but in an environment where console games are outselling PC games (revenues for console games are about 8x more than PC games worldwide) and beating the shit out of them, you don’t want to make you legitimate PC gamers angry.

And what about selling to the countries without much of a Net penetration? Or have they given up on these countries altogether?

Update: Some forumers are asking if this will work if Steam is running in offline mode. I will try that tonight. Another issue is whether you need to have a Windows Live account logged-in to play. Will also test that tonight. But having played this game for about 6 hours, I do like it a lot.

You’ll need an audio editor/recorder. One that I highly recommend is the open source software Audacity, available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

It’s pretty easy to use. Open a new project. Just click the record button when the music is playing, and stop the record when the music ends. If you want higher quality, just increase the sampling rate (default is 44.1Mhz). Export to Wav, mp3 or org vorbis when done.

Two tips that might help:

• Make sure that your line in settings are turned on and not muted. For Windows, this option can be found under My Computer->Control Panel->Sounds and Audio Device->Device Volume. Otherwise you might be wondering why there is no line input.
• To record in stereo (mono is default in Audacity), go to Edit->Preferences. Change the channels from 1(mono) to 2(stereo). For an FAQ for Audacity, you can find it here.

Besides YouTube, audio recorders like Audacity are useful for recording snippets from podcasts and streamed internet radio, especially for niche indie content.

In fact, I find myself sampling and converting to mp3 a lot more indie stuff nowadays as the internet makes it so easy to find great and unique music. Here’s a sample:

• Things so Singaporean, by Judith d’Silva and Ann Hussein (YouTube)
• Love Song for Singapore, by Mr Brown and folks (Mr Brown Show)
• Closer, by EN-X, Singapore band (MySpace)
• Miss Sunshine, by Postbox, Singapore band (MySpace)
• Code Monkey, by Jonathan Coulton, WoW machinima by Spiffworld (YouTube)
• Mario Kart Love Song, by BlinkTwice4y (YouTube)

I’m curious. What are you readers listening to out there? How do you find music?

Not when we can pull music off the virtual cloud that is the Internet.

Music is one big area that is exploding in the new social Web 2.0. You can discover, search, and share playlists on many music websites out there, and never have to own a single copy of any song.

It feels like Napster days all over again. But far more than filesharing platforms or basic internet streamed radio, these Web 2.0 sites – and there are many of them out there – allow you interesting ways to find and play music.

I hardly listen to my own mp3s nowadays except when I’m on the move. When I’m home doing work, I’m typically listening to one of these sites below:

1. Deezer

Deezer is one of the more established music Web 2.0 sites out there. Started up in August 2007, it’s a legal music search engine, sharing platform and radio station rolled into one.

When you search its database library to play any of the archived songs, the artist or rights owner makes a cut of the advertising profit on the site. The archive is pretty extensive, and many new songs are available. You can also create your own playlist and track other playlists by other folks.

I typically use Deezer to listen to the top music charts in UK and US – new songs often appear there before they hit our own radio stations.

2. Musicovery

Musicovery is a web radio that plays random music based on certain attributes like mood, tempo or genre.

It is great for discovering new songs, and it’s excellent when you don’t have specific music in mind and just want to explore.

3. Just Hear !t

Just Hear !t is my current top site for finding specific songs that I want to listen to.

Like Deezer, you can search for music and store playlists. But what I really like about Just Hear !t is the drag-and-drop flash-based interface. It’s simple, intuitive, and beautiful.

Top marks for presentation and ease of use.

Reminds me of traditional music players like iTunes or Winamp, but your library is limitless and free.

4. Qloud

Qloud is a raw way to discover what music is popular on the internet, based on what other users are searching for on YouTube.

The interface updates constantly, and serves as a barometer of what music is popular on the net. You can, as usual, create your own playlist.

The founders believe in embedding their Qloud MyMusic applications in social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Friendster. For example, on Facebook, you can discover what Qloud users are listening and create your own music feeds.

I like Qloud for it’s funky layout and use it as a random way to discover songs. Sometimes the best way to find something new yet really good is to hear what other people are listening.

5. Last.fm

Last.fm is great community radio, and besides MySpace, it is one of the best sites out there for serving up music from the indie crowd.

Want to find music from a Singapore or Malaysian band? Chances are, you’ll find them here, but not on any of the above mentioned sites.

You can create and store playlists, but you have to log in to use any of its services. Use it to discover indie bands, especially local Singaporean acts.

Besides these five sites mentioned, there are lots of other music specific sites like Seeqpod and Dizzler. I didn’t even mention YouTube or MySpace. Although these huge aggregators of content have loads of free music, it’s probably easier to use mashups or music specific tools – like those listed above – to access their content.

To take the tagline off Techgoondu: the revolution has begun. Music is going online and free, and nothing – neither DRM nor RIAA – will stop it.

A throng of Santas running down the usually sleepy streets of costal Paignton in Devon, England.

Overcompensating Christmas trees, snow in the the heart of the desert and theme park living in Dubai.

All these and more at fortylove.tv, a travelogue of roads less trodden by two friends criss-crossing continents. At fortylove.tv, two globe-trotting babes share three minute postcard videos of their travels with each other, and also with the wider web world.

Started by Singaporean Adrianna Tan, 23, and Malaysian May Yee, 25, the “part travelogue, part video-cast, part excuse to hang out with interesting people” experiment is a living dream writ large for the two writers/photographers/communicators.

Tapping on the collective power of Web 2.0, the duo have sourced artwork, music and photos from disparate corners of the world. To this they added their own videos, mashed and edited the content, and created something really unique. The closest thing remotely similar I can think of is Matt’s Dancing YouTube videos, but it’s like comparing apples to oranges.

This is an exemplar of self-published content blooming all over the Internet, where individuals with big dreams and talent can find an audience and be noticed. That they are Singaporean and Malaysian chio cha bos respectively is, of course, a plus point.

Adrianna and May Yee aim to release forty videos in twenty weeks, and so far, week one has been pretty good. I really liked the pilot episode on the Santas, and episode two on Dubai malls isn’t bad either. It’s raw and quirky, and most importantly, interesting.

Good enough to keep tuning in, and I’m now a fan. You go girls. Live your dreams, and I hope you get noticed.

(Disclosure: some of my content posted on Techgoondu is research for stories in Digital Life, the Straits Times weekly IT supplement. If you’re interested, please do drop me a mail. Here’s wishing all Techgoondu readers a happy new year for 2009!)

According to this insightful December 9th 2008 press release by market research firm ZenithOptimedia, ad spend on the Internet is scheduled to rise from 10.3% in 2008 to 15.6% in 2011.

Now, if there is an increase in the pie for the internet slice, something else must go down. And this comes mostly at the newspapers expense: from 25.4% in 2008 to 21.2% in 2011.

In terms of numbers, the Internet ad market will rise from around US$50 billion in 2008 to US$84.3 billion in 2011, whilst the newspapers ad market will decrease from US$123 billion in 2008 to about US$115 billion in 2011.

Another piece of interesting news is that, due to the credit crisis, the global ad market will contract (-0.2%) in 2009, with most of the decline in US (-6.7%) and Europe (-1.0%).