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.

Since Steve Job’s untimely death, Samsung has been ramping up the assault on Apple, having launched a series of funny ads attacking the iPhone 4S.

Take a look at this ad which was just released a few days ago:

And of course, here was the original ad that mocked the throngs of people who queued up to buy the latest iteration of the iPhone 4S.

Of course, the battle isn’t just being fought in the realm of marketing and PR.

A global war is being fought on the patent lawsuit end between the two giants, and Apple just suffered a setback when it failed to get Australia courts to prevent the sale of the 10-inch Galaxy Tab just this week.

Of course, Apple is well-known for using patents to go after the competition, in this case Android and the phonemakers who support the platform, like Samsung and HTC. Apple has purportedly even dipped into the shadier side of the law through patent trolling in its all-out war.

Steve Jobs himself famously vowed to “go thermonuclear” on Android in the recent official biography by Walter Isaacson.

This book, by the way, even though it is only about two months old, has already become Amazon’s top grossing book of 2011. A testament to the man’s legacy that even the big Apple detractors here at Techgoondu have to admit.

With the mobile wars between Apple and Samsung and HTC heating up, and not forgetting dark horse Nokia (with Windows), 2012 will surely be an interesting year. Fight!

Higher launch prices notwithstanding, hundreds of iPhone fans queued up late Thursday night to be among the first people in Singapore to own Apple’s latest gizmo – the iPhone 4S.

Although the launch time stated by all telcos was Friday 12 midnight, some began queuing as early as 8.30am on Thursday to ensure that they get a place in the queue.

Take Melva Yip, a 21-year-old student at Nanyang Polytechnic. He and his friend agreed to work in shifts and started their quest from 8.30am on Thursday. His reward: the first M1 customer to own an iPhone 4S.

A current iPhone 4 user, Yip is convinced that the 4S is a worthy upgrade. “I’m upgrading for the speed, for the camera,” he said.

Also in the M1 queue was 20-year-old Jayden Chen. He said, “What attracts me is the Siri function. I’m switching over from SingTel because I think there’s a lower chance of getting the phone fast with SingTel, as they’re going with a pre-order system.”

In comparison, M1 offered the iPhone 4S on a first-come-first-served basis.

But others were less willing to queue for the phone themselves. 27-year-old Amit Sawhney, who owns a construction materials manufacturing business, conveniently got his foreign worker to stand in line for him from 9.30am. As a result, he managed to be the first SingTel customer to own an iPhone 4S.

In addition to the launch of the physical handsets, SingTel also unveiled their exclusive apps for the iPhone 4S, including one which localises voice-controlled assistant Siri’s functionality in a separate app.

Called deF!NE, the app allows users to search their surroundings with familiar terms like “char kway teow”. A quick hands-on with the app shows that it’s nowhere near Siri’s polish, but still works well enough to be useful.

These apps could prove to be a key differentiator for the red telco, as the iPhone 4S is otherwise identical across the board.

Update: Record crowd turnout

According to M1, it was a “record turnout” crowd for the iPhone 4S, which dwarfed previous crowds for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS.

An estimated 750 people were in the Paragon queue on 27th October Thursday night.

Customers hoping to get an iPhone 4S at M1 outlets this weekend should check M1′s Facebook page for the latest updates on availability. Thus far, M1′s online store is all out of stock. The 64GB iPhone 4S model is also out of stock at all retail outlets.

Information for SingTel stores can be found on SingTel’s Facebook page, and updates and availability for StarHub on StarHub’s Facebook page.

(This story first appeared on Techtalk, our technology content partners at Yahoo! News Singapore, with additional updates by Chan Chi-Loong, Techgoondu. Photos courtesy of Yahoo! News Singapore)

Queue outside the Paragon for M1 on Thursday 27th October night

Queue outside Suntec Hall 4 for SingTel on Thursday 27th October night

The iPhone 4S might have disappointed many fans, and validated others of their move to Android, but it’s still a highly awaited smartphone to many people.

As the local launch dates draws near, both SingTel and M1 have already unveiled their plans and pricing for the new iPhone.

StarHub, on the other hand, is keeping mum over its plans for the device, and already some fans are speculating whether the green telco has failed to secure an agreement with Apple in time for the launch.

But let’s work with the numbers we already have. Based on the cheapest plan from both SingTel and M1, the new iPhone will cost you anywhere from $498 to $798.

M1 offers a lower monthly subscription and lower iPhone prices (with the exception of the 16GB version), but bundles 50 less SMS than SingTel.

SingTel might offer you 50 more SMS, but the prices are generally higher. You’ll have to pay $39.90 every month, $32 more than M1 for the 32GB iPhone 4S, and $28 more for the 64GB version.
If you don’t mind paying up to $205 every month, then you can get the 16GB and 32GB iPhone 4S for free from both telcos, with the 64GB still commanding at least $108.

M1 seems to be the clear winner here, with unlimited phone calls and unlimited data bundles for $198. SingTel, on the other hand, asks for $205 per month but restricts you to 2,000 minutes of calls and 30GB of data.

Now that the iPhone 4S will be hitting the streets, what’s going to happen to the iPhone 4?

M1 has not released renewed pricing for the iPhone 4 8GB, but it will be available at SingTel from $400 with the cheapest plan (iFlexi Lite at $39.90 per month), $120 for the next cheapest (iFlexi Value at $59.90 per month) and free for the more expensive plans.

If you prefer to buy the iPhone 4S without a telco plan, the prices will be significantly higher. But that might be the only option for those whose contracts with no end in sight. Retail pricing is available at the Apple online store.

Here are the full listings for SingTel:

And the full listings for M1:

In general, these prices are comparatively more expensive than the iPhone 4 when it launched, and could prove to be a major deterrent to consumers, especially those sitting on the fence about jumping to other platforms.

Update: StarHub has also revealed its pricing for the iPhone 4S.

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

As tributes pour in for one of the information world’s acknowledged geniuses, we thought it would only be right that we too remembered Steve Jobs for the way he changed computing for so many people.

His death this morning (Singapore time), when he was just 56, marked more than 20 years of endeavour to bring computing to the masses in a fun, accessible and imaginative way.

Not all his decisions and products went well with users, and not everything he touched turned to gold, but there is no doubt the former Apple CEO and founder of a company that created the iMac, iPhone and iPad had a profound influence in the way everyone used their digital gadgets today.

Here are four ways Steve has changed our computing lifestyles.

The way we use our PCs
Apple was the first to bring a graphical user interface (GUI) to the mainstream. For the first time, you didn’t have to know and remember complicated codes and commands just to operate a computer; you simply moved this incredible thing called the mouse cursor, point it at icons which clearly represented what their functions, and click. Computers went from cold, unfriendly machines to one which became the norm in every home – hence the term “personal computers (PCs)”. Bill Gates put a PC on every desk, but Apple made them fun.

The way we listen to music
Back in the Walkman days, did you ever think that some time in the future, you’ll be carrying 3,000 songs in your pocket? Sure, other MP3 players came before the iPod, but these were largely user-unfriendly. With iTunes and iPod, Apple opened our ears to portable music in a friendly and pretty package, with an easy way to edit and curate your music library. The iPod really took off when Apple released iTunes for Windows, proving that being open to other platforms has its benefits. And even though the iTunes Store never really reached countries like Singapore, it brought with it a new model of legal music downloads and an easy alternative to piracy.

The way we thought about smartphones
Whether you belong to the iPhone camp, the Android camp or any other smartphone camp, there’s no denying that the smartphone has been influenced by the iPhone. Before the first iPhone was launched in 2007, smartphones were clunky devices aimed at people like businessmen and verticals. They were complicated. With the iPhone, smartphones became fun, sensitive touch screens became the norm, and we all started to want a small computer in our pocket. Google responded by coming up with Android, and Microsoft had to do something to save their Windows Mobile. All because of a phone which didn’t even have a camera at launch.

The way we thought about tablets
It’s the iPhone all over again: before the iPad, tablet computers were clunky devices which sought to pile on features. Then Apple came along and showed how we didn’t have to torture our fingers for an interface built with the mouse in mind. People who didn’t even know what a tablet was became enamoured with the iPad, and it brought quick and causal computing to people who had never owned a computer before, whose iPads were their first PCs.

The end of an era
There are of course many questions floating around. What will Apple be like now that Steve is gone? Can successor Tim Cook continue Steve’s passion? But let’s put the speculation off for another day or so, and give our respects to the man who will no doubt become a legend in time to come.

Rest in peace, Steve. You’re a visionary, and you’ll be remembered.

Singaporeans are a cellphone-crazy lot. Even while on vacation, most will remain tethered to their smartphones, checking in from obscure locations to earn bragging rights and lapping up tips left behind by others. In this week’s app round-up, we review our favourite travel apps that will let you tap into all kind of information on the road.

Triposo, available from iTunes App Store, Android Market and Windows Phone Marketplace (Bangkok Guide only)
Move over Lonely Planet, there’s now an app developed by former Googlers that promises to give printed travel guides a run for their money. Developed by Jon Tirsen and Douwe Osinga, Triposo uses an algorithm that mixes, mashes and annotates free content from Wikitravel, Wikipedia, World66 and Openstreetmap to distill travel guides. Not surprisingly, its technology is similar to how search engines work, from crawling, parsing and matching content to relevance ranking and organising the data. If you are curious about how Triposo guides are put together, read a detailed explanation here.

For now, the Android version of the app has over 50 guides available for download, compared with just over 20 destinations for the iPhone and iPad apps. Once you fire up the app, search for guides to download based on continent, distance from your current location and from an A-to-Z listing. While some guides for cities like Bangkok are comprehensive, others are not. The Singapore guide, for example, only lists a handful of sights – albeit lesser known ones like the Poh Ern Shih Temple – that are strangely grouped under Symphony Lake at Botanic Gardens. The Night Life section is also skimpy, with Harry’s Bar as its only entry.

Wikitude, available from iTunes App Store and Android Market
Nominated as one of the best augmented reality (AR) browsers in 2010 by Augmented Planet blog which also organises conferences on the subject, Wikitude takes AR to its full potential by gathering information from sources such as Wikipedia, Twitter and Panoramio that have been tagged with location-based data. So, if you are standing in the middle of Orchard Road, use the app to get a run-down of the shopping belt’s history, malls, discounts and Twitter conversations in the area.

You can only select one source at a time, and view the relevant results represented as bubbles in the camera view. To read, say a Wikipedia article on Orchard Road, just tap on the Orchard Road bubble. But what happens if there are too many bubbles clustered on the camera view? In this case, switch to the map view to display the results on Google Maps, or list view to see the results as a list. For now, Wikitude remains a “consumption-based” app for perusing information contributed by others. Down the road, its developers should consider letting users contribute their own content by deepening the integration between the app and its data sources.

Trip Journal Lite, available from iTunes App Store and Android Market
Keeping a travel journal may sound a little old school to some folks. But decades later, a trip journal may well be a reflective record of your thoughts, experiences and memories for your posterity. Trip Journal is a nifty app that lets you trace your travels, pen notes as you stop at each point in your journey and snap images along the way.

Your can archive and share trips with others by exporting them as KMZ files to be viewed in Google Earth. Each KMZ file includes your trip route, photos, notes and checkpoints in the journey. There is a Facebook and Twitter export feature, too, that lets you send photos to Facebook and post your current location on Twitter. The app also includes a compass for finding your way around. As with all technology products, things get obsolete quickly. To ensure the memories are preserved, it’s important that the KMZ format that comprises the open-standard KML file and accompanying files like images, will continue to be supported by future software.

SGTaxi, available from Windows Phone Marketplace
SGTaxi is an amazing app that lets users book a taxi through the local SMS service with an elegant and intuitive interface. The app lets you save your most frequently-used locations and the ability to book a taxi with just one tap. For the privacy advocates out there, there’s also the option to not save your location at all, and manually enter them every time you want a booking. Made a booking that you don’t need any more? You can also cancel them from the app. SGTaxi currently only supports Comfort and SMRT taxi bookings. – Raymond Lau

iChangi, available from iTunes App Store, Android Market and Windows Phone Marketplace
Our Changi airport is no doubt one of the best airports out there; any Singaporean can attest to that. To top it off, Singapore is a small place and visiting the airport just for fun is a viable option. You can search and track flights for both arrivals and departures, and check out the shopping and dining options in the airport. The app also updates itself with latest airport highlights, such as the Angry Birds Finnair flight, or promotions like the ongoing $10 set lunches. General information about the airport, such as inter-terminal transfer, directions to and from the airport, and customs information, are also available in-app. - Raymond Lau

Kayak flight & hotel search, available from iTunes App Store, Android Market and Windows Phone Marketplace
For those not familiar with Kayak, it’s an online service which lets users search and compare the prices of flights, rental cars, hotels, cruises and travel packages across hundreds of travel sites. Booking can also be made directly through the app. Plus, if you fly frequently, Kayak lets you track flights and manage your itinerary right from within the app. And it doesn’t hurt that Kayak is a beautifully designed app with great transition animations. On the downside, the app is not completely localised: prices are displayed in US dollars, for one. - Raymond Lau

Kyoto NouryouYuka, available from Android Market
Sure, you can look up Tripadvisor and find a restaurant in Kyoto, but you’d realise that 1) there are many reviews in Japanese (because it’s popular to domestic travellers as well) and 2) the information is often not up to date.

One app that I turned to when I was in Kyoto earlier this year was the English-based Kyoto NouryouYuka, which I stumbled upon while searching for a localised app to show me some nice places for dinner, complete with the standard information like address, opening hours and perhaps even a nice picture or two of the place.

Besides letting you search up a restaurant quickly, this app also has all the useful buttons that give you one-touch access to call the restaurant and even to call a taxi easily. It really helped us when our taxi driver was lost in one of the side streets of the wonderful Japanese city and could not find a restaurant where we had made a dinner booking at. He could easily just speak to the restaurant staff because we first knew how to call the place with the app!

This wonderful app even lists the restaurants according to the cuisine they serve. There’s Japanese, of course, then “Kyoto” which signifies that an eatery serves the city’s famed cuisine, and even French, for when you feel like something different while on holiday there. – Alfred Siew

Hotels.com, available from Android Market
This is the mobile app to one of my favourite online hotels booking sites. Why do I use Hotels.com? It’s almost always one of the cheapest – along with Expedia.com – and has access to more than 130,000 hotels in 200 countries.

Like many other hotel booking apps, this lets you search for a place to spend the night in and book the hotel right on your smartphone. There are also reviews and ratings from fellow travellers, so at least you get a preview of what others have experienced.

This app is excellent for those who travel without their laptops and use their smartphones to do everything on the go.

I say this especially for folks who often forget to bring hotel vouchers or confirmation letters with them – some places still require that besides your passport. This app lets you access your reservations with your phone so that at least you can bring up a confirmation screen to show to the front desk staff and get checked in quickly. Handy, especially after a long haul flight. – Alfred Siew

Hong Kong’s getting the real deal this weekend, and it comes in the form of huge Apple Store right smack in Central. And the curtains have literally come off. MIC Gadget has the scoop on that and has photos of … people taking photos of the store. Plus photos of the store.

At 20,000 sq feet spread across two floors, in one of the most expensive malls in Hong Kong – it sure sounds like a lot of money until you think about the US$7 billion in profits that the company raked in in a quarter.

Anyway, what CAN the average Apple fanboy/girl do at an Apple Store.

He/She could of course buy and learn how to use an Apple product. Get tech support from the beer-less Genius Bar. Sit in their many workshops to learn how to use their apps. And of course chat up fellow Apple fanboys/girls – where else would they rather be?

Oh but wait, can this be? Apple has JOBS in Hong Kong! No, not Steve himself, but salary-paying jobs. I can already hear the Magic Mice clicks and the frantic Magic Trackpad taps. They still have positions open – which leaves me wondering … have they already sucked up all the Geniuses in this Special Administrative Region?

No promises, but Techgoondu’s Hong Kong correspondent might just brave the Applemania this weekend to bring you some snaps of the madness.

You stand in a dimly-lit, musty tomb holding your iPhone like a beacon aloft.

Its light illuminates a 2,000-year old terracotta warrior from the Qin dynasty that scowls menancingly at you.

Trembling, you reach out to touch it, but your fingers swipe only empty air.

The stone warrior exists only in the figment of the virtual ether. You’re experiencing the latest exhibition — Terracotta Warriors — at the Asian Civilizations Museum (ACM), which runs from 24th June to 16th October 2011.

Blending the virtual and the real

Using augmented reality (AR) and interactive storytelling, the exhibition uses visitors’ iPhones to experience the exhibition in a more engaging, visceral way.

Simply aim your iPhone’s camera at special AR markers littered throughout the exhibition — which just look like hieroglyphs — and you can see life-like animated scenes that look real from any angle.

Said T.Sundraraj, deputy director of programmes and audience development at the Asian Civilization Museum, in the show briefing today: “We wanted to offer visitors a novel multi-sensory experience.”

The technology vendor behind the magic of this exhibition is local digital and gaming company Magma Studios, who put together the storytelling, art and technology to make this possible.

According to creative director Chris Jones from Magma Studios, this “Teracotta Warriors” museum exhibition is the first in the world to use vision-based AR — the magic behind making it look real on a live video feed — and interactive storytelling at one go.

Visitors simply download the free 20MB ACM Terracotta Warriors iPhone app prior to entering the exhibition. Since the app is keyed to visual AR markers at the exhibition, you can only experience it when you’re at the museum.

The benefit of doing it this way is that no connectivity is needed during the exhibition itself — everything runs off the phone — and the experience cannot be messed up by our sometimes congested 3G networks in Singapore.

Fusing all the disparate software bits — like String, the vision-based AR software used, and Unity3D, a web-based 3D-renderer — together with artwork, storyline and interactive games under 20MB in one iOS app in six weeks(!) was an insane challenge for Chris and team, which they must have labored crazily to surmount the deadline.

The end result is a really impressive experience, and the AR looks lifelike and truly 3D on the iPhone from any angle (as long as the marker is visible by the camera). I’ve seen some AR demos by education institutions and research departments of tech vendors, and this particular AR app has them beat in terms of eye-popping visuals.

The only drawback is that, as an Android user, I won’t get to play with the cool app on my HTC Desire.

According to Chris, coding for the Android platform — for now — would have posed “significant technology challenges”, but could be done some day in the future as more AR SDKs support Android.

On ACM’s end, they are waiting to see if AR as an interactive storytelling device is popular with the museum audience. If so, they will consider extending it to the rest of the permanent exhibits at ACM.

ACM’s deputy director T.Sundraraj declined to comment on the cost of this pilot app, but said that it is important to try new things to make the museum experience more immersive.

“It’s how we imprint ourselves in the minds of our customers,” he said.

We already know how great the large-screen smartphone or tablet computer is as a remote controller to play music or movies from your PC server. Now, there’s also an iOS app that lets you control your Xerox machine and send documents to print – directly from your handheld device.

Unveiled today by Fuji Xerox, the free app on Apple’s AppStore enables users to do what many smartphone users often can’t do after viewing a document – print it.

With the app, they get to select the print mode (say, for a photo or webpage) and print settings, like whether to print in mono or colour, and to select which paper tray and paper type. In other words, a whole lot of features you’d expect from the print menu from your PC, whether you actually use them or not.

What’s more interesting is the multi-language support, which includes Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean, besides English, so the app will be great for East Asian users.

On its own, the app is no big deal unless you’re an iPhone/iPad user who happens to have a Xerox machine nearby. However, it’s yet another sign of the smartphone taking over remote control functions where it traditionally was not well-known for.

Get rewarded for running in Singapore. No payments, no onerous marketing sign-ups. Just put on your jogging shoes and run.

If you like to run, or better yet, you want to get some motivation to get fit, simply sign up at local non-profit site Liverun.sg and use their iPhone app to track your runs.

I had the chance to interview Liverun.sg founders Jeffrey Chan, 27 and Ignatius Ong, 28 on the craziness of running a pure non-profit(!) site exhorting Singaporeans to run.

“Yeah, many of our friends thought we were mad when we started up the site,” said Jeffrey wryly.

The idea for the site came last year in March 2009 when the two idealists and run enthusiasts were dreaming up fun projects of what they could do to improve the world and were passionate about.

Ignatius, who was then working at ST Electronics, always wondered why it was so difficult to get people to run.
“I used to orgnanize runs but people didn’t want to go,” he said. “No motivation.”

So they surveyed their friends to brainstorm what is the best way to reach out to couch potato Singaporeans and hit upon the idea of an iPhone application tied with a rewards scheme.

But that costs money, and even dreams need to take a backseat to pragmatism. So the idea was shelved for a while whilst the two left their jobs to start-up their own web and mobile application design company, also named Live Run.

This year, with their bread-and-butter issues taken care of, Jeffrey and Ignatius decided to go back to their original dream and put together a site to get Singaporeans off their asses and running.

Run, Singapore, Run

Even though it was just soft-launched in October, the site has currently gained 500-odd members. The Liverun.sg founders hope to gain 1,500 members by the end of this year.

Running the project costs around S$10K for a year, said Jeffrey. By leveraging their business contacts, they hope to defray the costs through merchant tie-ups and giveaways.

For example, they are tying up with Velocity — Singapore’s first sports-themed mall, which is situated at Novena — in December to launch a run lab of sorts, and they hope to get them to sponsor vouchers.

To me, a non-profit initiative like this would be an ideal tie-up with our Health Promotion Board (HPB), which is a Singapore government agency that looks at healthy living in Singapore. Of course, the duo tried this route, but whilst they are waiting for bureaucrats to say yes, they decided not to wait.

With many popular running mobile applications already available like Run Keeper, how would Liverun.sg compare?

The answer is that they can’t be compared fairly because the apps serve different purposes. Run Keeper is a professional tool for tracking your runs and the Liverun.sg is a non-profit site that aims to get Singaporeans running by giving freebies.

“We know of runners who use a variety of apps, so feel free to use both,” said Jeffrey.

Whatever it is, the site will be deemed a success in the eyes of the founders if they get Singaporeans out there and running.

Emails like this one from Rdmacalindong, whom Jeffrey shared with me, is the kind of feedback the two love.

The email says: “Goodluck to you guys! Im really looking forward to using LiveRun app.. This is my best motivation ever! =)”