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.
Singapore’s mapping start-up Gothere.sg launched their new iPhone application about exactly a week ago. I had the pleasure of catching up with Junhan, one of Gothere’s founders, to get both a demo of their app and a status update of what they’ve been doing.
Firstly, below are some YouTube videos that the scrappy Gothere guys have put up on the Interwebs to explain what their app is about:
Basically it’s a front end client app on iPhone that extends their already popular Gothere.sg site. I’m don’t own an iPhone (I have a HTC Desire and am on the Android platform), but in the preview session that Junhan demoed the app to me and a few other work colleagues on the iPhone 4, I found the app to be excellent.
Everything that I liked about Gothere.sg — various driving public transport suggestions + estimated costs (e.g. avoiding ERP gantrys), trip summaries, smart autocompletion of search locations, etc. — had been shrunk down into one portable app. And the best thing is that the price point of S$1.99 for the app is something that is very affordable.
Trust Adobe to hold a regional briefing on Flash on the day the Apple iPhone 4 was launched. The date, of course, had added significance now that Steve Jobs and co. have decided not to support Flash at all in any of its iPhones or iPads.
Despite that, Adobe predicts that 53 per cent of the more than 300 million smartphones to ship by 2012 will sport its Flash software to show off multimedia websites on the small screen. Currently, only 9 per cent of the less than 50 million smartphones have Flash.
This is a daring prediction, given that only a small number of Android Froyo 2.2 handsets – mainly the Google Nexus One – support Flash on the go. Other Android handsets such as the Motorola Droid/Milestone and HTC Desire are being updated in the coming months. …
Firstly, a big thank you to all the fans and supporters of our scrappy little blog here.
Thanks to all the attendees who took the time and effort to come down to Techgoondu’s first indepedent and wireless event UNWIRED last Thursday 27 May at the Singapore Management University.
Time for a little shameless plug here.
Organised by chief goondu Alfred Siew, the event was a success due to the excellent crowd and overall quality of speakers. Registered attendees numbered over a hundred-odd, and there were lots of friends from both media and PR in attendance. For a first-time event that no one had heard of a month and a half back, it certainly met and exceeded some of our attendees’ expectations.
Said Daniel Goh, PR and media manager at Samsung Asia, and owner of the excellent start-up blog YoungUpstarts: “I’m quite surprised with the crowd. They actually asked a lot of questions!”
There were so many questions being asked that time overran on many of the sessions on that day.
Alf will probably add on a blog post on this baby of his, but I thought I would do a quick wrap-up of the “Mobile applications: the future driver of wireless technologies?” panel that I moderated.
The internet is abuzz with Apple’s lawsuit today in the US, claiming that HTC has infringed about 20 of their patents. Gizmodo has an excellent breaking story of this, and they quote responses from both the Apple and HTC camps.
If successful, Apple’s action will get HTC’s phones banned — both Androids and Windows Mobiles — from being sold in the US, and be awarded “treble damages” and “interest at the maximum rate allowable by law”. Going by the list of patents Apple is whacking HTC for, it sure sounds like a hit job. It’s a big middle finger to the mobile phone industry not to mess with Apple, which had already tussled with Nokia in lawsuits late last year.
Not going to rehash the newspoints that you can find covered betterelsewhere, but just some quick comments of my own.
Apple did shake up the mobile phone industry when it debuted with the iPhone in 2007, which birthed the touch phone genre. I can’t even remember when was the last recent phone I reviewed that was not a touch phone, so for this we have Apple to thank.
But of course the rest of the mobile manufacturers fought back, and this led to a flourishing touch phone market. End result: More choice for consumers, and Asian brands like HTC and Samsung are doing well in the touch phone space.
So of course Apple nips it in the bud by throwing roadblocks at the competition, namely number two (Nokia) and three (HTC). And with Android gaining fast ascendance, whack the phone manufacturer, i.e. HTC, which has rolled out the most Android phones thus far. Doh!
What these lawsuits will do: Not very much, I predict. Even if Apple gets its way, the US is not the only phone market in the world. In Asia alone, mobiles are huge, and we have two of the world’s most populous nations — India and China — in our patch.
I thought so too – so I tried out the latest Google Mobile App‘s voice search feature on my Nokia E71 (which means the S60 flavour of the app).
The app is basically kinda like a one-stop-shop to quickly link to and search through Google stuff, so you will need a data connection (wifi or cellphone network), and the other mobile apps (Gmail, Google Maps etc) loaded if you want to fire it up from the above home screen.
If you enable its location-based function, it’s supposed to yield more relevant results. But it didn’t seem to do anything for me in terms of returning more relevant search results so I shut that feature off.
Early images of China Mobile’s Ophone has surfaced in recent days. Lest you think this is another iPhone rip-off, the Ophone is being made by Lenovo, and will use China Mobile’s Android-based OMS (Open Mobile System) to be launched by the second quarter of 2009.
So far, very little is known about the phone’s full specs, apart from a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash, a Marvell 624MHz processor, a microSD card slot and a mini USB connector. It is expected to work on China Mobile’s homegrown TD-SCDMA network.
OMS is built by Borqs, a Chinese mobile platform developer, and can operate on TD-SCDMA/EDGE/GSM networks. Chinese new reports have indicated that China Mobile will not mandate the use of OMS exclusively on TD-SCDMA handsets, preferring to leave the decision to handset makers.
Local newspaper Apple Daily has reported yesterday (see the 27th Sep edition if you read traditional Chinese) that parallel imported iPhone 3Gs here in Hong Kong are now priced between HK$4,780 (SG$878) to HK$4,880, while the 16GB version is between HK$5,780 (SG$1061) to HK$6,080.
That’s HK$620 or about SG$114 less than what the HK Apple Store is selling the 8GB version for.
The cons of saving that bit of money are – no local warranty, and the article reports that most of the parallel imported iPhones, which are from the US, have a SIM slot that is slightly different and requires the addition of a copper piece to make local SIMs (HK and SG SIMs are the same) fit. I’d presume the US SIM slots are larger? Oh, and they’d probably have to be unlocked via ZiPhone or similar iPhone unlocking software, which should be a simple two and a half minute process if its similar to what I had to do with the 2.5G iPhone.
In any case, don’t hold your breath for these HK phone dealers to drop their prices any further. The article reports that they are still seeing brisk sales, and they are expecting loads of iPhone buyers from China over the upcoming “Golden Week” holiday.
Albert posted in a comment to this post that the iPhone 3G can be had for SG$800 in Beijing, so HK certainly isn’t the cheapest!
Well, sure beats the HK$8000-9000 that they were costing when they were first parallel imported here!
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