UNWIRED, Singapore’s first and only independent wireless and mobile conference, returned for a second run last Thursday, and saw the attendance of top-level executives from the relevant industries from across Southeast Asia.

Opened by the Infocomm Development Authority’s assistance chief executive Khoong Hock Yun, it featured half a day’s discussion on hot topics affecting the industry and its users.

From Singapore’s expected move to next generation mobile broadband (4G/LTE) to the rise of mobile computing and winning features of a mobile operating system, the conference was packed with fresh insights from a who’s who list of the country’s industry experts, who fielded a number of questions from the audience. …

After a six month investigation in cooperation with Microsoft’s Counterfeit Investigation unit, the Singapore police last week seized over a thousand pieces of pirated Microsoft software as well as twelve tablet PCs that had unlicensed Windows 7 installed.

The police raided warehouses in Changi, Pasir Ris, Chinatown and Bukit Batok to uncover a covert counterfeit software ring that operates across China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia.

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Fortune published its list of the Most Admired companies in the world earlier this month, and BrandFinance just followed suit with its list of the 500 world’s more valuable brands, measured with a different methodology. Surprisingly, this list is rather different from Fortune’s; more technology companies made it into the top ten, and (gasp!) Microsoft is ranked higher than Apple! …

Microsoft officially took the wraps off the final version of Internet Explorer 9 in Singapore today. We’ve reviewed the beta previously, and nothing earth-shattering has been added since then. The spanking new browser saw mainly performance tweaks and interoperability enhancements in its final version. …

Microsoft is stepping up its efforts to wean the world off Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). A new website has been created by the Redmond company just to watch the aging browser die. …

Fortune magazine has released their list of Top 50 Most Admired Companies for the year 2011, and Apple tops the list for the fourth consecutive year. Other technology companies in the Top 10 are Google (No. 2), Amazon.com (No. 7), and Microsoft (No. 9).  …

Windows 7 Service Pack 1 will hit the download servers starting today, according to Microsoft. The software giant released the final release of Windows 7 SP1 to OEM partners earlier on February 9, followed by MSDN customers, Technet subscribers and volume licensing customers on February 16.

The first service pack for Windows 7, Microsoft’s fastest selling operating system, includes updates that were previously available through Windows Update. It also features client-side support for RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory, which are two new virtualization features enabled in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. …

Just days after Nokia and Microsoft joined hands in a bid to rein in the momentum that Google and Apple have rolled up in the smartphone market, the first piece of bad news has hit home – the first Nokia-branded Windows Phone devices won’t be out until 2012.

The news came from a Finnish interview with Nokia’s board chairman, Jorma Ollila, who contradicted his CEO Stephen Elop’s earlier estimation that the first such phones would appear by the end of this year. …

In the few hours after technology behemoths Microsoft and Nokia unveiled one of the most dramatic partnerships in years to take on rivals Google and Apple, terms like MicroKia, Noksoft and NoWin have quickly become popular sarcastic phrases for tech pundits predicting a doomed marriage.

As if the two new allies needed reminding, the jokes are a measure of how uncertain the future is for two companies playing catchup in the smartphone game, despite a deal that seems, on paper, to be joining their still considerable powers to crawl back their rivals’ leads. …

All major tech vendors lobby the government.

“You are either on the train or you’re off the train,” said Rodrigo Becerra Mizuno, managing director for worldwide e-government at Microsoft matter-of-factly. He was speaking at the first Asian GovCamp held in Singapore last week at the National University of Singapore’s Institute of System Sciences.

Modeled after the often kooky, sometimes enlightening, always chaotic grassroots-style user-generated BarCamp, GovCamp is a Microsoft sponsored campaign to “be part of the [government] conversation” according to Rodrigo. In other words, it is a marketing campaign to develop good government relations. …