Millions of messages fly above our heads every second, each one akin to a grenade lobbed into an instant messaging (IM) competitor’s camp. Although WhatsApp remains the most popular mobile IM client in Singapore, other up-and-rising stars, such as LINE, WeChat, and KakaoTalk, are starting to make their aggressive moves in Southeast Asia.

In this impending war for your messages, one lesser known app is slowly making its move in Southeast Asia. Nimbuzz, which just hit 150 million users worldwide in March, started out as an aggregator of various chat services, such as Google Talk and Skype, and is now also setting its sights on the lucrative Southeast Asian market.

Techgoondu recently sat down with Joby Babu, chief of operations at Nimbuzz (pictured above), to find out more about the company and the state of mobile instant messaging in general. …

Ask anyone who just bought a newfangled smartphone in recent weeks, and chances are he might take out a Samsung, HTC or Apple gadget from his pocket.

What’s the future then for the forgotten BlackBerry, once a must-have for corporate workers, but now a laggard in the smartphone wars?

In the last quarter, the company sold just 6 million phones – the lowest in years – but it managed a profit of US$94 million. Even better yet, it managed to sell a million of the new Z10 touch-screen phone, which BlackBerry has pinned much hope on.

Techgoondu got in touch with Hastings Singh, BlackBerry’s vice president and managing director for South Asia (picture above), to look for signs of a turnaround in 2013. …

This holiday season, more shopping is carried out over smartphones than ever before, as people seek to beat the queue and turn to the device they trust the most.

Just how do online merchants and other companies keep their websites accessible during rush hour and despite the frequently clogged mobile networks?

Techgoondu recently caught up with Ravi Maira, vice president of site performance products for Akamai Technologies. The Internet content distribution network, known more for its caching of Internet content all over the work for smooth distribution, believes its smart network technologies will make surfing and buying things on the mobile much easier.  …

Most IT head honchos would cringe at the prospect of allowing employees to use their own personal devices for work. After all, that means giving up the tight control that employers have always had over devices that connect to corporate networks, while facing the risk of corporate data falling into the wrong hands through lost or stolen devices.

Yet, more employees are yearning to use their own personal devices for work. A survey by VMware revealed that over 50 per cent of employees in Singapore already use their own devices for work-related purposes, whether their companies have a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy or not. …

Laptops will soon flip, swivel and rotate to give you both a traditional clamshell design to type on as well as a touch screen to dab at when you’re on a plane, for example.

Just how do PC makers see their role in this so-called “post-PC” era when users are expected to drastically change the way they interact with these devices? We spoke with Jessie Quek of Lenovo to find out what to expect, starting from the next few exciting months. …

(image courtesy of wordle)

Nearly all businesses rely on information to be competitive and efficient, but just how much do companies spend on protecting the information they own?

According to a recent Symantec “state-of-information” survey, corporate information is costing businesses worldwide US$1.1 trillion each year.

SMBs are also spending more per employee at US$3,670, as opposed to US$3,297 among enterprises. The survey received 4,506 responses in 38 countries, including 200 responses from Singapore. …

From frequent dropped calls to impossibly slow Internet connections, the problems with increasingly congested airwaves are prompting some industry experts to ask if there will ever be enough frequency spectrum to dump more data on 3G and LTE (long term evolution) networks.

Now, some are advocating moving some of that data to less congested wireless networks, such as public Wi-Fi hotspots. Dropbox files or less urgent app updates, for example, can be handed over to these faster and freer lanes in the cyber highway, according to an increasingly popular view on building future wireless networks.

One of its proponents is Aled Tien, who is Motorola Solutions’ lead for the Asia-Pacific vertical market for telecom operators. The veteran of the industry has worked on wireless systems for 25 years, starting with AT&T in the United States and including stints at Lucent Technologies in China and Southeast Asia.

A speaker in this year’s Unwired 2012 conference, he joined Motorola Solutions in 2009. In this month’s Q&A with Techgoondu, he argues how Wi-Fi offload can help telcos alleviate the jam in the sky.

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Downloads are never too fast. Webpages cannot load quickly enough, and that YouTube video should have streamed five seconds ago.

If that sounds like a typical day for a smartphone user, it is partly because of the explosion of mobile broadband data in the past few years, which has telecom operators struggling to cope with the demand for more bandwidth.

With users updating their Facebook status every other minute and worse, when machines start “talking” to one another to transmit, say, sensor data of an impending flood, how can mobile networks cope?

Techgoondu had a quick Q&A with StarHub’s chief technology officer, Mock Pak Lum, to find out more. A veteran of the industry, Mock has been the CEO of 1-Net, Singapore’s broadband exchange, and has had stints in Hewlett-Packard and MediaCorp.

He will be speaking at next week’s UNWIRED 2012 conference in a panel discussion on Adding Network Smarts.  …

The newly-opened up broadband market in Singapore has seen the entry of new players such as MyRepublic, which promises to cater to niche markets such as gamers with its differentiated fibre broadband offerings.

Just how do these smaller players get their game going and can they continue to prosper as the Big Three telcos in Singapore slash prices in an all-out fibre broadband war?

In this month’s Q&A, we speak to Malcolm Rodrigues, the CEO and co-founder of MyRepublic, the new kid on the block in the broadband market, for his views. …

As more companies jump on the enterprise mobility bandwagon, security has become a prime concern among CIOs. According to a recent Symantec study, businesses are incurring hefty losses due to mobility-related security incidents. Still, many companies remain convinced that the productivity benefits of mobility outweigh the costs, and have taken measures to protect corporate information.

In this month’s Goondu Q&A, we asked David Dzienciol, Symantec’s vice president for channel sales and SMB in Asia Pacific and Japan, to delve deeper into the motivations behind the uptake of enterprise mobility and what companies can do to protect their data from prying eyes. …