Take a look at a current one involving free iPads for beta testing :

The difficulty lies in telling whether a freebie giveaway is a scam sometimes. Some are scams, and some are supposedly real contests giving out free iPads, like the one here at freeipadgear.

When in doubt, it’s probably wise to reconsider: If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

The anti-virus (AV) market is increasingly getting to be a difficult business for market incumbents.

The top players in this space — notably Symantec’s Norton and McAffee, followed by Trend Micro — have seen their market shares taken on by a slew of smaller competitors in the market, including Kaspersky Labs, ESET, Panda, AVAST and AVG, amongst others.

What’s more interesting is that some of these AV solutions from these smaller firms are good, and might even be better than the incumbents, if you can believe the latest anti-virus comparisons released by Anti-Malware Test Labs just about a week ago. Anti-Malware Test Labs is a Russian independent security research firm that is not affiliated to any software vendor, and has shared AV comparison tests with the public since 2007.

According to them, both DrWeb and Kaspersky, both Russia-based AV solutions, topped the list of the 17 AV software vendors. More than half the vendors flunked the comparison test as they didn’t defend against enough virus attacks in the testing.

The results, especially if you delve into the methodology, seem quite vigorous. Although to an observer like me far away it’s interesting to see that two Russian anti-virus firms topped the list.

Another interesting tidbit I spotted: Microsoft Security Essentials clocked in at second place (tied with Czech-based AVAST), which isn’t bad in terms of performance. Now, with Microsoft throwing their weight into this area and offering their security solutions for free, this is really going to put the squeeze on the AV space. No wonder the old guard software security firms are fleeing this area, and are looking at new pastures.

In any case, if you’re looking to purchase an anti-virus solution it makes sense to check out Anti-Malware Test Lab, AV-Comparatives.org, VB100 or ISCA Labs, which are some independent AV and security testing research firms in this space.

What’s an anti-virus security software company like Trend Micro got to do with clouds?

Well, they believe that the next big IT disruption will be cloud computing. Moving into security for clouds is thus a necessary evolution path for the 21-year old software security company.

After their Asia Pacific media day conference in Macau today this point was made really clear. Let me explain.

Customers rightly expect the software they’ve bought to just work. Security should be baked into the product rather than bolted on as an additional cost. The good news is that we’re moving towards this trend, e.g. operating systems bundled with anti-virus and firewalls, etc.

Thus, security companies are getting bought up left and right by telcos, networking companies, software giants and middleware players (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle, Google) and incorporated into the IT infrastructure.

However, as a mid-sized IT software MNC in the security space, what are your plans? Hope to get bought out, ride the market on existing products, or try to carve up new territories to play in?

Trend Micro chose the later. With the anti-virus software business becoming an evolutionary dead-end in the future that will not provide much growth, why not use this time to bridge out into new markets?

Cloudy with a chance of striking the jackpot

For Trend Micro, they believe it lies in security for clouds (both private and public).

In April last year, Trend Micro acquired Third Brigade, one of the pioneers that looked at providing security for the nascent cloud industry. According to CEO Eva Chen, they had been reselling Third Brigade’s solutions for about eighteen months before deciding to acquire the company. Third Brigade does a lot of work with VMWare to provide security solutions to their virtualization platforms, and this seems like a sound business model (virtualization is a no-brainer, as I’ve said before).

I talked to Oscar Chang, the Chief Development Officer and R&D head honcho at Trend, about the recent acquisitions in the last two years their competitors were making, like Symantec buying MessageLabs and McAffee buying MXLogic, both email SaaS security players.

His comment was simply “We looked into it, but do we really want to do just email?” His fervant belief is that as we move into a world where more apps get virtualized into clouds, companies will start to outsource their apps elsewhere. Including things like email, which is just one example of an app. So rather than concentrate on one app, look at the broader underlying trends — virtualization and clouds.

I buy the vision, and I think Trend Micro has a good read on the long term trends. Kudos to them for also trying to stake a thought leadership position (hence the media day!) in this area.

However, short term, it won’t be that smooth of course. The market is not yet ready, and needs time to mature. Trend Micro’s anti-virus business and the cloud security business doesn’t seem to have any synergy, and probably needs to be run separately (with different channel partners, etc.)

Another interesting point: CEO Eva Chen believes that a lot of cloud infrastructure will be driven by government investment. In particular, by Asian countries like China, because a national cloud infrastructure will be immensely useful to tech start-ups and SMBs.

And being an Asian MNC that is headquartered in Tokyo, she believes that Trend Micro has a good understanding of the geography and culture of the region. Food for thought.

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:

At the opening of the yearly trade show today, the Singapore Government said it was looking into stronger, two-factor authentication for gov’t e-services, as part of what it calls the National Authentication Framework.

This means all those far-from-secure transactions that you have been performing on government websites will be a thing of the past. With the security provided by two-factor authentication, like what you use on online banking now, the Government intends to put in more “sensitive” apps in future.

In future, you’d likely have to not just key in a password, but also to key in a second password shown on a cellphone SMS or perhaps on a security token. Maybe, who knows, a fingerprint scan might not be out of order if prices for these scanners drop in future.

In any case, the IDA is to call for tenders in the next six months. But right now, the details are a little sketchy.

The date is not set for rolling out yet. Plus, what transactions can you do on it, for example (IDA said at a press conference today that perhaps you can even transfer CPF funds to pay for your flat – but will CPF allow it!)?

But who knows, when this more secure method for logging in is up, you might just not be feeling that scary feeling when logging in with that SingPass (which someone can sniff or easily guess) any more.