SingTel is going to lead a pilot project to explore ways to telecommute and have flexible work arrangements, with the hopes of drawing an estimated 326,000 “economically inactive” Singaporeans back into the workforce.

By sending a modest 30 employees from five companies back to their own homes, the study aims to assess the viability of telecommuting on a larger scale and identify the problems that may arise out of such a work culture. …

If you ask the towkays of many small and medium enterprises in Singapore if they had some of their most important data backed up, chances are they would give a blank look (“what’s backup?”) or say they have a network drive that they save everything in.

The reason why they haven’t put their customer contacts, invoices and blueprints – the very lifeblood of their businesses – in more secure places is often cost, or the lack of know-how. In particular, small companies often don’t have the manpower to plan for business continuity, should a fire or flood hit the office, or even if a user accidentally erases data on a server.

This is where Singapore backup firm Kronicles is proposing to come in with its backup service, which offers both local and remote backup of customers’ most important data.

Unveiled today, this “backup as a service” is offered from S$5,000 a month (down to under S$2,000 after Singapore government tax rebates for using innovation) and uses Quantum tapes to keep up to three copies of the most recent data. …