If you’re a repeat visitor to Techgoondu, you’ll no doubt have noticed the look and feel of the site has changed. Try it out and let us know what you think!

It’s the third incarnation of Techgoondu since our inception more than 18 months ago, but you’ll notice that our tagline remains the same: The revolution has begun.

That tagline has a special relevance to us (more on this later!), but most importantly the site wouldn’t exist if not for you, our readers.

What started out as an experiment in blogging and social media — as this old post by Boon Kiat aptly put when Techgoondu turned one — has taken a life of its own.

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?

Our first meet-the-techgoondus event at Geek Terminal last night

Firstly, a big thank you to the folks who took time out of their busy lives to come down for our first meet-the-techgoondus event last night. We hope you had fun, learnt something, and made some useful contacts.

Originally I had a crowd of about 20 to 25 in mind when I first planned this session, but it seems that word-of-mouth was so good that we roughly doubled that amount.

Besides the seven start-ups who did present their stuff in an informal unconference-styled event, we had a smattering of interested attendees from PR agencies, vendor brands, fellow bloggers (a shoutout to Daniel and Chinmay from Tech65), traditional media, analysts, Web2.0 community activists, and interested kay-poh friends.

Start-ups who presented include:

Interested in free publicity? Techgoondu is organizing a “Meet the Techgoondus” session next month on March 10th (Tuesday) for tech startups in Singapore.

The reason we’re doing this is because start-ups make for great stories but often they don’t get enough notice. Also, it’s a fun way to build a bottom up grassroots tech community in Singapore.

First, a group picture of who we are. Wanted to find a way to tag individuals, like in Facebook, so I used Phlook. For those that have not heard of them, Phlook is a pretty cool Singapore-based social platform start up that allows you to manipulate and share photos.

Use the “notes” function in the sidebar to see the tagging.

A photo of the Techgoondu folks in our last meetup where this idea was hatched. Unfortunately, both Roland and Stephanie are missing.

We hate to eat our own words.

Unfortunately, in this case, we have to. Techgoondu is off creative commons, an initiative I pushed for a few months back.

Even though many of us here at Techgoondu champion creative commons, after talking to some lawyer friends we realized that we can’t follow it to the letter.

In spirit, everything I wrote remains true — I believe that some forms of content should be free, and many of the Techgoondu posters do as well.

However, in practice, with content mashed-up from sites and vendors (e.g. photos of mobile phones, etc.) that are not under creative commons, we can’t offer our content under this license.

Legally, it exposes us to the liability of being sued even though we’re not for profit. Seeing that it is exceedingly difficult to run a chapalang tech news blog site with the freshest, kookiest stories for our readers with a blanket creative commons restriction, we have decided not to run with it.

Even though we could offer our analysis and stories for free re-distribution, without pictures and other content we take from others, we’re doing a disfavour to our readers. Apologies to all creative commons fans out there.

What’s a geek to do before Christmas? Buy a Techgoondu-approved gift to make others – and ourselves – happy of course. Granted, this year-end is shaping up to be more austere than the past few with the financial downturn already upon us. But austerity driving shouldn’t mean no giving for Christmas, right? So here’s a list of diverse geek gifts mooted by us, and we promise it is a cool one:

by Kevin Lim (theory.isthereason.com), for creativecommonssingapore.wordpress.com

We’ve moved Techgoondu’s content to the Creative Commons 3.0 License (Singapore).

This basically means that as long as you attribute to the source (i.e.Techgoondu), feel free to copy and mash-up any of the content here as you see fit. You can see this license on our front page on the right-hand sidebar.

Why are we doing this?

We’re not deluded enough to think our content is popular enough that it will run into some legal issues over copyright. Far from it. In fact if you take stuff, we’ll be more than flattered.

The whole exercise is more about making a point: content like this should be free, and we are stating upfront we have no issues with that, now and in the future.

Call it a reaction to our backgrounds in media, where “content protection” is the norm. That is not the way the world is heading, and not the way we believe information should be handled. Many of us here at Techgoondu are open source advocates anyway, so we should walk-the-talk, so to speak.

Besides, the site was set up on passion to find an alternative tech voice outside our work, and profit is not on our high list of priorities for Techgoondu.

If you have a good tech blog in Singapore, we’d love to RSS feed your content in a sidebar on our site. I believe it serves the Singaporean readers out there better. Drop us an email.

Thanks to this Tech65.org post for sparking this idea.

I often hear laments from my friends about the dead tech innovation scene in Singapore.

“There is nothing new in tech coming out of Singapore”, they cry. Singaporeans in IT are nothing but glorified tech sales and marketeers for big name MNCs who have set up shop in this little dot that we call home. Or, they work for GLCs (government linked companies) or statuary boards trying to copy technology from elsewhere. And failing miserably on innovation.

Contrary to the belief that Singapore has no tech innovation and we only have Creative to talk about (and that was before its star started falling), there are lots of interesting small tech start-ups here. We have a bevy of innovators experimenting with business ideas tapping on social media concepts, web-based services that provide useful services to Singaporeans, and a small but growing games and media industry.

One of the biggest problems? Getting publicity.

What do a few tech hacks in Singapore have in common? A love for gizmos, gadgets and all things that attract both geeks and goondus alike.

Here, you’ll find the latest talk about gizmos in town – straight from the best technology journalists from Singapore. Look out for more soon!