Here are some of the lucky winners of that contest with their prizes!

Soon Huat, with his HTC Desire HD

James, with his Jabra bluetooth headset

Jeff, with his Coolermaster v6 CPU cooler

Congratulations to all our winners! For those who have not collected your prizes yet, please contact Techgoondu if you intend to collect them, else we’ll roll them over (as usual) for our next contest.

Thank to all our readers for participating. Please stay tuned for our next contest where you stand a chance to win an Apple iPad2!

Firstly, a big apology for posting the results of our Chinese New Year twitter lucky draw so late.

For all those that missed it, the entry for this lucky draw contest was quite simple.

Just follow Techgoondu on twitter and then simply write a tweet about or retweet any article on Techgoondu, whilst adding the hashtag #TGCNY.

Running from 24th January to 2nd Feb, the contest garnered several hundred tweets.

Out of that bunch of tweets, we ran a random number generator to pick out the following handles to win prizes: @attifcusfoo, @mintea, @the_wit_returns, @stratosfyre and @jasonkyh.

Here are the happy winners with their prizes.

Atticus (@atticusfoo), 1st prize winner with his spanking new Motorola Defy

Lina (@mintea), 2nd prize winner with her Microsoft Arc keyboard and iTwin dongle

For those of you who won prizes but have yet to collect, feel free to drop me a note anytime via DM to coordinate.

Lastly a big thank you to our readers for taking the time to participate. We’ll be announcing the wrap-up and results of the HTC Desire HD contest soon. Stay tuned!

Here’s good tidings and wishes for the upcoming 2011 Rabbit Chinese Year ahead!

Techgoondu is giving out some tech goodies in a lucky draw contest from now to 2nd February. Head over to the Techgoondu 2011 Chinese New Year giveaway page to learn more!

Like our previous contests, all winners were chosen by a democratic vote of the goondus.

We received close to 200 submissions, but unfortunately we’ve got to whittle the field down to pick our winners.

Congratulations to our winner Mr Lim Chee Wee from Queenstown, who is now the proud owner of the AS100 tablet.

Our winner Chee Wee holding his Toshiba AS100 tablet flanked by goondus Chi-Loong and Gin on the left, and Aaron and Alf on the right

Here’s the simple and short but touching winning submission from this dad, who also works in the IT industry:

I will use the tablet for my 3 year old daughter. For a 23.5 week preemie who had brain bleeding, heart surgery and lung inflection, she has come a long way. Since she love computers and multi-touch screens, this will be a great device to work her gray matters and improve her motor skills at the same time!

We also gave out a second and third prize for this contest. Our second winner, Xin from Hougang, walked away with an Elgato eyetv DTT deluxe TV tuner. Here’s her winning submission:

I risk to be labeled as a bimbo once I recite my reasons but anyway, at least I am honest and I am not shy to proclaim my love and desire to own this lovely tablet.

Reason No. 1: To Show-off & Impress! Imagine bumping into a potential client on the street and I could instantly whip out the tablet and present right away without the hassle of setting up and waiting for the laptop to take ages to boot up. And now I go up the an ipad user and say, “hey, look! I am from a different school and my toy is more capable in terms of connectivity and file sharing!”

Reason No. 2: To Kill Time & Have Fun! As a struggling field sales rep, I rely very much on the public transport to take me from point A to point B and apart from enduring those torturing journeys, I have to waste more precious time staring into blank space waiting for unapologetic clients to turn up. But with the tablet, I could fully utilize the travel time to watch a movie or perhaps read an e-book and while waiting for the client, I could discreetly keep myself entertained with a little game or connect with friends on social networks.

Reason No. 3: To Work, To Learn, To Plan, To Play & many more! With the Android platform and tones of apps available, the ways of using the tablet are practically endless but one thing for sure, it is going to be a great ‘ice-breaker’ in awkward social situations and a powerful ‘men-magnet’ for me..ha, ha! Cheers!

Our last winner did not turn up to collect his prize, a secure remote file-access remote control access device from local company iTwin. If you received an email and SMS from us, you know who you are. (If you didn’t, you probably didn’t win anything. Sorry.)

We’ll hold this prize until the first week of January. If it is still not collected after that, it’ll be forfeited and we’ll give it away in a contest in January.

Stay tuned to Techgoondu, because we’ve got Motorola Defy phones, sets of Parallels Desktop 6 software and many other goodies to give away in January!

Till then, have a merry, merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

Techgoondu is giving away various tech toys for Christmas.

If you’re interested in the contest, which is from now till the 12th of December, head over to the Toshiba AS100 Tablet Giveaway page.

Have a great holiday season ahead folks!

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.

From various contests, to threads that have surprising life, to YouTube Techgoondu interviews, to Christmas wishlists, to our meet the techgoondu event, to Hong Kong flavoured posts, the site has evolved step by teething step.

Not all ideas worked and we had to drop some. But it has been a journey that has been — for the most part — a joyous thrill ride, and we’re grateful for the chance to be read.

Thank you for being part of our journey.

What will the future of Techgoondu hold? I don’t know how the site will look, but we’ll keep experimenting. We’ll keep trying to build a great content site that is useful and relevant to readers. Watch this space.

We started the site out of a fervent belief that traditional media platforms in Singapore do not reflect the way people access information and services nowadays. We desperately wanted a platform and voice to tell good tech stories that sometimes the media doesn’t tell. Put the two together and you have Techgoondu.

This isn’t just our site. We hope to build something that is also your site. Have a tech story to tell? Let us know. Hate the new interface or something bugs you? Let us know! Are you a vendor or PR that wants to try something crazy with social media? As long as it is good content that serves the community, you’ll find that we’re a flexible bunch to work with. Are you a small local SME or start-up that wants to be heard but don’t know how? Talk to us!

Drop us a note at contact@techgoondu.com, or check out our about pages for individual email contacts.

Lastly, here’s a gallery of some of our previous Techgoondu designs and sites one and two.

[nggallery id=20]

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:

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:

• Twinity (Jeremy Snyder): a 3D online-world that replicates real world cities in a virtual environment. The city of Berlin has already been launched, and both London and Singapore will be up later this year. According to Jeremy, they have about a 100,000 sign-ups since the launch of Twinity in September last year in 2008.
• Brandtology (Aaron Koh): a social media monitoring start-up that help companies makes sense of the big bad web by mining sentiments from it. Brandtology is founded by CEO Eddie Chau, who previously incubated managed security services player e-Cop that was acquired by Temasek in 2007.
• Makeaffinity (Thomas Tan): ever wanted to control robots over the internet to slug it out in a death match? Now you can with Makeaffinity’s robot sharing platform, which allows folks to play with and make web robots without much programming whatsoever.
• 2359 Media (Hong Ting and Wenhan): founded by a trio of passionate entrepreneurs who just finished their NUS studies and a stint in Silicon Valley. 2359 Media is an advertising platform for mobile phones utilizing location based services.
• Jorbb (Shen Heng): Most job advertising portals cater to the white-collar worker. Shen wanted to create a portal specifically for blue-collar workers — part-timers, trade promoters, temp staff — and Jorbb is the result.
• Neat Co (Sarabjit Singh): Neat co, a small US company with a second office in Singapore, was the only physical tech appliance company amongst the presenters. Showcased was their contextually aware OCR reader, a smart scanning solution for receipts and the like.
• Phokki (Sean Seah): And lastly, Phokki, a start-up which turns your photos into works of art via a platform that links artists to end users directly. I’ve written a post on Phokki before.

We had a couple of other start-ups who didn’t present like seemeCV and Airvert. Not to worry. Due to good interest in this first event from anecdotal feedback (thanks to those who gave theirs!), the Techgoondus will think about running this on a semi-regular basis once in a few months. Will keep you readers posted if we do run this again. Meanwhile, if you’re interested in ideas on this front, feel free to drop me an email.

It’s important to recap that Techgoondu started this because we believe that the tech start-ups don’t get enough visibility through traditional channels. Daniel, who runs the Youngupstarts blog, summed up this sentiment well in this entry, saving me the time of having to reiterate the purpose of the meet-ups.

Lastly, events like this work because of the content and passion attendees bring when they come for such an event — YOU folks provide the content. Feedback is crucial to understanding what works or what doesn’t. If you attended the event (or even if you didn’t), please feel free to give your unvarnished feedback on this post, or drop me a note via email. Thanks!

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.

Lifted directly from the Meet the Techgoondus event on Facebook:

Details
Host: Chi-Loong
Type: Meetings – Informational Meeting
Date: Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Time: 7:30pm – 9:00pm
Location: Geek Terminal, 55 Market Street, #01-01
City/Town: Singapore, Singapore
Email: chiloong@techgoondu.com

Description

Interested in getting free publicity for your Singapore technology start-up?

Meet the Techgoondus! Techgoondu (www.techgoondu.com) is a tech blog run by a bunch of ex and current journalists and we’d like to meet you! You might get featured in social media AND traditional media if your stories are interesting!

All you need to do is to show up. No dress code. No cover charge. Just a mingle with folks who have a love of technology and all things Singaporean.

It’s best if you can demo something, so bring your laptop or mobile and show off your stuff!

Please send me a request if you’d like to come via Facebook or email. We’d like to keep the session small and informal, with a group size of about 20. Target audience will primarily be Singapore tech start-ups, or PR agencies and tech vendors who have an interest in this space.

And finally, a big thanks to the Geek Terminal folks for letting us use the place!

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.