November 9, 2010
By Erica Ogg
CNET News

When you're listening to music, it's likely your earbuds are plugged into an Apple device. Making a phone call? One out of every five people buying a smartphone are choosing an iPhone. And Apple's share of consumer laptop sales jumped to 10.6 percent in the last quarter.

Now here's the big question: Does your IT department, the guys who think it's just fine that you're still using a Windows XP laptop (and P.S., stop whining about it), give a hoot about all this Apple stuff?

By Felix Lee

The air was filled with anticipation when the buzz of the microphone came to life. SMU's own incubator was hosting their Affiliates' Corner event at Victoria Street, and the coffee machine was whining non-stop. Mentors as well as industry figures were invited to take a peek at the plans in place for enterprising students, who were in turn reminded with an update of the grant schemes available by an iDA spokesperson. Spring's new business support managers Chong Hui Wen and Lin Zhixun were in hand to lend credence to the flock. I was told this was to be a regular happening, not to be confused with the Entrepreneurs Corner @ SMU [tagged as: "A watering hole for Entrepreneurs, Innovators, Investors, Business Mentors and Industry Partners"], which led me to believe I had come to the wrong event, and it was going to be a dry night :)

By Felix Lee

Singapore has been on the forefront of a large public relations campaign to promote its technological prowess, having been given the mandate to add excitement and EQuality to its often-posed stuffy image, enhanced by a lacklustre skyline not often worthy of a holiday snapshot. So it comes as no surprise that a major revamp came due, from the top.

F1 night race through the city; the clockwise movement of the Flyer; ascension of Marina Bay Sands casino, Genting’s Universal Studios at Sentosa, Garden Festival, are a start to the plethora of initiatives targeted at impressing MICE and the new talent drive to raise the republic’s profile as a key bridge between West and the new East.

Imagine my surprise when a familiar firebrand in the persona of TechCrunch’s own Sarah Lacy was heading down to the little red dot of Singapore, on the pretext of launching her new book. I signed up.

By Michael Graham Richard
Fri Jul 23, 2010 16:10

If our future is to be green and sustainable for our planet's ecosystems (and us), public transit will have to play a bigger role. It's simply a more efficient way to get large amounts of people around, especially for commuting in and out of cities during rush hour. But optimizing large and complex networks of trains and buses isn't as easy as it might seem. There are lots of moving pieces, and one small delay for one vehicle can snowball into a system-wide delay. The longer the average delay is, the less attractive transit becomes to commuters who need to know they can count on getting to work on time.

June 8, 2010, 10:12 AM ET 

By Russell Garland, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL BLOGS

This morning’s roundup of the latest venture capital news and analysis across the Web:

With the latest version of the iPhone out the door, Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs says the company’s mobile advertising network will commence operation July 1, bringing yet another distruptive force to the media industry, The Wall Street Journal reports. Jobs said the iAd platform will pull in $60 million worth of advertising in the second half of the year. Apple acquired venture-backed Quattro Wireless in January and used its technology to create iAd. “Apple has proven itself to be one of the most innovative companies in our lifetime, and they will be a powerful player in the advertising,” said Bob Davis, a partner with Quattro investor Highland Capital Partners.

Deloitte Consulting has completed the IDM Flash Study covering 2007-2009.  This study was done together with EDB, IDA, & MICA, and in consultation with DOS.  It is a “bottom up” study, with responses from 152 companies (out of 731 companies in the sector) representing 80% of the VA in 2009. Some of the findings from the study are highlighted as follows:

When Wired.com called for an open alternative to Facebook last Friday, lamenting the company’s untrammeled desire to control your online identity and reconfigure the world’s privacy norms, reader response was overwhelming, with hundreds of comments and ironically, thousands of “Like” votes on Facebook.

Now, a group of four New York University students — who were working on just what we called for — have harnessed that dissatisfaction in the form of more than $115,000 in crowdsourced funding for their distributed, social networking system called Diaspora. That’s the equivalent of a significant angel round of funding in the internet startup world, and their fundraising on the Kickstarter crowdsourced funding site has another 19 days to go. Story Link

My main coverage area as an Analyst is focusing on Online Communities for Interactive Marketers, I was formerly an enterprise intranet manager at Hitachi Data Systems, so I see where this is heading.

From Seth Godin's Blog:

Not all failures are the same. Here are five kinds, from frequency = good all the way to please-don't!

I saw a spate of recent articles that had some pretty amazing statistics and news bits on Amazon Web Services and competitors.   In no particular order: