Our friends at Tech65 starts off this week with their weekly podcast on the following issues that dominated the tech landscape: [1] HP CEO: “We didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business”, [2] Samsung Galaxy Tab revealed, [3] AT&T makes sweeping changes to data plans. Do click and check out their latest podcast here. You can now also listen to the Tech65 podcast here as well by coming to the blog post directly.

• Google Android Developer Conference in Google Singapore: Cerventus and BL discussed the recent event where Google gave out Nexus Ones to the developers and how the conference went.
• Nokia N900 Preview: Mike Foong and BL offered their glimpse into Nokia N900 and explained why this new phone is a worthy rival to Google Nexus One and iPhone.
• Big Asian Countries See Most January Growth as Region Continues to Gain Facebook Users: We examine the trends on how the Facebook population is growing in Asia and particularly how it impact the Southeast Asia market, and also the major assess point is not web but thru mobile.
• 30%-50% Traffic To Existing Chinese Video Sites Is From Baidu, CEO of Baidu’s Qiyi Said: We wonder if Qiyi is entering into a tough fight with the other Chinese video sharing sites such as Tudou and Youku and made comparisons on how different it is compared to Google and YouTube in the US.
• Silicon Valley’s Plug and Play Tech Center, I-city and PKNS forms strategics alliances: Given that Plug and Play has set up shop in Singapore, we ponder whether the Malaysian Plug and Play will create new synergies for the Southeast Asia market.
• The Thailand Tech Scene: Ben also shares with us his work in E-Jamming and Project Nexus.
• Final Plug for upcoming events: Barcamp Singapore 5 and TEDxKL on 27 March, Barcamp Kuala Lumpur in April and Barcamp Bangkok in May 22-23. We also talked about the upcoming PyCon in Singapore in June as well.

• Zynga in India: The creator of Farmville and Mafia Wars starts their global expansion with their first stop, India. Why not China?
• Indonesia looks to block offensive Internet pages and China tightens control on websites rings a new dimension of censorship in Asia.
• Facebook acquires Malaysian start-up, Octazen: We chat about the recent acquisition of Octazen, a Malaysian based start-up which specialize on contacts importer and wonders why TechCrunch offers an alternative perspective to the issue.
• Google snubs China on Android: We ponder whether Google is really walking out of China and then the gestures of them canceling the Beijing Android developers’ event.
• QQ expanding globally?: We discuss what QQ is really planning for their global expansion.
• Lastly a short reprise on Siok Siok’s Twittamentary.

Contributed by Chua Ruiwen, Wong Meng Weng, Luther Goh, and Justin Lee

Have you and your fellow hackers been working out of your living room for the past year?

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Gosh, I wish there was a better place to work. I’m sick of staring at my partner’s face!”

If you have, you’re in luck.

Hackers, tinkerers and entrepreneurs will soon be able to get down and dirty with their projects in Singapore’s very own Hackerspace. No more staring at your bedroom walls, no more hiding yourself from the Starbucks’ waitresses sight.

And no, hackers are people who enjoy the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations, not cybercriminals.

For the last few months, the local hacker community has been agitating for a physical space where they can get together.

Among the dozens of participants in the project are Chua Ruiwen, Wong Meng Weng, Luther Goh, and Justin Lee.

“We want to bring together technologists, designers, startups, and interesting people,” said Wong, “as part of the larger hackerspace movement. There are over a hundred hacker spaces around the world.

“Despite it being a Hackerspace, small startups are also welcome to join in the fun. Whatever project you’re working on, the Hackerspace welcomes you. You can bring your toys, build robots, give talks, or just hang out on the sofa and watch movies. Expect it to be a hotbed for intellectual intercourse.

“I’d like to see it happen at Kampong Glam. The atmosphere is bohemian and there’s good food available at all hours. Next year when *SCAPE becomes available we might set up shop there too.”

There are a variety of membership levels: $256/month buys a hotdesk, while trial memberships begin as low as $32/month and come with sofa-crashing privileges. Two anonymous sponsors have committed up to $1024 each, just to support the cause.

“We’re halfway to our funding target. In the last month we’ve seen over two thousand dollars in commitments. Now we need to get more pledges, and then we can sign a lease.”

If you’d like to see the hackerspace happen, check out the membership levels, pledge your commitment on the wiki or join the mailing list. And check out pictures of one of the proposed locations in the Arab Street area. (Source of Photos used in this post are from Wong Meng Weng).

Related Links:
[1] E27, What do Seattle, Silicon Valley, Berlin and Cambridge (both Cambridges) Have In Common?.

• Demo 1 – Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth: Blaise Aguera y Arcas leads a dazzling demo of Photosynth, software that could transform the way we look at digital images. Using still photos culled from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes and lets us navigate them.

Why it is interesting: First, it shows how one can utilize similar images from the same object and create the 3D landscape in exactly how the object looks structurally. In Singapore, when some of us visited Microsoft Innovation Centre Singapore, we were treated the same demo with the landscape where the Merlion is situated by constructing different photo images from the public.

• Demo 2 – Anand Agarawala demos BumpTop: Anand Agarawala presents BumpTop, a user interface that takes the usual desktop metaphor to a glorious, 3-D extreme, transforming file navigation into a freewheeling playground of crumpled documents and clipping-covered “walls.”

Why it is interesting: It offers a glimpse to us on how the next generation of operating systems desktop interface might look like, and using file size and other attributes with a graphical depiction to allow us to decide which files are important. Actually, we wonder why Apple or Microsoft has not bought over this idea yet for their new Mac OS X or Windows 7 interfaces.

• Demo 3 – Eric Giler demonstrates the usage of Wireless electricity: Eric Giler wants to untangle our wired lives with cable-free electric power. Here, he covers what this sci-fi tech offers, and demos MIT’s breakthrough version, WiTricity — a near-to-market invention that may soon recharge your cell phone, car, pacemaker.

Why it is interesting: This is one video which can show you the future where you don’t need to look for a socket to charge your phone or computer. It utilizes a traditional principle in physics using electromagnetism to get devices charged within a certain vicinity. You can already imagine that you can do the same with cars if you have a large plate in the parking area.

Editor’s Note: The abstracts of the talks are sourced from TED.com

Related Links:
[1] BL, My 5 Favourite TED Videos

In this second batch of award announcement, 21 new winners brings the new total of TECS awardess to 38. From over 220 submissions, these 21 were selected based on their commercial potential, scientific and technical strengths, cost-effectiveness and impact of their projects.

• CardioRev Pte Ltd: A Novel Peptide-Eluting Coronary Stent
• Double Helix Tracking Technologies Pte Ltd: DNA Verified(TM) Timber Origin
• HVS Engineering Pte Ltd: A Novel Real-Time Energy & Cost Saving Cleaning System for Industrial heat Exchangers
• Mesh.im Consultancy Pte Ltd: A cross-site interactive platform to integrate real-time communications online
• Microspace Rapid Pte Ltd: Micro Fluidic Energy System Suite
• Printed Power Pte Ltd: Printed Power enabled Active RFID Tags
• Progeniq Pte Ltd: GPGPU-FPGA Accelerated Life Sciences + Visual Effects for High Performance
• Qtech Nanosystems Pte Ltd: Development of Advanced Precision Driver System with Charge Switching Concept for Pico Positioning

• BioMers Pte Ltd: Development of High Stiffness Polymer Composite Arch-Shaped Wires with Rectangular Cross-Section
• Bio-X (S) Pte Ltd: Bio-X: A Digital Camera Approach to Food Testing
• Curiox Biosystems Pte Ltd: Point-of-Care Diagnostics Instrument for Immunoassays, Enzyme-linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA)
• D-SIMLAB Technologies Pte Ltd: Symbiotic Simulation for Operational Decision-Making in Asset-Intensive Industries
• Hiperware Pte Ltd: HiperSearch Appliance
• I-Flapp Technologies Pte Ltd: Mobility Technologies for Universal Computer Applications
• Niometrics Pte Ltd: Next-Generation Firewalls for Network Threat and Risk Management
• Pechora Technologies Pte Ltd: IP Camera Platform and Virtual IP Cameras leveraging HomeCamera
• Pipeline Micro Pte Ltd: Semicoductor Cooling Micropump
• Roar Particles Singapore Pte Ltd: Nanopowder Biomarkers
• SG Molecular Diagnostics Pte Ltd: SGMD Microkit IVDD AIO RT PCR
• Teliwave Pte Ltd: Voice 3.0
• tenCube Pte Ltd: tenCube Enterprise Mobility Suite

Previously, applications for TECS had deadlines but now, you can apply all year round. But applications will still be batched together for evaluation on a ‘regular basis’.

The $75 million TECS was launched by SPRING Singapore in April last year to provide technology start-ups and enterprising public sector researchers with early-stage funding support to R&D projects either at the Proof-of-Concept (POC) or Proof-of-Value (POV) stages. The POC grant seeks to develop technology ideas early on from the conceptualisation stage by providing full funding of up to $250,000, while the POV grant provides 85% co-funding up to a maximum grant of $500,000 to further R&D and develop the POV or first working prototype.

Our friends at Tech65 start their weekly podcast on the following issues that dominated the tech landscape last week: [1] The Microsoft discussion, a discussion after a visit to Microsoft’s HQ – (a) Windows 7 – their new Gear65 episode, (b) What’s “Windows Cloud”, not to be confused with Windows Live (Officially known as Windows Azure) or Microsoft Online, (c) What’s going on with Windows Live, (d) Cool trick in Live Messenger: Video Avatars, (e) MS Singapore working on specific frameworks in next Windows Mobile – Location Based platform. Will it ever happen?, (f) Microsoft as a platform company – are they compromising the wrong things?, [2] The Dell Adamo – the slimmest notebook in the world today. Even we think so, [3] The iPhone 3.0 – What Apple should have done in the first place (a) iPhone 3.0, what Apple is doing (post by Daniel and Jerrick), (b) Implications on the Palm Pre, (c) Apple’s iPhone, the phone that developers hate to love and love to hate, (d) HTML5 – what used to be Palm Pre’s strength is now Android’s, iPhones and Windows Mobile’s extra feature, [4] Social Media… uhh… Breakfast ( in New York time…) 6 and the Byte of the Week: TwitterFall. Do click and check out their podcast.

BL: Tell us your story. What did you do before starting up Mobrick?
Shannon Low: Prior to founding Mobrick, I spent 8 years in the public service working at various government ministries and agencies, the most recent being my last 4 years in the Media Development Authority where I worked in industry development, investing in local animation and game development companies. At the end of 2007, I decided to do something different, and left the public service to start up Mobrick.

BL: Tell us the story behind Mobrick and how you guys started up Shoplette and followed by Zinerepublic.

Shannon Low: Mobrick is a web technology company that creates new ways of socialising in online networks and communities. In short, we create web 2.0 community platforms for people to share their passions. The company is run by two partners, Loon Kok Keong and myself, who used to be schoolmates.

Our first released product was Shoplette (www.shoplette.com), a niche social network for shoppers, where users could tell their friends what they bought and where they bought it from, kind of like a Twitter for shopping. The idea came from a typical conversation among friends – one person would say “Check out this new … that I bought!” and show it off to their friend, and the friend would almost always ask in reply “Where did you get it?” That gave us the idea to create a social shopping intelligence tool to enable shoppers to take that conversation online among a community of like-minded shopaholics.

BL: What does Zinerepublic do? What makes it different from the magazine publishing platforms in the past?

Shannon Low: Zinerepublic is our attempt at a revolution aimed at democratizing magazine publishing. We believe that magazine publishing – from article sourcing and content generation, to editing, assembling and publishing issues, to subscription and distribution – should be open to everyone, so we’ve created tools to make it easier.

Zinerepublic is an easy way to create and distribute your own crowdsourced zine. On Zinerepublic, anyone can be a reader, writer and editor, create your own zine out of your own and other users’ articles, and submit articles that other editors might like to use in their zines.

On the site, users can create zines, submit articles for zines and subscribe to zines. To make zine publishing easier for zine editors, Zinerepublic allows users to crowdsource for articles, edit, assemble and publish periodic issues of their zine, and also provides a subscription and email distribution system so that people can subscribe to and receive new issues of their zine.

BL: What are the three main features in Zinerepublic that you like the users to explore?

Shannon Low: The key thing we want people to try out is creating their own zine. On Zinerepublic, it’s as simple as signing up, clicking “Create a zine” and customising your zine.

Then comes the fun part – assembling your issue with your own articles and crowdsourcing articles for your zine. You can write your own articles, submit them to the article pool by clicking “Submit an article”, and include the article in your zine, or you can browse through the article pool by clicking “Check out new articles” to look for articles that you might like to include in your zine. As an editor or curator of your zine, you get to pick what goes in, and you can play around with the order of the articles in your issue so that the issue “flows” in the way that you want it to.

Once your issue is ready, hit “Publish” to distribute your issue to the world! Once you do this, your issue will be emailed to users who have subscribed to your zine. So don’t forget to tell your friends to check out your zine and subscribe to it by clicking “Subscribe”. And do check out other users’ zines and try subscribing to them too!

BL: Do you have any future features that you like to implement on Zinerepublic?

Shannon Low: There are a bunch of improvements we’re looking into, like more customisable layouts for issues and articles, as well as printable issues, but we’ll save that for another update, eh? ;)

BL: Are there any interesting groups who have used your platform to publish their own online magazines? Tell us some successes so far.

Shannon Low: We’ve had some interesting zines created by users on the site. One is “The Little Arts Academy’s Magazine”, which is a really nice cooking zine with great dessert recipes. It was created by the Little Arts Academy, an interdisciplinary art school for children managed by the Old Parliament House Ltd (who also run the Arts House) that offers training in dance, drama, new media, visual arts, music, singing and cooking. They use their zine to help publicise their culinary classes for children, and they’re currently into their second issue.

You can check out The Little Arts Academy’s Magazine here:

Another is “Half Flat”, which is a stunning art zine featuring the works of four groundbreaking illustrators based in Singapore. The four artists were holding an exhibition of their work earlier this year, and we worked with them to put together a zine that they could distribute to help publicise their exhibition.

You can check out Half Flat here:

Both have been very creative and interesting uses of the zine format.

BL: Other than the online advertising model, how does Zinerepublic sustain itself?

Shannon Low: We started Zinerepublic as an experiment and an attempt to democratize the process of magazine publishing. We’re still experimenting with different revenue models to see which ones might be the most interesting. On the online advertising front, we’d like to see how to bring advertising concepts from traditional magazine publishing into the online space. We’re also looking into offering different kinds of freemium and premium services.

As a company, Mobrick builds and owns platforms such as Zinerepublic as a means of long term growth. To sustain ourselves, we also do client work and build web 2.0 community platforms for brands and clients who want to use them in online community campaigns.

Shannon Low: First, I think an entrepreneur needs to dare to try. It takes a bit of a leap to go out and try to do something different, and you’ll never know if it’ll work out until you give it a go. So trying is the first step, and as easy as that sounds, it can sometimes be a huge psychological hurdle.

Second, and most people will say this too, is a healthy dose of self-belief and perseverance. A lot of people are going to tell you “no,” “don’t do it,” and “it’ll never work.” You’ll also go through rounds and rounds of disappointment as things don’t work out the way you hope. You’ll need to believe in yourself (and your team) a whole lot to get over them.

Finally, I think an entrepreneur needs to not be afraid of failure, because the odds are stacked against you and chances are, you’re going to fail. But so what if you fail? Just pick yourself up, learn from it, and start over. I think one thing we’ve learnt is that it’s not that hard to start, and it’s not that painful to fail. It’s executing well that’s the difficult part, and that’s what you need to focus on the most.

BL: Given the current financial climate, what advice do you give to budding entrepreneurs out there?

Shannon Low: I’m not sure we’re really qualified to give advice to budding entrepreneurs, as we’re learning about it ourselves. One thing I can say is that for people contemplating starting up, there’ll never be a “perfect” time to start a company or do something new. If you’re waiting for the “right” time to do it, you never will. As long as you have something you want to create and you believe in it, just go ahead and do it, because you’ll never know if it’ll work out until you try. We’re still finding out ourselves.

Editor’s Note: You can read more of their adventures in Mobrick’s blog.

CocoaHeads: CocoaHeads is a group devoted to discussion of Apple Computer’s Cocoa Framework for programming on MacOS X as well as the iPhone/iPod Touch. During monthly meetings, members present on their projects and offer tutorials on various programming topics. The community has met up for the first time recently in iShop, Cineleisure. For those who want to get involved with iPhone apps development, the champion for CocoaHeads (Singapore Chapter), Eric Dunivant has started a new site, CoreiPhone, which contains resources to help those who want to get their apps developed, known and heard.

Singapore PHP User Group: The group (Facebook) was established in 2006 by Michael Cheng (who is also the champion for PHP User Group). PHP (recursive acronym for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”) is a widely-used Open Source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. Currently, they are the most active developers’ group and have organized monthly meetings in Microsoft, Oracle and SMU. Recently, they have evolved into a society and now they offered paid courses to allow PHP developers to obtain certification. They have also been involved in organizing events such as Facebook Developers Garage II and Barcamp Singapore II: Maps and Mobile last year with E27. In their main site, you can find videos of the seminars given by PHP developers in different areas from developing wordpress plugins to Microsoft Silverlight.

Python User Group: This Group is created with the objective of promoting the use of Python programming language in Singapore and beyond. They have held their 2nd meeting recently in SMU and is relatively a newcomer to the developer user groups. Known Python user include Michael Lim (Comiqs).

Singapore Flex Group: The Singapore Flex Usergroup aims to bridge its members with both local and international Flex gurus. They have organized monthly meetings for those who are interested in flash development and also they have done the recent RIAction event in Microsoft. Their current champion is Shunjie (Seesmic).

Singapore Ruby Brigade: This is a group for Ruby/ Rails enthusiasts in the tropical isle. Currently, their monthly gatherings are held in Yahoo!. They have been around for a while with prominent developers such as Harryanto (Bookjetty) and Choon Keat (SharedCopy). Their current champion is Jason Ong.

Creative Crew Singapore: Creative Crew is the official Adobe User Group for Photoshop and After Effects. Based in Singapore, Creative Crew (FB Group) has the aim to share and spread techniques and tutorials for both Print and Video. The User Group meets every second Tuesday of the month in a Live Meeting. The champions of the group include Stefano Virgilli (Ultimate Video Fx Pte Ltd) and Carlsson Chee (Rephlexion Designs.).

Code Android Singapore: CodeAndroid.org, is part of the Android Developer and User Group created to help Android users as well as developers from Singapore, Malaysia and our APAC countries to learn about the platform (API), latest news, reviews about development in Android. The champion for this user group is Zi Yong.

SGDotNet: The defacto Singapore .NET Developer Group. They are a Singapore based user group formed to discuss about IT related topics, focusing mainly on .NET platform. The group is made up of IT Professionals from all walks of life and from all corners of the world. Most of our members are based in Singapore, but we have valuable members from other countries and their mission is to help motivated developers discover the best ways to use .NET Technology. Their gatherings are typically held in Microsoft Singapore Pte Ltd @One Marina Boulevard.

If there are other groups out there who would like to be featured, do send us an email here in SGE. SGE has also helped to publicize free events organized by these IT developer groups as well, and will help those who need to get the message out.