Singtel has today sent to people who opted-in to their wait list, a confirmation that the iPhone 3G will be launched on the 22nd of August. This confirms the rumour that has been speculating for quite some time.

Singtel has yet to indicate the price it will be sold at or the subscription plans that will be coupled with the phone. One thing for sure though is that Singtel will take great advantage of the hype of the iPhone to draw users from its major competitors to their network.

This being said, it may be wise to wait for Singtel’s exclusive rights to run out before purchasing the iPhone, which will cause the overall cost (phone and subscription plan) to drop significantly.

However, for the die hard fans of the iPhone 1.0, this is definitely not an option.

After day 1 of the Adtech conference, there is 1 major lesson that stuck with most delegates. During the Keynote presentation, a speaker said the following:

“Digital Advertising is like having sex, it requires experimentation to get it right eventually….

…Another way digital advertising is similar to sex is that when you have not tried it, you are very excited about it. But once you try it for the first time, you may not be that impressed.”

It may sound funny at first. But once you think about it, it actually makes plenty of sense.

Twitter has become amazingly popular in the western countries but uptake within Asia is still relatively low. Many tech experts have called Twitter a "micro-blogging" tool and tipped it to be a lifestyle-changing web application.

So what is Twitter and how does it really affect our lives and help us. CEO & Founder of Twitter.com explains…

It was recently reported that Singtel has finally concluded talks with Apple to bring the iPhone to Singapore and be the first in Asia to do so. Considering the high demand of the iPhone, one doesn’t need to be Einstein to know that Singtel paid a high price for this.

Piracy in Asia has been so common and Singtel would be very naive if they thought that they will be able to force a significant number of subscribers to switch from competing networks just because of the exclusive rights. This is because unlocking the iPhone to work with other networks has evolved to a simple process that merely involves a single click.

So why did they do it? This is my theory…. 3G. Singtel has spent hundreds of millions, if not billions, on building the 3G infrastructure for high speed mobile data transfer but it has not really picked up. Despite various campaigns to boost the use of 3G like providing free video calls, the network is still largely under-utilized. This is where the iPhone comes in.

In the short few months that it has been released, despite only being able to support EDGE which is kind of 2.75G, it has emerged to be the number 1 mobile web surfing device due to its amazing Safari-based browser user interface and its large screen. Also, the iPhone allows the launch of useful applications such as Google Maps with a single touch and this would further encourage people to use services that require data transfer.

Hence when the 3G iPhone releases, if Singtel was able to hand these iPhone to their users, they would be able to better utilize their 3G networks and once usage goes beyond the tipping point, Singtel would then be able to reap the benefits from their entire customer base.

Another question then- so since the deal is almost confirmed, then why not make an official statement? If I may speculate and make a wild guess, I would say that Singtel may very well be awaiting for the announcement of the release of the 3G iPhone and concurrently tell the world of its arrival into Singapore. This could very well happen within 60 days as mentioned by Walt Mossberg from Wall Street Journal.

ZopIM has been in beta for quite a while now and recently relaunched its homepage. This is definitely a wise move as the previous homepage did not provide much information and is definitely not a homepage geared for a full commercial launch. With this new look, visitors to the site are able to understand the concept they are selling at 1 glance.

Essentially what ZopIM offers is a platform for website owners to communicate to their visitors. The founders believe that this ‘human touch’ to sales processes on e-commerce sites will make the visitor more likely to make a purchase. This may also work great on blogs as blog owners would be able to interact with visitors and can even have active discussions about his blog posts.

By allowing users to implement the system simply by adding 1 line of code, and integrating the technology with popular IM clients such as MSN, AOL & Gtalk, ZopIM is able to greatly reduce the barriers for new users to adopt their technology.

The ZopIM service is currently free-of-charge but I foresee that a premium service pricing package may appear if adoption of the product picks up. This pricing model would definitely make more sense than by purely running the site on a ad-revenue model. There could also eventually be an enterprise version for corporations as this is ultimately the target market ZopIM is looking at.

ZopIM is a direct competitor of Meebo’s “Meebo me” service which also allows website owners to chat with their visitors. ZopIM however is competing on fringe benefits such as the integration of 3rd party IM clients, and superior visitor web statistics. They do, however, have a uphill battle against Meebo which is heavily funded.

The founders of Google were graduate students studying computer science. Mark Zuckerberg has been programming since he was in his teens. Bill Gates was the quintessential geek. It seems like the most successful software/web companies are those that were founded by technically able people. This then brings a fundamental question…. do you really need someone who is technically able in the founding team for the company to succeed?

In this article by The Next Web, editor-in-chief Ernst-Jan Pfauth interviewed the founders of Singaporean start-up Conference Bay and posed a question regarding their biggest challenge when developing the portal. The founders cited their lack of technical experience. Due to this deficiency, the founders had to outsource the project to a company in Australia for its initial launch and then to an Indian company for its revamp.

This itself has presented 2 issues. Firstly, technical knowledge may have allowed the founders to have a deeper understanding of web design principles which MAY have prevented the need to do a complete revamp of the website which resulted in wastage of valuable resources.

The second problem that may not have existed if one of the founders had a technical background is that they probably would have more contacts in the tech sector and hence be better able to find technical help and can build the portal in-house.

However, what the Conference Bay founders lacked in technical skills, they more than made up with their business capabilities and networks. Being able to gain funding from private investors and the Singapore government (both of which are not easy to pitch to), they had enough resources to obtain the services from professional web agencies and a experienced PR/Marketing consultancy.

Overall, I would say that having technical skills in the founding team is extremely helpful but at this age where the world is so flat and outsourcing partners are so easily accessible, starting a web 2.0 is no longer a feat that is unreachable for the programming impaired.

In a press release they sent out on Monday, Conference Bay, the one-stop shop for conference organizers and goers, announced the official launch of their remodeled portal and their decision to open up the portal to organizers worldwide due to user demand. The site was previously targeted for conferences within the Asia Pacific region only.

According to the press release, this new site developed by a design team that consisted of media powerhouse Ogilvy RedCard is to make it obvious to users that Conference Bay is not just an event listing company but also a portal which helps them save costs.

They have also released data on their progress since their initial launch in July 2007. There were more than 300 conference organizers using the site, listing more than 600 conferences in more than 30 countries and 70 cities around the world, all within 7 months. They have however left out the number of users that actually bought or bid tickets from the site, information that is definitely more important from a business point of view.

Conference Bay was previously covered here.

Singaporean start-up Widgeo.us announced in their February newsletter that they have launched their first widget – t.widgeo.us. This widget serves the purpose of allowing users to update multiple twitter accounts within a single user interface. The aesthetics are fantastic and, like most twitter applications, have a simple and intuitive interface.

I do question the number of people who has multiple twitter accounts because the purpose which Twitter was created for is to allow friends to keep track of the user’s activities and hence updating on different accounts simply do not make sense. This being said, there are some exceptions like the screen shot above where the user represents several organizations and wishes to separate each account.

Another major deficiency that this widget has is that you can only update your accounts but not read the feeds from them which is a huge part of twitter. This widget will do great if there are options to click the account and the latest messages would appear in the UI. Also, such an application will work even better if it was an Adobe AIR application which you can launch from your desktop.

In their newsletter, Widgeo has also mentioned that they will be launching the beta-version of their platform in the Middle of March even though this would be kept private and not open to the public. According to the company’s blog, this platform would “allow people to build tools which unify multiple communication channels into one central core.” This description sounds rather bold but audacious goals seems to be a common trait amongst successful start-ups.

You may think you know technology and hence be able to predict what sites Singaporeans are visiting, but the truth is the more you know, the higher the chances that you will get the order wrong. A point to note is the this top 100 list is provided by Alexa and is by no means the perfect measurement though it is still widely used within the industry.

Shocker Number 1: Yahoo! is number 1 in ranking, beating Google which ranks at number 4. Techies may think that yahoo is an obsolete search engine but the truth is that most of the less technically inclined people within the country still prefers to use Yahoo! due to its “one-stop shop” concept.

Shocker Number 2: Friendster is ranked number 2 while Facebook is number 7. Who the hell uses Friendster anymore? Ha… Apparently it still holds its place as the number 1 social network in Singapore though Facebook is fast catching up.

Interesting Fact 1: Blogger is the number 1 blogging platform followed by Livejournal and then WordPress. WordPress here refers to the commercial version (wordpress.com) and does not include self-hosted wordpress blogs (from wordpress.org).

Interesting Fact 2: About 15 of the top 100 sites are video hosting sites with YouTube leading the pack with 5 of them being porn sites. I have been observing the rankings for quite some time now and there has been a gradual decline in the number of porn sites making the list. A very encouraging sign.

Notable Mention: The most visited local site is HardwareZone which hosts one of the most popular forums in Singapore.

Are the rankings similar to your web surfing patterns?

Singaporean Start-up Patsnap launched the Alpha-version of their portal last week which aims to bring patent search to a new level of simplicity and enable research to be done more easily. This puts the company in direct competition with Google’s Patent Search functionality that was launched in 2006. Google’s Patent Search, in my opinion, has been the most intuitive search engine within this arena thus far.

In its website, Patsnap mentioned that “coupled with the initial work done on the clustering technology and relevant feedbacks from the users, this search engine can be further improved for enhanced search results.” This is one of the key fundamental differences between their algorithm and Google’s as Google’s depends solely on computational methods to determine the order of search results. This is similar to how Mahalo competes with Google using semantic search.

This Alpha release seems to have only one of the 3 core functionalities that the completed site will eventually provide. The homepage hints that they will subsequently launch a social networking function and perhaps a mechanism that allow users to find all patents associated with a certain device.

After several test runs, I realized that Patsnap, even in its alpha stage, is able to equal Google Patent Searches’ capabilities and produce comparable results. In fact, I actually do prefer the layout that Patsnap provides which places the actual patent documentation on the same screen than Google which requires you to navigate to another page to see it. However, Google does have a functionality that may be more useful which shows the links of other patents that references the one you are viewing. Perhaps for the professional researcher, they may have different opinions on the quality of the search result, but for the average user like a typical college student or ad-hoc researcher, this may very well be what they are looking for.

Google Patent Search has not changed much since its launch other than perhaps its underlying search algorithm, and this makes it highly possible that the completed version of Patsnap would be able to provide a better solution than that of Google’s.