Striped:Shirt

It was on the news last night on TV and TODAYonline posted the same info on their site today. Basically, it says that the iPhone ‘may finally launch’ here in September this year and it will be Singtel carrying one of the most anticipated mobile phones.

I doubt how accurate the sources are - “industry sources” and “a local vendor who works closely with Apple associates in the United State”. If @wanidakok, an Apple employee here in Singapore, even does not know any details, how can outside sources find out? Apple is known to be secretive with its product launches and this may just be one of those ‘leaks’ that usually happens online.

For it to be on the news, there must have been a credible source but they don’t sound as convincing as most people would’ve liked. I can safely say that the iPhone should be coming in the near future given that their currently looking for a local iPhone Buyer and Planner plus the announcement on the news. The details on the service provider and the pricing are still shaky.

Meanwhile, follow the conversation here in HardwareZone as the locals discuss the news announcement last night.

After my presentation the other day on microblogging, I was inspired to conduct a social media experiment using Twitter. SMU is proud to be a technology-enabled university and I’m going to try to add microblogging to the current technologies being used in school. I’m sure there are already a group of students using Twitter but I’m just not sure how small or how big the group is.

So if you’re a student or an alumni of The Singapore Management University and you are on Twitter, please do follow @SMUtweets on Twitter. (If you don’t have an account but want to be part of this experiment, please do sign up and join the fun!)

Other than sending alerts to SMU students, SMUtweets aims to help students develop “a sense of each other as people beyond the classroom space” as suggested by academHacK. It can also be an Emergency Notification System like what the University of Michigan is doing with Twitter. I doubt that we’ll have emergencies like what happened in Virginia Tech but an example of an SMU emergency announcement would be: “All group study room’s in business block are fully booked for the week. Try again next week.”

About a month ago, Andrew Careaga posed this question on his blog, “Should universities tweet?” My answer to that is there is no harm in trying. The corp comm office in SMU will not start Twittering anytime soon, so I’ll try to initiate something before I end university schooling in a month.

I’m not sure how this experiment will turnout or evolve.. We’ll just have to tweet and see..

After watching Scoble’s interview with the co-founders of Jaiku, I was pretty impressed with the guys and their vision with their micro-blogging tool. So I quickly searched the net for some invites. Interestingly, I got the invite through Twitter when I wrote a tweet and a friend who had a Jaiku account sent me an invite.

I’ll be exploring Jaiku for a while and study its differences with Twitter. I foresee it being a very powerful tool, especially with its strong emphasis on mobile. We just have to wait and see. Watch this space for my review and experiences with Jaiku.

After the announcement about Yahoo’s plans to lay off hundreds of employees 3 weeks ago, a post from Portfolio.com just confirmed that Yahoo has gotten rid of their designers. Not just some of them - the whole enchilada in fact.

I think that the Yahoo Design Innovation team, a.k.a. yHaus, was critical to a company like Yahoo. In a business where you have this graphical interface which serves as an in-between between the services that you provide and your customers, design does matter.

To quote Chris Campbell from Particletree:

“Good design in our company doesn’t just sell products. Good design fosters collaboration, communicates strategy, sets expectations, improves the efficiency of a team, and most importantly inspires and motivates like nothing else.” (Source)

I’ve used one of their products before, Wufoo, to make online forms and the usability of their site was excellent. I remember choosing Wufoo over 2-3 other services that I found online because their site was just really easy and simple to use (and it a lot of cool features too).

yHaus probably does a lot more than website design that’s why they have the word Innovation in their team name, which I think is a bigger loss for Yahoo. Based from their old blog and the next* (a site that you get re-directed to if you go to the main site of the design team which does not exist anymore) , they do have some pretty innovative projects going on.

My advertising professor from a year ago, Jorg Dietzel, who is also a brand consultant, previously had a talk on business and design. One-half of Jorg’s message from his presentation was that businesses need design.

To keep up in this overly competitive domain, Yahoo still needs to come up with innovative designs.

After the iPhone, I think that Sony Ericsson has one of the best mobile phone user interfaces in the market. Not only are they easy to use, they look good too.

Check out the new XPERIA X1 “panel interface”.

Check this site out.

Google, Twitter and Twittervision are working together to send geographical Twitter updates that are related to the Super Tuesday.

The mash-up is a very useful implementation of good technologies, which is closely related to the nature of Super Tuesday.

At least that’s what my younger sister would say. She did not accept my dad’s friend request on Facebook until 2 weeks later when she placed him under the ‘Limited Profile’ list.

This article talks about how the younger generation feels uncomfortable that their parents are signing up on sites like Facebook. I understand how they feel because we share photos and send messages to our friends through all these social networking sites, which we feel isn’t necessary for our parents to know about. Times are changing and there’s no turning back. Even our future employers will be checking our profiles to get to know us better.

I think we just have to accept this trend. I actually don’t mind having my dad on my Facebook contact list. I’ve been so busy with school and he’s been flying out of the country a lot so Facebook helps us keep in touch.

It all boils down to managing our online identities. Be responsible, kids.

I came across the article, 10 cool new technologies at DEMO 08, from NetworkWorld, and 4 of the 10 technologies mentioned are mobile phone applications. I’ve been really interested in the mobile space since the launch of the iPhone. I think Apple has really jump-started the world into better and faster mobile-related innovations. Even in today’s Digital Life from the Straits Times, the feature story highlights Google’s Android platform and Yahoo!’s Go 3.0.  I just wished that services providers, especially here in Singapore, would drop their data plan prices significantly to enable mass usage of these mobile services without worrying about the costs.