Singapore
Tech Brief: Instagram Betrays World, VR Replaces Friends & Festivals, and… Butter Spray
Tech
March 18, 2016
Tech Brief: Instagram Betrays World, VR Replaces Friends & Festivals, and… Butter Spray
Welcome to Tech Brief, your weekly wrap-up on all that’s happened in the tech and startup industries this week! THIS WEEK, WE’RE GOING TO TALK ABOUT THE TRAITOR THAT IS INSTAGRAM. THAT IS ALL. The World’s Largest Photo-Sharing Platform Just Pissed Off ALL Its Users In a blog post released on 15 March (“BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH”), Instagram tried its best to convince its few hundred million users that switching to an algorithm-based feed is really the best decision. Wrong. I’m not entirely sure where they plucked that observation that “people miss on average 70 percent of their feeds”…
Innovation, Education & Charity: Microsoft’s We Tech Care 2016
Tech
March 15, 2016
Innovation, Education & Charity: Microsoft’s We Tech Care 2016
Last Saturday saw President Tony Tan Keng Yam officially launch the 16th President’s Challenge at Microsoft’s We Tech Care 2016. Held at JTC LaunchPad @ one-north, it was a little different from last year’s gig, which Microsoft held in its One Marina Boulevard headquarters. This year, Microsoft has made good on its mission in wanting to empower every person (and organisation) on the planet to achieve more: focusing the spotlight less on what Microsoft does, and more on how the local IT industry and Tech ecosystem as a whole can create a smarter, more inclusive Singapore. While fundraising is obviously a core topic in any charity…
Tech Brief: McDonald’s Brings VR to Kids, Singtel Woos Spotify Fans, Tech Supergiant Defies FBI
Tech
March 4, 2016
Tech Brief: McDonald’s Brings VR to Kids, Singtel Woos Spotify Fans, Tech Supergiant Defies FBI
Welcome to Tech Brief, your weekly wrap-up on all that’s happened in the tech and startup industries this week! This week, McDonald’s attempts to take over the faces of your children with its gaudy, oily Happy Meal boxes (all in the name of tech), local telco Singtel announces a VERY ATTRACTIVE price plan for Spotify subscribers and music lovers in general, Code School offers free online lessons on coding this weekend, Apple joined by its pals in its “f*ck the popo” saga, and more, all in this week’s Tech Brief, right here on DANamic.ORG! McDonald’s is about to take over…
Digital Art Forms In Question At Betwixt Festival
Arts
March 4, 2016
Digital Art Forms In Question At Betwixt Festival
As more production tools become available on a digital platform, it’s becoming easier for anyone to produce a work of art and publish it online. Such is the rate of this phenomenon that it may become an increasingly common occurrence for the art we pay for ending up enclosed within a hard drive. If we pay for digital art, are we paying for a hard drive? This question was deliberated during a panel at the inaugural Betwixt Festival on Saturday. The four presenters – Dayang MNT Yraola, Suzy Sulaiman, Pichaya Aime Suphavanij, and Michelle Ho – discussed digital art and the role…
Tech Brief: Spotify Floats Into The Cloud, Snapchat Celebrates Birthdays, and Two-Eyed Smartphones
Tech
February 26, 2016
Tech Brief: Spotify Floats Into The Cloud, Snapchat Celebrates Birthdays, and Two-Eyed Smartphones
Welcome to Tech Brief, your weekly wrap-up on all that’s happened in the tech and startup industries this week! This week, we’ve got stories of Spotify joining the Google Cloud, Snapchat and Facebook both trying to make your birthday even better, literal cyber-bullying, two-eyed smartphones, and more; all in this week’s Tech Brief right here on DANamic.ORG! Spotify Goes Up, Up, and into Google Cloud Music streaming giant Spotify has announced that it’s moving all its data centers from across Scandinavia, the US, and the UK right up into the cloud computing services operated by Google. That’s a huge paycheck for…
Home Brew: Coffee with Local Poet Marc Nair and Champion Barista Hisyam
Arts
February 23, 2016
Home Brew: Coffee with Local Poet Marc Nair and Champion Barista Hisyam
After Costa Coffee‘s session with Singaporean poet Marc Nair last Saturday, travelling to new places or revising old haunts will never feel the same again. The chill event kicked off with a short video of Marc’s travels to the birthplace of Costa Coffee in London. Through the video, we were “given” the chance to pop by the rich literary scene in and around the city and also the root of the whole operation; that is, the Costa Coffee Roastery. Things picked up when we were introduced to Hisyam, Costa Coffee’s first Singaporean and regional Asian-representative in the International Costa Coffee…
Tech Brief: R.I.P. Picasa, Tumblr Breaks Free, Nissan Haunts Offices
Tech
February 20, 2016
Tech Brief: R.I.P. Picasa, Tumblr Breaks Free, Nissan Haunts Offices
Welcome to Tech Brief, your weekly wrap-up on all that’s happened in the tech and startup industries this week! This week we saw the final nail in the coffin for Picasa, Tumblr freed from the evil clutches of Yahoo, Nissan dabbling with the paranormal, and Samsung giving the first peek at the Galaxy S7 to a… llama. We’ve got some great stories for you in this edition of Tech Brief. R.I.P. Picasa (2002 – 2016) After shaping the early days of online photo services, Google‘s image organising program Picasa will no longer be supported from 15 March 2016. In an…
Tech Brief: Einstein Proven Right, Instagram Does Right, and Wi-Fi In Lightbulbs
Tech
February 12, 2016
Tech Brief: Einstein Proven Right, Instagram Does Right, and Wi-Fi In Lightbulbs
Welcome to Tech Brief, your weekly wrap-up on all that’s happened in the tech and startup industries this week! It’s been an exciting week for geeks the Tech world, with a breakthrough in the search for gravitational waves, a major Instagram update (the one everyone’s been waiting for), and a new form of Wi-Fi that works through… the lightbulb in your home. Gravity Is Real, You Guys… Okay so it’s not that simple. The headline that Tech Insider used was more along the lines of “Scientists just detected gravitational waves for the first time ever”. 100 years after Einstein predicted their existence,…
Imagining Your Relatives As Monkeys
Life
February 10, 2016
Imagining Your Relatives As Monkeys
We get it, entertaining the visiting relatives isn’t the most enjoyable nor profitable use of your time. But really, cut them some slack – Chinese New Year doesn’t happen every day. While you’re being anti-social by reading this on your phone, let’s take a moment to imagine your relatives as monkeys (Year of the Monkey, yes?) and see if the ones we chose matched yours. Just a word of warning: if you can’t suppress your uncontrollable giggling, don’t read this out in the open where everyone can see you. We won’t be held responsible for the subsequent death glares from…
New Year, New You, Same Old CNY
Longform
February 9, 2016
New Year, New You, Same Old CNY
I sauntered into the grocery store, basket in one hand, shopping list in another, ready to embark on my usual therapeutic routine: shopping for my beloved groceries and jamming along to the latest Ariana Grande tune while grooving to those insane falsettos. It was then when the sirens of doom hit me. That ridiculously and blaring noise screaming through those accursed speakers; yes, I have heard them before. They are not the alluring tunes sang by mermaids to lead sailors to their doom. They are those fateful songs that play on loop to torture even the coldest of criminals, to shred…