BusinessWeek has a special report on the shift to cloud computing in the business sphere.  More comampanies are obtaining their software and computing capacity through web-based models. A Merrill Lynch report estimates that the annual global market for cloud computing will surge to $95 billion by 2013 with about 12% of the software market moving into the cloud.

Read the full BusinessWeek article here: “How Cloud Computing Is Changing the World”

The iPhone has finally landed on our shores – more than 1,000 people descended on Singtel Comcentre at midnight yesterday to be among the first official owners of the 3G Apple iPhone in Singapore. Even before Singtel’s launch, though, there were an estimated 10,000 iPhone in use locally – mainly unlocked versions of the original 2G iPhones.

I myself have been using one as my primary mobile phone for the past three months. From my experience, the hype and excitement surrounding the iPhone is justified – mostly. Sure, it is not the most feature-rich of phones currently available: no SMS forwarding; no video capability; no stereo-bluetooth; etc. Overall, though, I must say that it has been the most competent and intuitive smart phone I’ve ever used.

In my opinion, the two areas in which the iPhone excels are accessing the Internet and synchronizing data. The iPhone’s web browser, which is a mobile version of the Apple’s Safari browser, is far superior to those found on any other mobile phone. It is no accident that a far higher percentage of iPhone users access the web regularly compared to any other mobile phone.

Having struggled to keep my personal information synchronized between my PCs and a variety of mobile devices over the past decade, I am also well and truly impressed at how effectively Apple has implemented this potentially frustrating process. Dock your iPhone with your Mac and your email accounts, calendars, contacts, music and photos are synced with minimum fuss – no messing about with complex configuration options or dealing with frustrating sync conflicts.

The iPhone will definitely evolve into a dominant mobile web platform fairly quickly. I believe it is already the best smart phone option for small businesses wishing to make their workforce more mobile and productive.

With almost daily reminders in the media that the global economy is heading south, many companies are naturally looking for ways to tighten their belts. The marketing budget is usually one of the first victims in most cost-cutting exercises.

An Economist article – Perfecting Pitches – examines how some larger firms are likely to modify their marketing spend. One prediction is that advertisers will become more selective about the channels they use to communicate with customers, with firms likely to commit more resources to online initiatives.

Well-executed Internet advertising allows firms to easily address sharply-focussed market segments and its effectiveness can be far more accurately measured than mass-media campaigns. This is precisely why small businesses, which cannot match the Olympics-sized marketing budgets of the likes of Coca-Cola anyway, should also place the Internet at the heart of their marketing efforts.

Another interesting article – Are Olympics Sponsorships Worth It? – from BusinessWeek reports that many long-time sponsors of the Olympics are re-examining their marketing strategies amid research that suggests few consumers even notice who is backing the Games. Clearly the golden age of intrusion marketing is over. Marketers will have to find more targeted and personalized methods of leveraging on the Olympic spirit going forward.

Dell has unveiled a new range of laptops aimed squarely at digital nomads. Speaking to BBC News, Andy Lark – Dell’s VP for Global Marketing – claims that more than two-thirds of India’s workforce is going to be entirely mobile.

With the majority of people buying their PCs online coming from emerging economies like India, it is no wonder that Dell is focussing on features that are being demanded by the footloose mobile worker. These include things like long battery life, easy connectivity, robust security, reliability and, above all, supreme portability.

Dell is wise to focus on mobility, but whether its revamped laptops are enough to stem its recent loss in market share remains to be seen. All the major PC makes from Apple to Toshiba are continually pushing the envelope on battery life and weights of their laptops.

I believe the real “game-changer” in the mobility space is the maturing of the cloud computing and web services concepts. The true digital nomads of tomorrow are those who do not need to lug their computing hardware around with them, regardless of how light it may be. Instead, their data, applications and processes live on the Web and are accessible practically anywhere through far tinnier devices that are not much larger than smart-phones.

An Economist article – “Nomads at last (April 2008)” – paints a far more compelling picture of how wireless communication can turn us into true nomads, sans most of the hardware.

Market research firm Frost & Sullivan expects to see robust growth in Singapore’s online content market over the next 5 years. Worth over SGD 30-million in 2008, it is expected to grow to over SGD 165-miilion by 2013.

Online gaming dominates the local content market now. Other content services include online music and videos. However, it is online gaming that has taken off significantly here, driven by the popularity of community focussed MMOGs (massively multi-player online games).

Singapore’s planned next-generation National Broadband Network will certainly give the online content market a fillip by making it more feasible to provide bandwidth intensive services such as Video-on-Demand.

However, I personally feel that it is the new mobile devices coming onto the market that will really boost the market. Apple’s iPhone has shown how a truly mobile device can effectively tap into the Web. Some of the 1st-generation applications on its fledgling App Store already demonstrate how ubiquitous, always-on connection to the Internet can be genuinely useful.

Most of the successful mobile apps do not require massive bandwidth or production infrastructure . Instead, the critical factors are to have relevant content and to present it intuitively through well designed user interfaces. Providing such relevant, localized & niche content is a field where you don’t really need to be big to succeed. So, I do expect that small businesses can take a big bite of the SGD 165-miilion online content market come 2013.