Singapore Election Facebook Fight and 46 Asian Tech Stories You May Have Missed

Last week was an interesting week for Chinese censorship. Xinhua reported that a new State Internet Information Office will be established to help monitor the nation’s online activity. Meanwhile, American Senator Dick Durbin addressed a letter to Baidu on human rights concerns, asking the Chinese Search Engline to list down its current and future human rights-related policies.

The iPad 2 was also launched in China and interestingly, a fight broke up at Apple Store, Sanlitun, Beijing as well. Baidu also did a closed-beta launch for its licensed music player, “Baidu Ting.” Ctrip also jumped onto the group buying bandwagon with its hotel group buying site.

In India, the partnership between Indiatimes and YouTube to stream the Indian Premier league online has proven to be effective as online viewership increased by 82 percent in the first 15 days of the tournament. Indiatimes also launched a group buying site, TimesDeal.com to compete Groupon India. Check out this post if you wish to understand the India media landscape.

Elsewhere, in Indonesia, fitness social networkm SixReps combined offline and online strategy by launching a body contest. The Acer Iconia tablet also hit Indonesia last week. More on mobile as Nokia leveraged on Angry Birds’s popularity to gain buzz. Nokia also upgraded its Life Tools by providing health information. Our very own writer, Ratri also attended the IBM technology conference in Indonesia and wrote a neat summary about the event. Indonesia and Microsoft also signed a deal last week t0 improve education in the country.

World of Warcraft played its part for the Japan earthquake relief by donating all sales of Cenarion Hatchling to the relief. We also covered Japan’s kiss machine and also a start-up which helps publishers monetize through a button.

Below are 3 must-read stories and another stories for Asian technology last week.

Politician Faces Facebook Petition Trouble: The Singapore General Election ended. All was good, except for Ms. Tin Pei Ling who isn’t really popular among Singaporeans, or at least Facebook-ers in Singapore.

Chinese Censorship: For those of you keeping an eye to censorship in China, it has been an interesting week. On Wednesday Xinhua reported that a new State Internet Information Office will be established to help police the nation’s online activity.

iPad 2 is here in China: Starting from RMB 3,688 (US$568) for the 16 GB iPad 2, Apple fans in China can now purchase them online or in Apple stores. The queue is already long in Sanlitun (三里屯) Apple Store, Beijing. The usual scene we would expect for any product launch from Apple.

Tech and News

(1) Japan Invents Internet Kiss Machine

(2) Online Strategy For Indian Premier League Paying Dividends

(3) Google’s Korea Office Raided By Police

(4) Mozilla Firefox 4.0 Holds Launch Parties Across Indonesia