Issued by The Economist's Intelligence Unit and sponsored by the BSA, the IT Competitiveness 2009 study puts Singapore 9th among 66 economies.

T&A: A study released one and a half weeks ago has recently ranked five Asia Pacific economies — Australia (7th), Singapore (9th), Japan (12th), Taiwan (15th) and South Korea (16th) — as among the Top 20 in the world in infotech (IT) industry competitiveness.

The study, now in its third year, was made by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and sponsored by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), and it compares the IT industry environments of 66 economies, to determine IT sector competitiveness.

According to Jeffrey Hardee, BSA Vice President and Regional Director, APAC, the IT sector remains an important engine of economic growth, and economies that support innovation and stimulate tech sector output will be in a stronger position to accelerate economic recovery. (more…)

SHOWCASE: Well, “public” as in 100,000 users will be getting their invites on September 30. It’s expected to go out to the rest of the world a month later.

Google Wave, an open-source, real-time, personal collaboration and communication tool, was first unveiled at the Google I/O developers conference on May 27, 2009.

Ever since then, it has been described as a game-changer by multiple developers (25,000 of them currently have access to Wave) who have been busy creating and testing their own slew of plug-ins and widgets via APIs (Application Programming Interface) which Google has made available to them.

Basically, Google Wave takes the basis behind emails, instant messaging, community forums, media sharing and social networking, and puts them all within a platform.  (Editor opinions: 1)

To better understand what Wave really is all about, here’s an eighty-odd minute video of that fateful developer conference:

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CORP TALK: Facebook users…rejoice. The social networking service has decided to end its Beacon marketing program.

According to this Associated Press report, picked up by news publishers worldwide, the Beacon marketing program was launched two years ago to track user activities at partner Web sites.  The intention of the program was to help users keep their friends informed on their interests when they visit participating sites, thus becoming “trusted referrals” and drive sales.

While users were able to decline this tracking on a site-by-site basis, the warning prompt was too brief (a 20-second pop-up at the corner of Web browsers), causing many to complain. (more…)

China had 687.2 million subscribers in 2008 (about 80% of North Asia's mobile users). By 2014, this will increase to 1.15 billion users.

T&A: Frost & Sullivan released a report, indicating that compared to the other Asian sub-regions, North Asia (China, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong), continues to lead in mobile revenues, innovation and subscription in 2009.

According to the report, Japan is expected to launch its LTE (Long Term Evolution) in 2010 — which is probably a world first — and together with South Korea, form the two nations with the highest ARPU (average revenue per user) levels in Asia-Pacific.

Japan leads with an ARPU of US$53.2 per month in 2008, while South Korea takes second with US$38.04.

By the end of 2009, North Asia is expected to have 1 billion mobile users, which is a year-on-year growth of 15.3%.

While China continues to fuel this growth (51.6% mobile penetration rate in 2008), other countries like Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan are experiencing similar take-up rates at 133.2%, 110.9%, 94% and 86.5% respectively.

China alone is expected to form 80% of that billion user benchmark.In the four countries besides China, Frost & Sullivan believes that growth will be driven less by more subscribers but more by data usage due to mobile broadband and 3G service uptake.

“We expect intense price competition in these markets with the vast majority of mobile data subscribers using flat-rate plans,” one analyst explains. (Editor opinions: 1)

HWM Indonesia

HWM Indonesia: No surprises there as the North Asian countries are more economically established than the rest of Asia.

Telecommunication infrastructure is also more developed making it more practical to use, thus more usage per user.

The rest of Asia is still catching up on the number of mobile phone owners.

The development and introduction of additional mobile features (content) are still slow with most providers still focusing on basic mobile phone usage (voice and texting).

Since acquiring Voodoo in 2006, HP has now spruced up the ENVY line-up with two new, sleek notebooks.

SHOWCASE: HP Asia Pacific showcased new netbooks, notebooks and desktops to regional journalists (from as far as Japan) on Sentosa Island, Singapore last night.

Among the products shown included the latest ENVY 13 and 15, a series which HP adopted after acquiring Voodoo in 2006. The new laptops have the full body aluminum and magnesium chassis, including a multi-touch pad called a Clickpad.

The system comes with the Beats Audio subsystem developed by Beats by Dr. Dre (a Monster Cable product). The Envy 13 itself has a thickness of only 0.8 inch and 1.69kg weight. It doesn’t come with a built-in optical drive.

The more impressive function is the 13.1-inch widescreen display, which boasts 410 nits brightness and 82% color gamut. This is possible with the ability to switch between the integrated graphics chipset and ATI Mobility Radeon 4330 chipset.

The Envy 15 is heavier at 2.35kg and 1-inch thick. It’s 15.6-inch screen can manage only 300 nits brightness and a 60% color gamut. It’s using a Core 97 processor (Core i7 Q720), supports up to 16GB of memory and allows 2 solid state drive disks on a RAID 0 configuration. It uses the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4830 with 1GB of memory.

Expect both the Envy 13 and 15 to launch by Oct 22 in stores at US$1699 and US$1899 respectively.

Another major showcase was the HP Netbook Mini 311, which comes with NVIDIA’s Ion platform. With an 11.6-inch screen, the Mini 311 is using an Intel Atom N270 processor, while the Ion hardware-accelerated HD decode function powers up high def content (sans Flash-based HD content).

Other products included two consumer-based Pavilion notebooks (dm1 and dm3), a business-class ProBook (5310m) and a Pavilion desktop PC. For more info on these products, check out the full coverage here. (Editor opinions: 3)

Meanwhile here are some images of some of the products shown last night.

David Chieng, Editor, HWM Singapore

David (HWM Singapore): We saw an earlier Voodoo ENVY laptop in Berlin last year during HP’s 2008 Big Bang launch of the year.

From the looks of it, HP’s still going on with the ENVY theme, but there doesn’t seem to be any additional sparks of life from the Voodoo unit that HP acquired sometime back.

Even more telling is a recent blog post by Voodoo founder Rahul Sood that all but confirms that HP probably isn’t going to continue with the Voodoo brand as it was originally conceived to be, as a high-end, custom PC offering for the well-heeled.

At least Dell’s made some inroads into the region with Alienware, but I think hopeful Voodoo fans in Asia might get disappointed. That said however, the ENVY 13 and 15 seem to both be fabulous machines, and I for one can’t wait for productions samples to arrive for review.

HWM Indonesia

HWM Indonesia: I think it’s good that there’s a quiet transformation in the making for the Voodoo line.

The original transformation was quite revolutionary as it was very gamer-audience focused.

Now, it’s very lifestyle focused — aimed more for the masses.

I think it’s a smart move on HP’s part and I hope this strategy will attract more sales volume.

Paolo Manzano, Managing Editor, HWM Philippines

Paolo (HWM Philippines): The ENVY line-up consists of interesting products that have me wondering if these will be brought over to the Philippines’ shores.

HP Philippines has been quite conservative in bringing in the more “advanced” and high-end product offerings such as the Blackbird and TouchSmart PCs in the past.

Hopefully, they see the merit of bringing these in, even as “hero” or “halo” products.

Seeing another Ion-powered netbook is good news for the market as well, as it sends out a strong signal that Intel is either losing its equity with manufacturers or its grip over and desire to control what chipset ships with the Atom processor.

Either way, this is good for consumers and brings forth another challenge for Intel in deriving better performance from their Atom chipset combos.