Not to be left out of quirky squad, LG's two furry mascots - what looked like a briefcase and the other, a big furry eeerm, "@" sign - have hit the showfloor.

LG joins the 'furry mascots' squad with a briefcase and an "@" sign.
PHOTO: Chua Hian Hou

Blackberry's mascot aside (see below), it also got two leggy girls to "storm" the show and distribute brochures promoting its recently launched Blackberry Storm smartphone to visitors.

Blackberry ups the ante with a couple of leggy attractions.
PHOTO: Chua Hian Hou

And then there is Cboss.

Every hour, the media working room in Hall 5 will be hit by a barrage of sound.

Some curious journalists would step out, and return five minutes later looking puzzled, asking "what's Cboss?" of the other, equally nonplussed, reporters.

I still don't know what Cboss is or what it does, but apparently the "Cboss girls" hourly dance routine is a highlight for many visitors.

Nobody knows what Cboss is, but their dancers are cute.
PHOTO: Chua Hian Hou

If you spot any other interesting, quirky, odd or puzzling things at one of the many tech shows going on in Singapore, take a quick snap and e-mail to chuahh@sph.com.sg or serl@sph.com.sg and we'll add them to the list.

DAY TWO
IT IS Day Two of the biggest tech show in Asia, the Infocomm Media Business Exchange, and my ankles and feet can attest to that.

Most visitors,  here just for one or two days, are still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. It is the exhibitors and other journalists around me that have  bleary eyes.

But there are still quirky things to look forward to at this show – and, from a personal view, there are more of them this year than last year.

The best example must be Mabuhay Satellite, in hall 6, which brought in a model who looks very much like US president Barack Obama's long-lost twin.

'Yes, Mr President,' here is Singapore's verion of Mr Obama.
PHOTO: Joyce Fang

He comes out to pose with his bevy of "Secret Service" girls, who look a little like Angelina Jolie.

I'm not sure what the purpose of having him there is, but he sure attracts crowds.

The furry mascots that look like Blackberry phones or e-mail message icons are also quite popular.

Lots of visitors, in particular the foreign visitors, stop to take photographs with them, as though they were children taking pictures with Mickey Mouse in Disneyland.

At least you are able to see all those small buttons...
PHOTO: Serene Luo

And everytime this race car gets going, a crowd gathers to watch some lucky prospective customer try out the wheels.

Broom, broom. Singapore loves a fast car, especially if it's not going anywhere. PHOTO: Serene Luo

I think the man also had another, better reason to try out the car – he might just be looking for the nearest available seat to rest his poor feet.

Business visitors meeting technical experts from Nokia Siemens Networks got to enjoy foot and back massages while discussing the finer points of networking -- the cables and fibre type, not the social kind.

The Solutions Bar, as it is called, was an idea they came up with last year, so visitors could talk shop in a more casual manner. It was so popular they decided to bring it back this year too, the company's spokesman said.

The drinks start flowing nightly in Clarke Quay's Rupee Room from 6pm to 10pm nightly, for the course of the Asia's largest tech trade show, the Infocomm Media Business Exchange, held here this week.

Before the downturn, and during the dot.com heydays, tech shows like CommunicAsia, which is part of the imbX, and shows overseas like the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, used to be full of the weird and wonderful.

The tech team here at The Straits Times remembers dancing girls, numerous coffee bars at the booths at the exhibition, and gourmet ice-cream being dished out.

These perks are no longer there on such a large scale, but some exhibitors, particularly the multi-national companies, do still try to surprise visitors.

For instance, Yahoo!'s booth in Hall 5 is serving up slushees at a special bar it has put up, while another booth brings in an Obama look-alike twice a day.

Not only do these perks bring in the crowds, perhaps building friendly relations is the new way to doing business too. Can there be anything more intimate and friendly than getting a massage together to cement a new friendship?

PHOTO: SERENE LUO

If you've seen something quirky at the imbX exhibitions, list it below or send an e-mail to stonline@sph.com.

EARLIER today, a man was walking around the crowded halls of Suntec City’s convention centre looking for a specific mobile phone to buy.

He was holding a copy of my article, which featured a simple-to-use phone with big buttons targeted at the elderly, and was asking around if they knew where to get it at the PC Show.

The phone debuts at the show from today, and costs $78. Among its features is a special SOS emergency button which the owner can press when he is in trouble. An emergency message and call goes out to pre-programmed numbers when he does that.

It was too crowded, he could not find it — and his employer, a reader who only wanted to be identified as Grace, 55, called The Straits Times to find out where to buy it.

She said she had been searching since last year for a phone like this for an elderly family friend.

"It's good to have one of these in your pocket around the house, in case you fall and can't get up," she said, referring to an elderly person. "It's good for the handicapped too."

In fact, she spent the next hour hunting around Lucky Plaza, in case they were sold there too, passing around the article in case anyone knew where to find it.

"I think I must buy a few more, to keep around just in case," she said.

When I got her message and returned her call, she sounded very grateful on the phone.

As a journalist, it always spurs me on when I know I’ve helped someone out, even if it is to give directions to someone as to where the booth inside the convention hall is.

THURSDAY, 11.40am
AT THE time of writing, it is 11.40am, 20 minutes before shopping season begins at the PC Show, which opens today at noon.

But already, people preparing to suss out the best bargains have headed online to do their research.

Exhibitors, brands and even the temporary promoters hired to push the sales of gadgets have gotten more tech-savvy.

Even before the show opens, they have uploaded digital versions of price lists, brochures and flyers onto websites where people can download them to make a comparison.

As of June 11, 11.32am, there were 144 of these digital brochures uploaded already on one website www.bootstrike.com, hosted by a user named Ganesh. Submission to his website is free.

Forums like Hardwarezone and VR-Zone, which have a tech slant, also have many pricelists and comments from members who have visited the show.

In the past, it used to be simply a "service", where fellow users helped one another out by posting what they found out, from the kindness of their hearts.

But today, it’s really about business.

Temporary promoters who put up such information, even news about whether certain models or colours of the gadgets are selling out fast, also post their cellphone numbers – and ask forum members to look for them when they head down to the show to buy.

The promoters are usually paid commission when they make a sale.

Brands that submit their pricelists are also signalling to customers that they have taken a booth there. It is another means of marketing, and it comes at little or no cost.

But for seasoned electronic fair shoppers, these lists are simply a guide.

As the show goes on, the prices or number of freebies are usually adjusted as exhibitors check out the competition and price themselves better.

New leaflets are usually printed too – which may not be uploaded onto the websites.

The amount of "noise" from too many discussion threads from the show also needs navigating.

And of course, there’s the fine art of haggling – unfortunately, one I have not mastered.

So beat the heat and crowds and monitor the prices and deals from the comfort of your own home first – then swoop in and bargain. Happy shopping.

WHERE TO FIND ONLINE BROCHURES:

www.bootstrike.com/itfairsg/pcshow2009

http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg

http://forums.vr-zone.com

http://my.ocworkbench.com/bbs/forumdisplay.php?f=80

A woman gets robbed and stranded without money in some part of rural China. She calls her consulate, but they never call her back.

All around her are cops, a hostel pestering her for payment, and she has nothing on but a singlet and cardigan in 13 to 20 degree Celsius weather.

Desperate, she turns to her first instinct: Facebook.

It must be her good karma that one of her friends decides to play hero and engineers a massive callout on the social network – all the way from Singapore – to save her.

Help from dozens of rescuers in Singapore poured in. They made calls to police stations, trawled satellite maps to pinpoint exactly where she was, and even called their friends in China to help.
Too good to be true?

No, that is exactly what  happened this week, here in the Lion City, as I watched it play out on my Facebook network - I was a friend of the "hero".

Ms R Yeow, 27, whom I tracked down last night in China, couldn’t believe her luck. She didn’t even know the person she was staying with right now, she said.

"I was really lucky," she said. "It's amazing. I have never met most of these people before."

I am amazed too.

One of the helpers I spoke to said she had initially dismissed the SOS alert, thinking it wasn't that serious. When she realised it was critical, she pitched in.

It may not be a strategy that works for everyone though.

Some contacts may simply think you're joking – just like the boy who cried wolf – especially if you are one of those users that often post jokes or cryptic messages on their networks.

And there may be "fatigue". For instance, I doubt the same contact would drive 140km to pick up another stranded traveller that soon.

And how wide do our contact networks stretch? Ms Yeow was lucky she got stuck in China, a country which many Singaporeans have fairly close ties with.

What if this had happened in Africa? That would have severely reduced her chances of receiving help.

I'm very glad that Ms Yeow is safe and sound now, but I also think this is a "feat" that can't be repeated on a regular basis.

Dear Singaporeans, here's a pat on the back for all your help. We aren't so apathetic after all.

Do you know of other Singaporeans solving crimes or conducting rescues on social networks? E-mail the writer at serl@sph.com.sg

"I remember when I was a kid, we actually had to pay for goods and services," the 28-year-old said. "Now, we've been given things for free for so long that we’ve developed an entitlement mentality."

Jon is in town, and gave a talk entitled "How to fire your boss" to about 150 people interested in blogging and social media during the weekend’s BlogOut conference. The two-day affair was organised by The Digital Movement, a non-profit local interest group.

Jon was trying to make the point that blogs could earn their owners money, but not through advertising. Advertising is an unstable form of income for the blogger, and like Heidi Klum says, "One day you're in, the next day, you're out."

He believed that the day would come when people would start paying for content. Not just any content, but specialised, niche content that only YOU would be able to create.

"There’s an expert in all of us," he said.

My question back is, what expertise do I have? It isn't always so clear.

After all, we are just students, office workers, service providers, housewives...Can all of us really be an expert?

Perhaps the key is in becoming an extremely niche expert, and to take advantage of the long tail.

It isn't enough, for example, to teach people how to get good grades, because that is too general, but perhaps someone will pay me because I can teach them how to write an essay and get a reasonable grade within 48 hours.

Maybe a housewife can give tips on making the perfect Japanese bento lunchboxes that will win the love of their children and husbands – all within 30 minutes in the morning.

Jon gave some examples, such as The Japan Times Online, which managed to make a good income by delivering extremely niche content – it "sold" information on how foreigners can start a business in Japan, including all the licensing protocol, translated into English.

I'm still on the fence.

I think the barriers to entry are a little too high for our average teenage blogger who writes about make-up, movies and school.

It sounds extremely daunting. I'll believe it when I see our regular teenager blogger making his pocket money that way.

The major outage hit thousands of users worldwide, and while it happened in the wee hours of the morning for United States users, it was  peak hour traffic for users in Asia, as it was roughly between 5pm and 11pm for us.

Then, in the same day, numerous Gmail users were hit by a phishing attempt.

The phish came in this form: a friend on your Gtalk contact list would send a message that gives an inocuous-looking link, and “tells” you that the video at the end of that link – the ViddyHo website – was quite a laugh.

It’s only human to click the link. And when you do, it asks you to enter your Gmail address and password so you can watch the video.

Uh-oh. If you did that, you’ve only given some hacker the address and keys to your e-mail account.

If you’re anything like me, your Gmail account holds a great deal of personal correspondence, and even confidential material such as reports, phone numbers and even identity details.

I rely on Gmail to prepare my notes, send out urgent e-mails to newsmakers in the middle of the night, and to chat with my friends, whether they be in Bukit Timah or Sydney.

When the outage occurred, I felt lost. And when the phishing attempt was reported, I felt outrage.

It is almost the equivalent of getting locked out of my own bedroom, while someone takes their time to go through my diary, my underwear drawer and perhaps take a nap in my bed.

Most of all, I felt handicapped, because access to my information was not at my fingertips.

The past 24 hours have also made me a lot more aware of how much time I spend on e-mail, and how reliant I am on it.

Judging by the amount of searches and posts about the outages online, it seems there are many people out there who feel the same way.

These rabbits are helping out in laboratory tests to test a new homegrown contact lens that "self-lubricate".

After the bunny tests end in October this year, researchers will move on to testing the lenses in human patients.

So far, there are no side-effects on the rabbits, the head researcher from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Dr Edwin Chow, told me in an interview two weeks ago. Barring a major problem, it seems that these lenses will reach us soon.

This is great news for me, someone who has worn glasses from the age of three – and has given up on contact lenses thrice.
Even for the hottest date or closest friend’s wedding, I could not stand to have contact lenses in my eyes.

The lenses made my eyes itchy, painful, and dry. Worse still, my vision would blur, and I’d be left blinking or winking rapidly (hopefully not at the wrong person), trying to bring some vision back.

A bottle of eyedrops became my best friend, and woe betide me if they had reached the expiry date or if I forgot to take them out with me.

The latest lenses these days, that I succumbed to buying two weeks ago, are a lot more comfortable, and have some “hydrating” features built into them, but on bad days when I’m staring at a computer screen all day, the blurred vision returns.

Users with dry eyes like me, all 40 million or so of us worldwide, are still hunting for that perfect solution, that won’t involve any cuts or pain or inconvenience.

Of course, I hope these lenses will be it, and that being homegrown technology they will be cheaper for consumers as well.

That said, I suppose not everyone will find them suitable for their eyes.

But either way, I’m rooting for the rabbits.

But I'm not.

In fact, I hate how commercial and scientific love is these days.
Valentine’s Day, itself, is a huge money-spending conspiracy.

It’s another "reason" why we should buy roses at $10 a stalk (and at this late date, you’d probably pay a lot more); jostle with other lovey-dovey couples to pay $200 for a steak and a glass of house wine; pay hundreds of dollars for a room at a five-star hotel for a romantic getaway, but end up just being a mallrat on Orchard Road.

I also recently learnt about how some men have been paying "dating coaches", a la Will Smith in Hitch, to teach them the art of picking up girls.

These classes don't come cheap. One of them I know of charges $600 for a weekend's training.

I'm not against people getting help to appear more attractive – look, a hairdresser does the same thing – but I'm worried that the man I fall in love with might just be an A student in the dating classroom.

And then, there's the Internet.

Sites like Match.com work, for sure, but they boil potential boyfriends and girlfriends down to a list of ticks and crosses.

How clinical – and honestly, how unmagical.

One other gem I recently found, titled DontDateHimGirl.com, even takes the "danger" out of meeting a dud.

Former girlfriends write reviews of the flops they have dated – and other women can check out if the man they are thinking of dating may actually be a pervert, cheater or axe-murderer.

I personally love the website – these women are so frank – but I feel sorry for the men too.

Call me a hopeless romantic, but I'm the kind of girl who wants to literally run into the love of my life.

I'd rather smile and walk away if the magic is manufactured or store-bought.

For another perspective on Valentine's Day, read Nic Yong's blog on why he can't find love.

WE ALL know that too-loud sounds – a jackhammer drilling, an airplane taking off, a rock concert – can make one lose their hearing.

These days, with every other person sporting mobile phone or iPod earphones in their ears, it's a danger that is very real.

But how really does an odourless, colourless, shapeless entity like sound affect the ear?

In the inner ear, there are three layers of microscopic “hearing” cells or outer hair cells. When sound waves hit them, these cells can convert the sound energy into electrical pulses that are transmitted by the nerves to the brain. The brain then interprets the sound.

However, every person is only born with 15,000 of these cells, a finite number, said Singapore General Hospital’s Associate Professor Low Wong-Kein.

The director of the hospital’s Centre for Hearing and Ear Implants said the body cannot re-grow these cells when they are damaged, unlike skin cells, where new skin can grow to replace the sloughed-off old ones, for example.

That means that if one spoils too many of these cells such that they cannot work to transmit the electrical pulses, the amount of hearing that can be perceived by the brain will drop drastically.

Prof Low recently did some experiments in the United States where he exposed guinea pigs to loud sounds above the human acceptable limit. He found that initially healthy cells would become “disorganised”, burst and become scar tissue. And that was after just 10 hours of exposure to noise at 120 decibels – equivalent to front-row seats at a rock concert. 

At 120 decibels, the amount of exposure considered safe by the US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health is less than 10 seconds. The safe level for workers exposed to loud sounds is usually 85 decibels for eight hours of exposure.

However, many MP3 players today are able to deliver more than 10 hours of playback time. 

While music players sold in Europe are governed by the continent’s 100 decibel limit, gadgets in other countries, including Singapore, may go beyond that.

Mr Tan Boon Hai, a senior audiologist from Changi General Hospital, said it wasn’t the patients that had already come to the clinic to seek help he was worried about.

“It’s the ones who are out there and still exposed that are unaware of the damage to their ears,” he said.

Remember that the next time you reach out for the volume wheel on your iPod!

Read the full story in The Straits Times' today.

In one incident last week at Clementi MRT station, a man in his late 40s was understood to have been under the influence of alcohol when he was caught tottering 200m away from the station on the tracks.

In some cases, passengers may have fainted, lost their balance, slipped or just fallen onto the tracks due to carelessness, an SMRT spokesman said.

But in another more eyebrow-raising incident nine years ago, a man was jailed three months – because he had decided to relieve himself and pee on the tracks.

Intentional reasons, such as mischief or committing suicide, make up over 70 per cent of cases where people stray onto the MRT tracks.

There have been 21 cases of people straying onto tracks so far this year; last year there were 31 cases and 30 cases the year before.

These cases have so far only happened at the stations where the tracks are at ground level or above-ground.

That is because full-length platform doors at underground stations have prevented anyone from trespassing onto the tracks at underground stations, like City Hall Interchange or Hougang station.

However, a person who leaps onto a track may face more danger from an oncoming train, rather than the electricity coursing through the rails.

An SMRT spokesman said a third rail, which runs along the main track, supplies electricity – and is insulated with a protective cover.

Under this cover is a metal bar that carries 750 volts of direct current to the trains.

Trains use a “current-collector device”, which is found under the carriages, and reaches down to touch the third rail, in order to access the current, and thus move the train.