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In the 1st program series, we shared some insights on HERE as well as the community landscape of the HERE Expert Community Program in Singapore. Today’s article (2nd part of a 3-part program series), we will focus on the HERE Expert Community in Indonesia and Malaysia. Our first stop for today is Indonesia. Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world and is home to more than 195 million people. While much of Indonesia’s allure lies in its rich cultural tapestry and untamed wilderness, its cities and resorts are also famed for world-class visitor facilities **INDONESIA….**Our story so far Indonesia community membership more than doubled in 2014 and accounted for almost three quarters (71.8%) of edits in the South East Asia region. HERE Indonesia communities and members are widespread in most of the major islands and our university partners are predominantly from the top 5 universities in Indonesia. Three quarters of our Indonesia community members are under 25 and mostly developers, smartphone users, university students, travelers and techno geeks. In 2014-5, HERE awarded 10 top influencers in Indonesia with the ‘Map Master’ title, recognizing their excellent contributions. We continue to work with the Map Masters to build our relationship and share ideas. Achievement With a membership around 1,100 and still growing, it is not surprising that the HERE Indonesia Expert Community Program Facebook had the highest number of contributions worldwide for 2014. In 2015, we introduced Indonesia community members to the ‘Community Goes to HERE’ concept, the first event of its kind offering the opportunity to tour the HERE Indonesia office, get a deep-dive into the HERE Expert Community Program and see how HERE collects data via our highly automated True cars. 2015 and beyond For 2015, HERE Indonesia aims to hold our first ever API Map Challenge, organize a ‘Lost in Heaven’ flash-mob campaign and a HERE Indonesia Appreciation event for the community. We will continue to collaborate with the various universities for potential engagement opportunities. Contact For more information about the HERE Indonesia Expert Community Program, join https://www.facebook.com/groups/HEREExpertCommunityIndonesia/ or contact idecpteam@here.com Hopping to our next country, Malaysia! A bubbling, bustling melting-pot of races and religions where Malays, Indians, Chinese and many other ethnic groups live together in peace and harmony!! **MALAYSIA…**Our story so far Malaysia community members grew by more than 52% during 2014 and accounted for ~ 7.5% of contributions in South East Asia region. HERE Malaysia communities are distributed widely across Peninsular and East Malaysia with ~80% of the Malaysia community members under 25 years of age and mostly university and college students. In 2014-5, HERE awarded 8 top influencers in Malaysia with the ‘Map Master’ title, recognizing their excellent contributions. We continue to work with the Map Masters to build our relationship and share ideas. Achievement Communities in Malaysia have been collaborating with The Royal Institution of Surveyors Malaysia (RISM), State Land Survey Board (Sabah & Sarawak), National Geomatics & Geoinformatics organizer and Microsoft Students Partners for map creator based competitions. In 2014, the HERE Malaysia Community team participated in the National Geomatics and Geoinformatics Students Innovation Competition (NGGSIC) – the only competition platform held at Malaysia national level for these students to come up with creative ideas, new approaches and innovation for maps and systems. The results were amazing as NGGSIC clocked the highest edits for Malaysia over a period of one month from the competition timeline. On top of that, HERE Malaysia was appointed as the Polytechnic Industry Partner and recognized by the Ministry of Education (MOE) for their tremendous effort made through partnerships with four polytechnics in Malaysia. 2015 and beyond For 2015, HERE Malaysia is looking to create more publicity and awareness of the HERE Expert community program with a variety of potential users, including school students, professional groups and others through map campaign awareness, participation in conferences, competitions and collaboration with organizations from government bodies and private sectors. Contact For more information about the HERE Malaysia Expert Community Program, join https://www.facebook.com/groups/MalaysiaHERE/ or contact myecpteam@here.com Till the next article, HERE fans, keep mapping!

Microsoft introduces Surface 3: The thinnest and lightest Surface yet Pre-order begins April 1 in Singapore Singapore — March 31, 2015 — Microsoft Corp. is introducing a new Surface, the Surface 3. Like Surface Pro 3, it’s a tablet that can replace your laptop but is thinner, lighter and even more affordable. Powerful and efficient, Surface 3 is optimised to run full Windows and Office and features long battery life. The ability to run Windows apps and the versatile pen experience¹ — great for taking notes or marking documents — make Surface 3 ideal for students, schools and anyone looking for a portable device to get things done. Starting at just a suggested retail price of S$748, Surface 3 packs performance and value into an elegant, lightweight design. “Surface 3 brings what customers love about Surface Pro 3 to more people, delivering the premium design and productivity of Surface in a more affordable device,” said Ian Tan, Surface Lead for Consumer, Microsoft Singapore. “We’ve taken everything we learned making Surface Pro 3 and poured that innovation into this newest Surface. It’s beautiful, versatile, powerful and productive, and our customers are going to love what it lets them do.” ...

In the next installment of our Startup Features, we talk to Alex Chan from Babbobox, one of our BizSpark startups. Babbobox is a Singapore startup that deals with Cloud DMS (Document Management System) allowing people to collaborate and manage their document life-cycle better. Is this your main occupation? Yes. Even though I have vested interest in some other businesses, but I started Babbobox, therefore, no effort will be spared for Babbobox. ...

Since Imagine Cup started in 2003, students all over the world have teamed up to make the world a better place. By creating impressive new technology projects in fields such as health, education, and the environment these students have shown the world new ways to think and to change. Over the past 6 months, innovative young minds all over Singapore have been dreaming, building and living the inventor’s dream. To make the world a better place, they have created projects to influence critical fields such as healthcare, education and our environment. After rounds of refining their projects, six teams of finalists will pitch to industry experts for the opportunity to represent Singapore in the World Finals held in Seattle this July. Only one will be selected for each of these categories: World Citizenship, Innovation, and Games. For the techies, the creatives, and the entrepreneurs – JOIN US! Be inspired. Be the next! ...

Last weekend, my friends and I took part in BattleHack, a hackathon that is held in 14 different cities around the globe, hosted by PayPal and Braintree. During the event, participants were tasked with developing a range of applications, aimed to solve a challenge of their choice. On top of winning a real battle axe that glows (how cool is that!), the winning team of 4 will be flown to the finals at PayPal’s headquarters in Silicon Valley to battle it out with teams from around the world for the $100,000 grand prize. The event kicked-off with a huge bang at 11am, where developers were introduced to all the cool event partners that they may leverage on during the competition. Also, lots of cool swags were given out! Partners for BattleHack were eagerly sharing their individual hardware gadgets and services. Some of them include Hoiio - a software company that provides cloud communication and apps to businesses, Rainmaker Labs - who gave developers the opportunity to use their beacons to trigger actions on mobile phones, 12 Geeks - which brought a cool eyewear that allows developers to create apps on their mobile phones and view them in a 3D-like space, and JustGiving - a platform which helps in fundraising. Well, since a picture speaks a thousand words, I’ll let them do the talking… Keep a look out for all the awesome food provided over the event. They feed us so well, makes us wonder if we’re actually here for a buffet-athon rather than a hack-athon, haha! They even brought in a bartender serving alcohol! As the clock ticks past midnight into the wee hours, I got to see the perseverance of many developers. Of course, there were also those who KO-ed and lost to the Z-monster. If you look hard enough at the photos, you’d spot some teams who would cherish a game of DotA more than their sleep! And finally… the moment we were all waiting for. The sharing session to hear about all the different cool ideas that surfaced from the 24 hours! Ideas ranged from apps that does Twitter Analytics, a mobile phone selling/buying platform, web services that handles memory of your loved ones, mobile services that handles queue problems, food ordering systems, and even crazy ideas that aims to help our rag-and-bone man in their work … and many more! It was truly an amazing experience, and I’ve made lots of friends from different countries and exchanged ideas. Can’t wait till BattleHack 2016, and hope to see everyone again next year :) 

You didn’t read it wrong. I have been a long proponent of Angular ever since it started picking up popularity. As you might have known, Angular is an open source web application framework that is currently maintained by Google and the community. One of the best features of Angular is its two-way data binding that allow us to synchronize models and views automatically. TypeScript on the other hand is a compiled language that is a superset of JavaScript maintained by Microsoft. TypeScript enforces safe-typing and allows modular programming, a feature that we are familiar with in other OOP languages. Angular 2, a newly rewritten version of Angular, is developed for mobile in mind, hence the focus on performance, speed, and efficiency. As of last year, it was written using AtScript, a superset of TypeScript that uses Annotation processing. However, just today, Angular and TypeScript team announced that Angular will now be build with TypeScript. ...

If you’re a student in Singapore (or anywhere, really) at a recognized educational institute (Primary, Secondary, Tertiary) you’re eligible for Microsoft DreamSpark where you can get free development tools and software. At DreamSpark, you’ll be able to explore programming through tools such as Visual Studio and SQL Server and take advantage of subscriptions such as Windows Store Developer Accounts and the recently released Azure offer for students. Here’s how to join: ...

Microsoft has just released an initial SDK preview for Windows 10 developers to start experimenting with the new platform capabilities for building Windows 10 apps. Just to explore the new platform and see how quickly I can launch a new app, I installed the latest Windows 10 Technical Preview Build 10041 through the Windows Insider program, and also the latest Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 and the Windows 10 developer tools. The cool thing about the Windows 10 Universal App is that it is able to run on all Windows 10 devices - PC, Tablet, Phone, and even Xbox! How awesome is that! Similar to building Apps for Windows 8, the templates allow developers to select a language of their choice, such as C#, VB, C++ and JavaScript. For my case, I chose to use JavaScript. I added in a few of my designs for my app logo and updated their path in the package.appxmanifest. For a quick trial, I reused the code for a Windows 8 app I made in the past. After adding in the code, I can deploy my app for testing purposes on the different platforms. In this preview, the feature to deploy the app to a phone running Windows 10 and Xbox is not yet supported. In the meantime, I can deploy it on the Windows 10 Local Machine, as well as a Windows 10 Phone emulator. Subsequently, I tried to run my Windows 10 app on my Local Machine and Phone Emulator, and this is what I see! As I was checking out on Windows 10 Universal App development, something interesting that I thought was worth mentioning is the Application Insights, which is a service that now allows developers to monitor their published apps and visualize data such as application usage or diagnostic reports in the Azure Preview Portal. Here is a guide that shows you how this can be added to your Windows 10 Universal App. Interested in creating your first Windows 10 Universal App too? There’s a lot of free resources available on Microsoft Virtual Academy, such as A Developer’s Guide to Windows 10 Preview, that you can leverage on! It will show you how you can quickly set up your “Hello World!” app, extension SDKs, App Services and more. Also, if you are familiar in developing on Windows 8, it also guides you on the migration process. Do check it out :)

Web Camp - Exploring Microsoft Azure and MVC framework in Visual Studio Everybody’s gotta start somewhere I’ve been having the inclination to learn how to build my own website for a very long time. The chance to design and style my very own corner of the internet, and upload my ideas and projects has always been exciting, but has been taking a back seat. Too much work, too lazy, too busy with Dota2 - there’s always been an excuse to push it to the next free slot. So when Terence, a Technical Evangelist from Microsoft Singapore posted about his upcoming Web Camp, I was quite excited at the prospect of learning to use Microsoft’s Azure platform for web applications and projects. Laptop? Check. Cables? Check. Open mind? Bit sleepy, but check. Off I went! ...

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that students around the world will be able to access Microsoft Azure for free. Previously, students who wanted to explore Microsoft’s cloud computing platform and infrastructure would have to have had a credit card in order to sign up for the free trial. This offer can be claimed through Microsoft DreamSpark with a verified student account. Students will be able to explore the new Azure App Service and build and deploy websites and web apps using a plethora of languages such as ASP.NET, Java, PHP, Node.js and Python. Here is a full list of services you can use to develop in the cloud at no cost: ...