The 20 Biggest Cross-Border SWF Deals Since 2005

An very illustrative infographic by New York Times :







[via : Tomorrow.sg]

NUS ranks Lowest in Customer Satisfaction Among 3 Local Universities

According to the statistics buried inside the executive summary PDF from SMU's Institute of Service Excellence (Ises):

Universities (70.9)

• NTU (70.8)
  
• NUS (70.6)
  
• SMU (72.2)
  

Almost neck-to-neck with NTU but SMU is way ahead? I'm kinda keen on seeing the full report so anyone keen on donating a thousand bucks for me to purchase it?

Interestingly, SMU is also sticking to the "we only have 3 universities in Singapore" viewpoint.

Probably not something which is going to appear in NUS Press Releases

[read more here: Today Online / SMU Press Release ]

Temasek Funds 9You.com, declares itself non-SWG

Seems like Temasek and others have just plunged US$100 million into Chinese online gaming and music site 9You. The site has recently claimed to have broken the 1M concurrent users milestone and is heading to IPO later this year.

This is interesting as it departs from Temasek's regular infrastructure-type investments and enters the virtual world. If it pans out, the ROI could be pretty high, but so's the inherent risk of such ventures.

(via : VentureBeat & alarm:clock)

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In other news, Temasek says it "not a sovereign wealth fund" and hence "not affected by an agreement by Singapore, Abu Dhabi and the United States on principles to increase the transparency of sovereign wealth funds."

Spokesperson Mark Lee elaborated "Temasek has to sell assets to raise cash for new investments and doesn't require the government to give approvals."

The mind boogles.

(via: STOnline)

Yahoo Board Rejects Microsoft's Offer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Yahoo Inc.'s board plans to reject Microsoft Corp.'s bid to buy the Internet pioneer, The Wall Street Jornal reported on its Web site Saturday.

Board members concluded the unsolicited $44.6 billion offer massively undervalues the Web pioneer, a person familiar with the situation told the newspaper.

Would be interesting to see what a more accurate valuation would look like, and whether Google would still remain in race.

[source: Breitbart ]

Recently, it seems that Starhub and EZlink has been running a trial of mobile payment technologies:

CELLPHONE users can soon pay for a train ride or a burger by simply tapping their mobile gizmos at the fare gate or cashier.
...
Altogether, there will be about 20,000 ez-link machines that can read these specially-made phones, which are loaned to the trial users for six months.

Two questions boggle the mind though:

1) For the consumers, are the benefits of tapping to pay for purchases (over carrying and using a payment card) enough to make them give up their latest high-tech phones for these generic looking ones? Also, how many retailers will allow them to use these devices to pay?

2) For the retailers, are there going to be enough phone-totting customers to justify getting (and paying for) a new machine just to accept this new payment? Remember that even given the widespread use of EZLink cards, hardly any merchants bother to uses it as a form of payment.

Seems like a classic chicken and egg problem to me.

Somehow, this reminds me of the era when cashcards were predicted to bring us into a new cashless world.

[ More here ]