Interest rate falls

According to a bank letter, Singapore has seen a steady decline in inter-bank rates this year. Since Feb., the 3-month SIBOR fell by >0.6% p.a., from 3.375% to 2.75% p.a. in Apr. I guess this further encourages speculation in the recent property market.

Fring 3.02

While searching for a good IM client, I found this freeware (http://www.fring.com/).

It's so great that links multiple IM and VoIP services in one place. Your contacts at Skype, MSN, Google Talk and other SIP VoIP such as Gizmo are all collected together and present in the Fring frame so you can invite or be invited for a chat or voice call. It also allows to call a normal phone number using your Skype CallOut credit, which is useful in saving the IDD call charge. Fring gets connected via GSM data (e.g. GPRS) or WiFi.

So far I noticed some drawbacks. it seems to consume the phone battery a little bit too much especially when the connection is lost or intermittent (I guess it then keeps searching for the WLAN). There is sometimes a noticeable delay in the Skype voice (due to the transport server like Jabber?). By the way, it does not support Chinese -- my MSN contact with a Chinese alias does not show up correctly. Well, let's hope it gets improved in next release...

Property market turns bullish

The property market has turned to bullish. On today's newspaper, analyst estimates that the market will rise by 12% to 20% this year. It is said that the price index of private residential properties is now close to that of the previous peak in the 2nd quarter of 2000. On HDB resale market, it is reported that the index increases by 3% as compared to last year (or 1.3% quarterly) but the number of transactions falls. It remains positive and is estimated to rise by 5% annually.

Advertised on today's LianHe ZaoBao, Botannia is launched this weekend at $680 psf.

The Start

I decide to re-start a new blog where it collects any useful information that I happen to come across, hopefully it will reach 101 pieces one day...