One of Cerventus‘ pet project, This Week in Asia (TWIA), a podcast focusing on the Asian technology community, has been growing since its first episode on 8 November 2009. As one of echelon 2010’s media partners, TWIA has been interviewing many speakers and attendees of the upcoming event, including Daniel Raffel (Yahoo), Gen Kanai (Mozilla), Noah Kagan (Gambit) and many others.

Now for their 50th episode, TWIA is hosting a special live episode at the end of echelon 2010 conference from 4-5 pm on level 2. In this live show, they will invite those who have graced the show from the past to present and come on board to discuss how their thoughts and opinions are after the two days of exciting keynotes, panel discussions and case study presentations at echelon 2010.
If you have been a listener of the show, please come down and give them your support. The whole TWIA crew from moderator John Lim and his fellow co-hosts, Daniel Cerventus, Michael Foong, Bernard Leong and Chew Lin Kay will share how the show has been progressing and also drop a few gifts for those who are here for the event.

With Pamela Fox (@pamelafox) from Google Australia as our special guest this week, the TWIA crew tried to make sense out of the JooJoo’s new partnership with CSL Malaysia. We also reviewed the future of Naver, the top search engine in South Korea, the Malaysia government’s declaration of 95% adoption in OSS and most exciting of all, the impact of the court ruling on iiNet’s victory over the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT). Not to mention, we weaved Google Wave, FilmCamp SG, the #dIE6 movement and adoption of open source in governments into an exciting week of This Week in Asia.

• The return of JooJoo from Fusion Garage and the new battle against Apple’s iPad together with the partnership with CSL Malaysia: With their declaration that pre-sales for JooJoo went up after the announcement of iPad, the TWIA crew and their special guest talked about the implications of the partnership of JooJoo with CSL Malaysia with the latter doing the manufacturing of the tablet.
• NHN Posts All-time High Profits, Yet “Future Isn’t All That Rosy,” Analysts Say: Will Korea’s top search engine prevail given CyWorld has been taken over by Facebook in Korea?
• Safe Harbour for Australian ISP: The ruling on the iiNET and AFACT case offer a new light for the ISPs in Australia.
• Malaysia govt touts 95 percent OSS adoption: Do you believe this? You can read this report from MAMPU and ask yourself whether the news is really true.
• Modern Browsers for Modern Applications: Check out the crew’s initiative to send IE6 to the graveyard with the hashtag #dIE6.

No this is not a Malaysia clone of the Ipad or its clone. This is a rather interesting new twist to the JooJoo/Crunchpad incident.

In case you missed out, Fusion Garage(FG), a Singaporean company was supposed to partner with Techcrunch to launch their version of the Ipad called the Crunchpad. A few days before the launch, Michael Arrington announced the death of the Crunchpad. What happened after that was FG decided to launch the product by themselves and renaming it the Joojoo.

With an impending case with Techcrunch, FG was taking pre-order and announced they received a new round of investment and a partnership with a South East Asia mobile player. This “major mobile player” is no other than Malaysia’s own CSL group. According to their site, “CSL is a leading and most established mobile phone service company in Malaysia”. CSL group is a retailer, service provider and currently manufacturing mobile devices and netbooks.
Their carry their own range such as the Blueberry and the Nseries netbooks.

With this partnership, CSL will be their manufacturing partner for the Joojoo and we will expect to see the device in the market by end of Feb.

When asked by SgEntrepreneurs on the Ipad, Chandrasekar said with the bigger screen and faster loading time, the Joojoo will be formidable and he thanked for opening up the market as pre-order of the Joojoo pad has increased since the announcement of the Ipad.

We have yet to get any comment from CSL when this article was published.

To find out on some of our thoughts on the Crunchpad Joojoo incident, listen to ThisWeekinAsia Episode 5