Sunday, June 28, 2009

Connected Communities

At the recent "NICT Conference 2009" in Putrajaya, Malaysia, I was on one of the panels & spoke on the topic of "Connected Communities: Towards Intelligent Urbanisation".

Urbanisation is a very significant (and seemingly irreversible) trend for global economic development. In the next 5 years, 300 million more people are going to become urban dwellers. Urban activities also typically contribute to at least 70 percent of overall national economic growth. Thus, the focus of my talk was to highlight ways in which urban communities could be better connected via technology, to enable them to be more productive and effective.
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For those interested in my presentation, a PDF copy can be downloaded at the website


Tuesday, June 23, 2009

National Broadband Initiatives (Interviews in Bangkok)

In a recent visit to Bangkok, Thailand, I led a workshop for government officials. The theme was around Connected Government, and also on the benefits of deploying National Broadband.
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I also had a session with a number of Thai journalists. Here are some articles or excerpts from those interviews. The first is with Bangkok Post (an English language daily), and the other a Thai language paper Krungthep Turakij.
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Article 1: Bangkok Post (17 June 2009)


Article 2: Krungthep Turakij (2 June 2009)


For the article in Thai, I am told by our PR manager that the gist of the content is as follows:

Headline: E-Government: the ‘government’ highway to stimulus the Thai economy.


Synopsis:

- ICT can play an crucial role to stimulate the economy & increase GDP especially during economic crisis situation

- The Thai Government should leverage its ICT budget to build the readiness to support the future growth ie. investment in development of the Government Network in order for all Thai people to access into information. This will help improve human resources development, create new business opportunities, pull in the more foreign investment and help stimulate economy recovery.

- The Government has an important role, which falls into 2 parts: (1) Create a good environment around National Broadband Network to be able to leverage and develop opportunities in the future and (2) improve the Government Information Network (GIN) to enable all government agencies to connect, access, share information and be able to provide ‘one-stop’ service faster, easier and more securely.

- Cisco's SONA (Services Oriented Network Architecture) is a sound framework to leverage on.

- The Government Information Network should be open, standardized, scalable and secure.

- Common people should be able to use the service through single portal and support all business organizations to be able to improve their competitiveness and launch new services to the market speedily.

- It was suggested to leverage ‘cloud’ computing technology to make most of the resources of the Government Network to achieve maximum benefit.

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