Author: Digital World

Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting the Rural Networks Award in the UK’s 2014 Next Generation Digital Challenge  at NexGen 13 held in London.

These awards illustrate the ability of communities and innovators to crack on with finding connectivity solutions regardless of the incumbent’s strategy and solve a multitude of community issues like poor radio and TV reception.  They demonstrate how the utility of local access networks is very different from the openly competitive services that run over them, and remind us that regulation for connectivity and services should also be approached with differing aims and objectives.

It will be interesting in November, when I moderate the ITU Telecom World 2013 debate on Regulatory Convergence (Tuesday, 19 November at 16:15) in Bangkok, Thailand, to see if anyone questions the merits of converged regulation, when these trends towards separation of connectivity and services must be  accommodated in markets where the pressure to enable new access network entrants is growing  apace.

This may of course be peculiar to Europe, although there are many pioneering examples of open network design in the Nordic Countries.

The panel for the debate brings together informed views from Asia, Europe and the USA – We live in interesting times!

Join the conversation. Watch the live webcast of this session (available on this site in November) and share your views through Twitter #ITUWORLD.

Investing in the burgeoning ICT sector in Uganda is vital to drive the growth of the industry, and of the country as a whole.  And making sure the message on Uganda’s digital and broadband initiatives, projects and opportunities gets out to a world of potential investors is a big part of ensuring this happens.

This is why Uganda will be present on the showfloor at ITU Telecom World 2013 with a National Pavilion, showcasing ICT technologies, advancements, innovations and investment opportunities to the event’s uniquely influential global audience. Under the theme of “Uganda – Unleashing the opportunity for ICT”, the Uganda pavilion will be accompanied by a delegation headed by the Minister for Information and Communications Technology, H.E. John Nasasira, and including officials from UCC, the Ministry of ICT and NITA-U, Ministry of Tourism, and other key ICT sector players.

Priority ICT projects open to possible partnerships focus on the need to promote universal access to both voice telephony and data networks throughout the country, including the Rural Communications Development Fund and the National Backbone Infrastructure, which aims to connect all major towns in Uganda on an optical fibre network.

Growing business and economic activity is increasingly dependent on ICT, both as the essential supporting infrastructure and as a source of new initiatives and entrepreneurial start ups. Uganda has focused in particular on business process outsourcing in areas such as customer support services, policy management (including human resources) and data process services such as payroll outsourcing and technical support services.  Also in development are a series of ICT Technology Parks to boost the development of this business process outsourcing and encourage innovation incubation.

The multimedia business in Uganda is still in its infancy, and whatever production made in Uganda is faced with stiff global and regional competition.  This is a particularly exciting area looking to attract  investment to exploit local talent and innovation. Developing local digital content has consistently proved key to driving Internet take up and associated economic growth, in addition to paving the way for the inclusion of all citizens in the digital economy.

Uganda’s ICT sector has much to showcase, talent and technology to demonstrate to the world – and a wealth of potential partnerships and opportunities. There’s no better place to highlight this than the global stage of ITU Telecom World 2013.

Many aspects of life as we know it are being revolutionized by new technologies – and new ways of using new technologies. This is a change that goes far beyond gadgets and geeks, a change with the potential to uproot business models, daily life and society itself.

As curators of interactive exhibition space The Lab at ITU Telecom World 2013, our aim is to illustrate the impact of this technology-based revolution through practical or artistic cutting-edge applications – and to better understand the nature of the future.

No single factor or development is behind this change: it is the conjunction of several elements that makes it so exciting and far-reaching. For example, proprietary systems are now a thing of the past. The magic word of the future is “open.” In tomorrow’s digital marketplace, there’ll be no place for hermetically sealed-off claims of individual providers. Everything is growing together into a vast ecosystem where developers, providers and end users roam and romp worldwide.

Here, “plug and serve” solutions are fed in and offered up, demanded and purchased. Everything and anything can be quickly and conveniently loaded to all sorts of mobile devices, whenever and wherever they’re needed.

Additional impetus is provided by a current development that is nothing less than revolutionary: the so-called internet of things. Nearly all the technical devices and accompanying paraphernalia we use on a daily basis will soon come equipped with sensors, cameras, chips and microprocessors, and be able to be started, operated and updated via the Internet. The quantity of data that will then constantly careen around the Web will be truly gigantic.

The foundation of this digital ecosystem is extremely high-performance, totally pervasive infrastructure that offers everybody optimal network access. But it is equally indispensible that the right balance is achieved between, on the one hand, saving and evaluating user data and behavior, and on the other hand, protecting people’s right to privacy and data security. This is something that won’t just be in the interest of the end user but also of the economy itself, since a lack of trust in the Internet will have a growing—and increasingly negative—influence on potential turnover on the online marketplace.

In the context of an open lab situation, Ars Electronica has assembled artistic commentary on this radical transformation process. We present best-practice examples at the nexus of art, technology and society that show the opportunities and risks that the economy, science, politics, art and whole societies could soon be facing.

This is a matter of new forms of communication and participation, new types of artists and scientific disciplines, unconventional alliances, and business models with great future promise. We throw a spotlight onto the enormous potential of technological innovations and, thus, the changed relationships of power in political and economic life that will inevitably accompany them.

Experience it for yourself at the InnovationSpace Lab on the showfloor at ITU Telecom World 2013 – interact with the future.

Ahead of my Futurist Keynote speech at ITU Telecom World 2013 in November, I’d like to share a few thoughts on the disruptive trends poised to utterly transform the way we live, communicate and do business.

We are entering an era of information tsunamis: mind-boggling global data torrents , all-pervasive social-local-mobile (SoLoMo) connectivity, widespread ‘wikilikean’ transparency expectations (both B2C as well as B2B), rapid changes in interface technologies (AR, gestures, voice-control, nanotechnologies,bionics, AI etc), the hyper-realtime speed of information and media, and of abundant consumer choice in pretty much every sector of commerce and business.

Almost all business – including those in the hereto lesser-impacted B2B sectors such as banking, energy and raw materials – will become socially-driven (especially those based on digital products). Peer to peer recommendations, ratings, endorsements and all kinds of are already widespread but will essentially replace customer relationship management in the near future; the same goes for hiring and general HR needs (witness the rise of LinkedIn as a global HR resource pretty much eliminating the need for traditional headhunters). Since most social business is essentially data-sharing- and permission-driven, data is indeed becoming the new oil. The global and radical empowerment of ‘the people formerly known as consumers’ via cheap, powerful and ubiquitous SoLoMo technologies will be a huge game changer (yes, both an opportunity and threat) – and this will really get cooking when another 3 billion in the BRICS and other emerging markets come online. You thought it was confusing now – just give it another 2 years.

There will be data, data, enormous big data, everywhere. Data levels, depth and sheer frequency will reach previously unimaginable pace and proportions, and anyone / anything having to do with data-mining and management will be in very high demand. The consequence: curation, context, relevance, timeliness and overall sense and meaning-making as well as totally intuitive pattern recognition (i.e. the human part of the data deluge) will become infinitely more important than mere access to lots of information, content or data. Meaning will actually trump noise.

In the dawning knowledge- and experience society, we are quickly shifting from downloads to flows, and from stuff to bits, both in terms of technology as well as in terms of our user behaviour and actual consumption habits. Information is no longer (just) stored and kept for later, rather, it’s accessed and filtered and sifted, when and where and how it’s needed, in realtime, realplace, real-life. Technology will also move from relying on search, files and pages to reading, understanding and enabling flows and streams (cloud, social, local, mobile).

And then there’s the Internet of Things, of course, and pervasive machine-to-machine connectivity is becoming very real, very fast. Wireless networks, RFIDs and NFC technologies will seamlessly and ubiquitously connect people (if not their actual brains then their devices) to things to machines, and vice versa, and artificial intelligence and ultra-smart electronic agents will glue all this together.

The Internet is gradually becoming an extension of our brains; and mobile devices are already our external brains. Is the next stop the actual integration of the Internet in our bodies (iris implants etc), cyborgs after that… singularity, transhumanism? Not sure what to think of that, really -are you?

The world of voice communications is changing. A new technology called WebRTC will further accelerate the pace of change.

We’ve completely redesigned the web pages for this year’s event – as you’ll notice immediately if you’ve visited us before. And it’s not just about changing how it looks – it is part of our commitment to the one conversation that matters. Because this is just not an empty strapline. It’s our statement of intent and purpose.

Are young people in India simply uninterested in what is going on around them? Apathetic, un-opinionated, disengaged? Anshul Tewari, one of the winners of ITU Young Innovators Competition at ITU Telecom World 2012, doesn’t think so.

Albert Einstein sometimes used to torment his students at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. During a period of dramatic changes in physics he would set an exam paper containing exactly the same questions as the previous year. When challenged about this he remained unrepentant.
The questions may be the same as last year, he observed, but the answers are now different.

Just like physics in the middle of the last century, the ICT sector is currently undergoing a period of dramatic transition. And, again like physics, the end points of that transition are unknown. Just a few years ago life was so simple. We bought telephony services from the telephone company. We watched TV transmitted by the broadcasters. We left the internet to the scientists.

Today it’s so different. Today millions of people get their telephony services from TV broadcasters or internet service providers. They download TV programmes from the telephone companies and not only watch videos but also send out their own videos over the internet.

Usage of social media has dramatically changed the way people interact and communicate. Instead of direct person-to-person communication, in the digital world people are increasingly communicating through YouTube or Facebook comments and Twitter tweets.

Within the ICT sector today, everyone is after everyone else’s business. Services are arriving “over-the-top” (OTT), under the floor and round the side. The ICT world is changing.

For the players in the ICT sector – new as well as old – the fundamental questions remain the same. How do we remain competitive, deliver customer value, make money, and so survive? But the answers are changing as new technology breaks down the previous relationships between services and delivery mechanisms, and as new players with entirely new business models burst onto the scene.

ITU Telecom World 2012 in Dubai confronted all these issues. Influential leaders of industry, government, regulatory bodies, consultancy and academia highlighted the cultural and generational gap between internet companies offering OTT applications and conventional telco operators.

The debates were illuminating and constructive, reinforcing the importance of ITU Telecom World’s role as a neutral platform for all stakeholders in ICT – whether from public or private sectors – to share knowledge in an open collegiate environment.

Bringing together the public and private sectors is a key feature of the ITU Telecom World series. These are networking and knowledge sharing events open to all stakeholders. They do not formulate rules or propose treaties. But they do further understanding and cement relationships. They track the continuing evolution of the answers to the fundamental questions we all face.

Sessions at ITU Telecom World 2012 were webcast in their entirety. You can view them at world2012-live.itu.int. A summary of the significant, and sometimes surprising, conclusions from the debates has just been published in an Outcomes Report, which you can download here.

ITU Telecom World 2013 in Bangkok will again provide a neutral platform for all concerned to review the new answers that have emerged. I hope that all concerned will take advantage of this opportunity. Now more than ever it’s vital to continue sharing knowledge, experiences and ideas in an open and honest fashion.