Notes On ICT Summit Eurasia 2012 - Part 1

I had a chance to attend the ICT Summit Eurasia 2012 for a day which is held between 11-13 September in Istanbul.

I tried to take some notes during the event about the sessions I have attended:

Smart Education:
The current education model  is based on the needs of the Industrial Age. Now, we are at the first steps of a new age, Information Age, so we need a new model.

Bum-Coo Cho, Samsung Electronics Senior Vice President, shared the education approach in South Korea which can provide useful feedback when defining this new education model.

South Korea is a clear example of "from nothing to richness" and it reach to this level based on:

• high rate of savings and investments
• focus on productivity
• focus on overseas business
• and most importantly, highly educated people

A survey in South Korea asked for the most precious thing in life, and the first item is education of children with %65. Religion, which is considered as the most important thing by a big majority of Turkish people, became the sixth with %21.

In South Korea, %14 of government budget is spend on public education. With the investments of the private sector, %7.5 of total GDP is devoted to the education.

Samsung is also a part of this investment project as it sees (or positions) itself as a core part of South Korea.

Then declared a vision statement as "Smart Education For Everyone" and defined three missions to move towards this vision:

• inspiring the future
• innovating the core
• living in community

Samsung also declared a three phase plan:

1. smart classroom (improve engagement in class)
2. collaborative learning (expand learning horizon - go beyond school)
3. adaptive learning (enrich learning experience)

The results of the first phase are promising:

• overall satisfaction increased from %63 to %85
• interest in lessons increased by %29
• engagement in class increased %14
• problem solving activity increased %9.5
• self-directed learning increased %9.5

Next Technological Steps in Finance and Banking:
Based on a research held in 2012, the number of active users in Turkey for:

• internet banking: 9 million
• mobile banking: 1 million

Hot topics of IT infrastructure in finance domain is:

• cloud computing
• analytics over big data

Social media integration and mobile applications are also concepts with high potential.

The first step of "mobility" in finance domain is took 4 years ago, but it is the last 18 months that causes the most of the growth (probably related to the increase of smartphone usage based on iPhone and Android devices).

There is an unrevealed potential in tablet domain.

The core abilities that the mobile communication bring into the finance domain:

• access
• productivity
• efficiency

Removal of physical money/cards will be one of the core approaches in the finance domain for the next 10 years.

A conversion from "e-state" to "m-state" is indispensable.

Contactless card usage is an important step to digital money as it replaces the usage of small changes. In Turkish market, 7 million of the all credit cards (58 million) has the contactless property. This number will increase much more with the usage of smart city cart applications.

Mobile Health: Coming...
Entrepreneurship: Coming...
Machine to Machine: Coming...