Friday 21 September 2012

Notes On ICT Summit Eurasia 2012 - Part 2

As I mentioned in 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.
The second group of sessions I had attended are mainly about Mobile Health and Machine2Machine and Entrepreneurship.

Smart Education:
By 2014, it is estimated that the mobile health market will reach 40 billion USD, creating a great saving (estimated value for U.S. market is 3 to 6 billion USD).

Now the hot topics in this domain is health tourism and preventing diseases. Mobile Health is extremely important in the concept of "preventing diseases" as the health expense of an healthy individual is nearly 1000 USD whereas this number increases to 6000-16000 USD range for patients.

Based on this point of view, a new model for the health system should be designed. Current model in summary is something like:

Individual --> Sick --> Doctor --> Pharmacy

This should be changed such that the "Doctor" domain should have a tighter integration with the "Individual" domain.

The reasons behind the shallowness of mobile health in Turkey are defined as:
  • too much players
  • regulation problems
  • highly stationary structure

To achieve this, a national electronic health infrastructure should be constructed as the first step.

Mobile Health is extremely important for Turkey, because it is the only way to prevent the budget deficit in the health domain.

Machine2Machine:

The number of mobile device users is reached to 5.9 billion across the world. By 2012, there will be 2.2 billion smart phone users available (in Turkey, this number will be 13.5 million).

The number of devices that contains a simcard is now 9 billion and this number will reach 50 billion by 2020.

In Turkey, the current M2M market is mainly concentrated on:
  • fleet and asset management
  • mobile pos
  • telemetry

This situation will turn into the following in the near future:
  • automotive
  • consumer electronics
  • health
  • transportation

M2M is not a technology issue anymore, it turns into a business and marketing problem.

Possible list of items defining how the M2M business will effect the Turkish market:
  • creation of local solutions easily
  • generating solutions in a quick manner/li>
  • creativity is much more important than the technology itself
  • solutions with competitiveness
  • big data gaining much more importance
  • business intelligence becoming more valuable
  • usage of data gathered in different areas

There are three main business models from the perspective of a MNO, such as (with revenue percentages):
  • B2B (%15 - %20)
  • B2B2C (%45 - %60)
  • (B+B)2C (%55 - %80)

Entrepreneurship:
Unfortunately, the "Entrepreneurship" sessions were a little bit disappointing except for the local success stories (but i think most of us in Turkish market already know the story of Nokta, Peak Games, etc.) The Manifesto of Entrepreneurship is simply:
  • team itself is one of the most important things (the most important thing at the beginning)
  • the diversity of team members can create a great synergy
  • idea is something but execution is something bigger
  • focus on things that matters




Yes, this two parts series is the summary of a day in ICT Summit Eurasia 2012. Hope to see you in Webit Congress 2012.

Monday 17 September 2012

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...