This year's ASOCIO ICT summit was organised by Hong Kong's Information and Software Industry Association (ISIA), which was established in July 1999 to promote the standard, recognition and profitability of the local information and software industry for Hong Kong and the region.
21 economies represented
Incepted in 1984, in Tokyo, Japan, the ASOCIO has dedicated itself to promoting, encouraging and fostering relationships, while promoting trade between its member organisations.
ASOCIO's 21 members include Japan, Australia, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. It has seven guest members from the US, the UK, Canada, Spain, France, Russia and Kenya. Its member associations represent more than 10,000 IT companies in the region.
The summit's main theme focused on the growing role of Asia Pacific in the global digital creative economy and highlighted four key areas crucial for the region to further advance this emerging sector: Public-Private Partnership, Information Technology (IT) Talent, Startup3.0@Asia and Digital Lifestyle.
"We are honoured by the strong support from various industry sectors, governments and the Hong Kong IT community for year's summit," said CS Ng, chairman of the organising committee of the 2008 ASOCIO ICT Summit. "With China's growing role in the IT industry, we look forward to more collaboration between China and the rest of Asia to further develop our industry," Ng said.
"We want the ASOCIO ICT summit 2008 to be the region's most authoritative forum for addressing the emerging global digital economy," said Ashank Desai, president of ASOCIO. "We are optimistic that despite challenging times, this new digital economy will give a much needed boost to the ICT industry as well as the overall economy of the region."
New R&D centres
Rita Lau, Hong Kong's secretary for commerce and economic development, said the Hong Kong government has earmarked more than HK$2 billion (US$258 million) to set up five research and development (R&D) centres for ICT applications, in addition to the existing Cyberport and the Hong Kong Science Park.
"The focus of these [five R&D] centres include logistics and supply-chain-related technologies such as electronic product code and radio-frequency identification (RFID), communications technologies, consumer electronics, optoelectronics, nanotechnology and advanced materials", Lau said.
"To develop Hong Kong as a leading world digital city, the government will continue its commitment to support technology and innovation in Hong Kong. In 2008-09, we estimate the IT expenditure by the government alone will be around HK$5.5 billion (US$645 million)," Lau said.
Asia's natural advantages
Richard Li, chairman of PCCW, delivered a keynote address entitled 'Asia's role in the Global Digital Creative Economy'. With Asia's global digital creative economy, "I feel confident that we in Asia will be late into, and the first to recover from, this dreadful economy," he said.
"At last, the natural demographic advantages in Asia--large, young populations concentrated in densely populated cities--can be brought into play. And without the legacy dependencies on old digital technologies, many are well placed to leapfrog to capture the advantages of new platforms, whether it is 'cloud sourced' computing or 'New Generation Networks' that thrust IT users beyond 3.5G."
There is no other sector like the IT industry that is so clearly aligned to the need for reducing our reliance on limited natural resources, Li said. "The collapse in people's wealth obviously means that spending is falling sharply. But this same process will create increasing pressure to live our lives less wastefully, and in particular to reduce our carbon emissions in the battle to slow global warming."