The Annual survey illustrated a 20 per cent rise in total revenue spent on the infocomm industry in Singapore 2006 which accounted for SGD 45.4 million.
According to Singapore’s Minister for Information, Communication and The Arts, Dr Lee Boon Yang, the strong performance was driven by healthy growth in the export market. The export market reportedly accounted for some SGD 29 billion compared to SGD 22 billion in 2005 while the domestic market accounted for SGD 16.4 billion compared to SGD 15.8 billion in 2005.
Speaking at the opening ceremony of the annual imbX event last week, Dr Lee associated the growth of the infocomm industry with the increasing adoption and usage of Information Communication Technology (ICT) amongst governments, businesses and consumers.
As an example, he highlighted the Singaporean government’s efforts to roll out extensive e-government services and solutions which today have amounted to some 1600 e-government services for always-on, easily accessible services to Singaporeans.
Moving forward, it looks like Singapore is set to become an even bigger player in the Infocomm sector with its recently announced Digital Concierge service.
“Through the Digital Concierge, we will offer visitors handy personalized and location-based services accessible via mobile devices such as headphones,” said Dr Lee.
“Users can obtain a variety of information such as recommendations of interesting places to visit, where to eat and what to do.”
When fully implemented next year, the Digital Concierge will support Singapore’s Tourism 2015 goal of increasing visit arrivals and tourism receipts to 17 million and SGD 30 billion respectively.
Another program that Singapore will launch in the near future is the Infocomm@SME programme. This programme is focused on not just equipping Small and Medium enterprises (SME) with basic ICT know-how but to also help them explore the latest ICT technologies and solutions to transfer and enhance their businesses such as getting accustomed to commonly used applications such as e-mail, IP telephony, anti-spyware and anti-virus.
Singapore plans to invest some SGD 5 million into this project and foresees that by the end of 2007, business registration will seamlessly be integrated with simultaneous domain name registration to facilitate on-line presence of SMEs.
Quelle/Source: SDA Asia Magazine, 26.06.2007
