HEADLINES
JOBS
COM:PORT
POLICY POLICE
ARCHIVES

Readying for e-commerce

Gary Koh, director, e-commerce, Sun Microsystems, Singapore, has the personal history of a typical nerd. When eight, he was already scorning Ninja games and devouring Isaac Asimovs by the dozens while tinkering in the innards of a computer.

So at Cybercity today, it was not at all surprising when he elected to speak on the very cutting edge of the technology which is all set to change forever

T O D A Y

• A new mascot • Cybercity gets calmer • Java, Java, Java! • Readying for e-trade

the way we trade and do business. E-commerce is expected to be the one single technology which will change society profoundly in this century and the next.

Koh, who worked with National Computers in Singapore before joining Sun Microsystems, has the advantage of knowing the ways of both, the industry and the bureaucracy. But it his understanding of the mechanics of how networking has enhanced lives, which is of most interest to his audience.

He began by tracing the history of computers from the days of the mainframe, when the machines were kept in a glass-house and users were not even allowed to touch them. You were given the information your asked the computer, days later on a piece of paper.

Then IBM thought there may be a market of at least five persons for personal computer. "They were a bit off the mark," Koh laughs.

1986 saw a recession in Singapore. The government started by computerising the ministry. They refocused from glasshouse technology to users. Soon trading operations began to get computerised. Educational institutions and schools, all had computers. Now if the ministry of education had to issue an order to all primary schools, it would reach them within second. No bureaucracy, no paperwork.

Koh revealed that just by this method of slowly empowering small areas and spreading the radius to include more organisations and government bodies, Singapore is in the situation they are in today. Today no one in Singapore uses money, they use smart cards for a variety of personal needs.

Soon every police station, school and department store will be computerised. The paradigm has moved once again to broadbase itself so that there is one large network connecting everyone. "We use the cable infrastructure to achieve this," Koh explains.

Families and homes have computers, parents speak to teachers, children interact with libraries and institutions, all on the network. Once the Internet peeked into their lives in 1992, it became the accidental superhighway.

Koh explains how cost-effective it can be to transact business over the Internet: "A bank in the US would spend $1.7 on every customer (for rentals, facilities, staff overheads etc) for completing his transaction. If he does it via the ATM, the costs are reduced by half, and finally, if he does it via the telephone line which connects him to a human voice from the bank on the other side, he doesn't spend more than a cent!"

Today Singapore is moving to a recentralised system of networking, allowing the entire population to be linked up. Even a tiny pager can be linked to the Net. Now beyond the information infrastructure, there is the infospace, he points out. Every single intelligent or semi-intelligent device is connected with the help of embedded systems (most obviously Java) so that if you are in office with a smart card you can probably initiate a programme recording at your house.

A situation of ubiquitous computing, something, which could be realised in India too. How? "The trouble with India and other countries like it is that they want to be fair and democratic. If they offer some solutions in Delhi, they want some of it in Hyderabad, Bombay and Bangalore. What you should concentrate on instead is centralising and localising the network in a small place, then completely hook up with every tiny town, village and school, then move to widen the circle. You already have the technology, it all depends on the way you use it."

Tell us what you think of this story