Press/Media Releases

SPEECH BY MS WENDY LIEW
Chairman
Persatuan Industri Komputer dan Multimedia Malaysia (PIKOM)
in Conjunction with Apricot 2001 Press Conference
at Putra World Trade Centre

December 12, 2000

Yang Berbahagia Cik Suria Abdul Rahman, Deputy Secretary-General of the Ministry of Energy, Communications and Multimedia

Mr Izumi Aizu, Executive Council Member, APRICOT 2001

Generous sponsors of APRICOT 2001

My colleagues from PIKOM

Members of the press

Ladies & Gentlemen

Good morning.

First of all, I wish to express my appreciation to Yang Berbahagia for being with us today, and I am very happy to see Izumi-San who is joining us on behalf of APRICOT 2001 Exco.

On behalf of the Internet community in this country, Malaysia is proud to be the host for next year's Asia-Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT 2001).

The local Internet Services Provider business and Internet industry will benefit greatly from the hosting of APRICOT in Malaysia. The local ISP business has seen much activity since other providers have started their operations and this will greatly increase the need for more engineers to be trained in Internet technologies. The hosting of APRICOT in Malaysia will be timely, as it will help to meet this great need.

It will help nurture Internet Engineers in Malaysia, a must for a healthy and rapid development of commercial internet services such as e-Commerce and it will help Malaysian Internet business people build stronger networks with counterparts in Asia-Pacific.

Previous hosts of APRICOT have enjoyed exponential growth after the events were held in their cities. Singapore and South Korea saw an explosion and a plethora of Internet activities, and history will certainly repeat itself for APRICOT 2001 in Kuala Lumpur and for Malaysia.

With the growing tendency for the word 'e' in our daily lives, the Internet will fuel a desire especially for the business community as logging into the Web and spending more time in front of a PC become a reality.

This summit comprises two days of tutorials and two days of conference, including birds of feather meetings, AP* Meetings and social activities. Some of the topics presented in the past include Policy and Internet Security, Encryption, Firewall, Spamming, Domain Name System, Internet Regulation & Policy, IPV 6, ATM, Switches & Routers, Satellite & Wireless Technologies for the Internet, Virtual Private Networks and Extranets, VOIP, ISDN, xDSL and Broadband Internet.

Participation for previous APRICOTs have been increasing, which shows the multitude of the Internet explosion globally. APRICOT 1999 in Singapore drew 632 participants from 25 countries while APRICOT 2000 had 850 participants from 36 countries.

We are targeting 200 to 300 overseas participants and as many Malaysians as possible. I would strongly encourage Internet players to attend APRICOT 2001 as it is virtually on home turf. Ultimately, we are hopeful of having 600 participants in total.

In addition, we will have prominent speakers who are authorities on different spheres of the Internet. I am pleased to announce that David S. Isenberg has been confirmed as a keynote speaker, and we will be announcing his topic soon.

David is an icon in the Internet world. His works have been cited in Forbes, Fortune, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Communications Week International, George Gilder's Technology Report and Network World, just to name a few. You will find his biography in the Press kit.

We are also privileged to have Anders Comstedt, CEO of Stokab, a public company incorporated in the city of Stockholm. In 1995, it offered the world's first Dark Fiber service in Stockholm, thus enabling broadband deployment.

We would also like to very much have other prominent technology leaders of the Internet industry, including those from Malaysia. Further information can be obtained from the website, www.apricot2001.net or call PIKOM.

Developments in worldwide, regional and especially Malaysian e-commerce clearly point us to an exploding field. A recent projection by Gartner Group says that growing Internet use will lead to booming e-commerce revenue outside the US in the fourth quarter of this year by 85.5 per cent to US$19.5 billion from US$10.53 billion.

We will be keeping you posted on further developments. Thank you for joining us here today.

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