The annual event brought together public and private sector infocomm leaders for a sharing of insights into key developments and trends in the industry.

What do speed dating and fast food have to do with convergence? In a keynote presentation at this year’s Infocomm Industry Forum, Gartner Research Director Mr Nick Ingelbrecht connected the dots as he discussed the impact that social acceleration – as manifested by speed dating and fast food – is having on developments in consumer technology and how this, in turn, will shape the Converged World in 2020.

Consumers today lack time, observed Mr Ingelbrecht. In this context of “time poverty”, applications that help them to make use of “dead time” will gain a strong following, he said, noting wryly how the tablet has been replacing the newspaper as the “technology of choice in the toilet”.

He said two-thirds of the consumer population are not interested in “bleeding edge technologies”. “Give them something that is easy and fun to use,” he said. He also pointed out that consumers do not work in product silos, and therefore it is important for a product to be able to grab the consumer’s attention in the midst of all the distractions in a socially accelerated environment.

A key enabler behind these consumer-facing technologies and services will be the consumer cloud, which Mr Ingelbrecht believes is going to be of huge importance going forward to 2020. Given the “quintessentially social context” of many of today’s consumer applications, users will gravitate towards putting content in the cloud. Increasingly, intelligence will shift to the cloud and the management of the user experience will also be done there, he said.

The growth in social and user-generated content will lead to an explosion of information. The challenge will then be to store and manage data, and use it to help make right and timely decisions. This is one of the focal areas that Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) is working on under the broad theme of “The Internet of Knowledge”, said its Chief Executive Officer RADM(NS) Ronnie Tay in his address at the Infocomm Industry Forum.

As part of its initiatives under this theme, RADM(NS) Tay announced that IDA will be issuing a Call for Collaboration (CFC) in November 2011 for Sectoral Business Analytics Shared Services to drive the adoption of business analytics in selected sectors.

The CFC will call for service providers to establish and offer business analytics shared services in the areas of Retail Customer and Marketing Analytics, Retail Inventory Optimisation, and Operations Analytics for the Manufacturing and Food and Beverage sectors. These shared services will make business analytics technology and services more readily available to the sectors, and lower the costs and barriers of adoption for businesses. “We hope that this would also develop and propagate industry best practices for the application of business analytics,” said RADM(NS) Tay.

The convergence of business analytics and cloud computing was also the focus of a presentation by Mr Keith Budge, Advisor, CloudByte, who spoke about how the use of Magnetic, Agile and Deep (MAD) principles can help unleash the potential of big data and deliver useful business insights. Big data refers to datasets in the order of terabytes, exabytes and even zettabytes – datasets that are too huge to work with using conventional database management and business analytics tools, yet too important to ignore for the valuable insights they hold in areas ranging from genomics and meteorology to Internet search, finance and business informatics.

Examining convergence from a different perspective at the Forum was Dr Guruduth Banavar, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Global Public Sector, IBM, who spoke about the smart city of the future, in which information must flow smoothly unhindered by incompatibilities as industries work together. As cities undergo transformation, opportunities lie in the convergence of disparate data as this enables information consumption and innovation. To achieve this, governments must embrace and set standards for businesses to innovate and integrate across platforms, as well as to intelligently leverage information bases and flows.

The Infocomm Industry Forum 2011 was organised by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) and the Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation. It was held on 25 October 2011. Other speakers at the event included Mr Mark Toner, Director, Solution Engineering (Europe/Asia), Jasper Wireless; Dr Hannu Verkasalo, Senior Vice President, Arbitron; and Mr Drew Thomson, Chief Executive Officer, All The Worlds Entertainment. The panel discussion was moderated by Mr KC Neoh, Founder and CEO of Catalyst Asia and Partner, Stream Global.