MELAKA: Speaking about smart cities, people will imagine a city full of sophisticated technology with the population having smart phones on their hands with cool and convenient apps, hovering around with their flying cars.
Melaka Communications, Multimedia, NGO, Youth and Sports State Exco Kerk Chee Yee in an interview with Bernama recently stated that he wants the people in Melaka to imagine beyond their imagination as Melaka makes strides to become a smart city.
He said transforming Melaka into a smart city may not generate direct revenue for the government or the people as a whole, at least not in the short term, but there were reasons bigger and far more important than revenue that should be taken into serious consideration when preparing to create a ‘smarter’ city.
“Moving towards smart city means becoming a more efficient and tech-savvy population with safer environments, it means finding better crime deterrents, traffic management, disaster response time, and also potentially life-saving solutions, better economic growth and greater happiness.
“I often talk about the economy of technology, and the government plays a huge role in it (in moving towards smart city). Three components in the economy of technology are talents, enablers and community,” he said.
Kerk said Malaysia was endlessly preparing its talents to have the ability to invent and create products but the meaning of talents in creating a smart city ecosystem goes beyond that, saying talents are the ones who can drive the creation and deployment of digital infrastructures in society.
He said enablers play an important part as well because Malaysia needs to ensure its talents’ efforts and output are optimised and the government should be the platform for those who are keen to equip the city with good technology.
Community, probably the most crucial part of the ecosystem, ensured that any initiative or development by industry players and government do not simply become one-off transactions that do not bring in actual results or impact for our people, he said.
Commenting on one quite essential needs of smart city, high speed internet, Kerk said he was impressed with the cellular connectivity in Taiwan both speed and coverage.
He also emphasised the need for high speed Internet to be a smart city saying to improve the quality of connectivity, fiberisation needs to be done even though it is a costly exercise.
“Fiberisation is an important milestone to not only faster internet speed or cellular connectivity, it’s also the foundation to technology such as Big Data, 5G, Cloud, Internet of Things and so many others,” he added. – Bernama
