ICT World in Kuala Lumpur

Greetings from the MobileMonday Global Summit, at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. This is being held in conjunction with the 2008 World Congress of Information Technology and assorted computer exhibitions. I was a little late arriving, being a last minute stand in speaker for a session this afternoon on mobile enterprise and social networks (I am talking about emergency use).

The Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre is a remarkable sight filled with thousands of delegates and visitors. It is a curved building at the edge of a large park (KLCC Park) in the center of KL, with the Petronus Towers on the other side. The effect is similar to Darling Harbor convention center in Sydney, but on a larger scale. For those in a hurry, or who do not to get hot or wet, there is a tunnel from the convention centre, under the edge of the park to the Suria KLCC shopping centre under the towers and on to the KLCC LRT Station (metro).

The MobileMonday Global Summit is one of the more accessible events at the congress. It is free and has panel sessions (the one at the moment is on mobile learning). Screens around the event are broadcasting the heavy duty sessions from the UN GAID event, next door.

Downstairs from the conferences are a series of ICT trade shows, with everything from home PCs to industrial systems.One which got my attention was a device to interface medical equipment to Ethernet, the Active Ethernet I/O. This does event reporting by TCP/UDP/e-mail or SNMP. It is a small computer which can be programmed via the Ethernet interface to carry out functions, such as: "when line six goes high (blood pressure warning) then activate line six (page crash cart)".