Executives from global Internet industry meet at 2008 APRICOT

February 27, 2008 The twelfth-annual Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (a.k.a APRICOT) returned to Taiwan this year at the Taipei Howard Plaza Hotel. This is the first appearance since the 2003 conference held by the Taiwan Network Information Center (TWNIC) at the Taipei International Convention Center and Grand Hyatt Taipei. There's a transformation occurring in Taiwan's Internet industry due to the maturing of the Internet users' population. With the conference being held in Taiwan this year, I hope representatives from government, academia, and industries world-wide, including Taiwan, can gain valuable experience from this annual conference. Even though this conference is held annually in Asia-Pacific countries, I think many executives world-wide including Europe & America can gain significant experiences from the Asia-Pacific host countries. Due to several transformations within the networking industry, the government (Executive Yuan) promoted several policies from M-Taiwan to u-Taiwan. With hot topics in the high-definition era, such as HDTV, the IPv6 will be a must-have trend after several consumer electronics will exploit network technology. When Wikinews journalist Rico Shen reported on the recent "Edison Chen photo scandal" incident, Philip Smith of Cisco Systems commented: The [photo] scandal is really a hot topic in Asia-Pacific countries, especially in the Chinese-language world, but we [the officials] had provided several lectures related to information security earlier in our workshops for industrial solutions. Generally in fact, some Internet users' habits when connecting to Internet should be appropriately corrected.

Workshops with varied topics and different technology levels took place from February 20 to 24, while several main seminars and speeches for industry, governmental, and academic executives ran from February 25 to 29. Several industry experts such as Wilfred Kwan (Chief Technology Officer of AsiaNetCom), Chung-laung Liu (Taiwan Chapter Chair of ISOC), and Maemura Akinori (EC Chair of APNIC) will give several speeches related to the Internet industry at the conference.