DNA on BFM: What’s Next dominates the conversation

By Karamjit Singh October 1, 2015

AirAsia a tough customer for IT companies: A Sikh myth?
Do Malaysian’s really prefer lowest broadband speeds?

DNA on BFM: What’s Next dominates the conversation I MANAGED to coin a new term today that will be likely made official in Indonesia in 2019! What was that?

You will have to listen to this week’s Tech Talk show on BFM Radio, where I had Jeff Sandhu as my on-air companion.

We were talking about Digital News Asia (DNA) contributor Dr Shawn Tan’s opinion piece on the affordability of broadband and supposed preference of many Malaysians to the lowest broadband package in the market.

The recent flare-up of this issue comes at an interesting time, as on Oct 26, Malaysia’s Finance Minister – and also its Prime Minister – Najib Razak will propose the nation’s Budget 2016 in Parliament.

I just wonder if we will see some action taken by the Malaysian Government in this space, after it had already allocated some monies to developing the broadband infrastructure in the 11th Malaysia Plan – the latest in the series of five-year national development plans, which was announced in May.

But the bulk of the Tech Talk show was spent talking about the What’s Next: The Business Impact of Disruptive Technology conference, which DNA organised and which had BFM as a media partner.

While every speaker and panel was interesting, we kicked off with AirAsia Bhd cofounder and chairman Tony Fernandes, who revealed that AirAsia will soon be announcing the formation of an e-commerce arm.

And while Fernandes said he would announce more details later, towards the tail-end of this session, getting too excited, he did share some of the things the company was going to do!

Listen to the podcast for that, and to understand why Fernandes is so keen on big data analytics, and also why he thought I was spinning a Sikh myth about AirAsia!

During What’s Next, which took place at Cyberjaya on Sept 29, I was also taken by a point that Ahmad Izham Omar, chief executive officer of TV Networks for Media Prima Bhd, made – that the audience at What’s Next did not represent Malaysia.

He had some data from Nielsen to prove it too. I also made the point that the same can be said of BFM listeners as well!

We also spoke about e-commerce and why our speaker Dr Adrian Vanzyl felt that traditional retailers probably had the next 12 months in which to participate in the e-commerce wave, or risk just being observers in this new way consumers want to shop.

There was also an interesting exchange between MOL Global founder and executive chairman Ganesh Kumar Bangah and Hong Leong Islamic Bank chief executive officer Teh Maimunah, on whether traditional banks are in danger of money going digital.

With digital being the most powerful force moving life and business, we then switched gears and spoke about the most powerful force in the universe – love. Listen to this week’s podcast below to get the download on all the interesting things we spoke about!