NEWS: Telcos should have more cultural content

KUALA LUMPUR: Telecommunication companies (telcos) should also give priority to content on culture and the development of human civilisation, said Information Communication and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim.

He said this would further help stimulate the minds of Malaysians, more so this in this era of sophisticated and borderless communications, and was an aspect of content the telcos should address besides chasing profits.

“New applications like SMS, Yahoo Messenger, Twitter, ICQ, Skype and devices like the Blackberry and the like have made communications between humans easier and this has contributed to the development of civilisation and changed the landscape of communications universally, which before heavily depended on the telephone, telex, fax and the postal service,” he said.

He said this in his speech which was read out by his deputy Datuk Joseph Salang at the prize-giving ceremony for winners of the “Mobile Content Challenge 2009” contest, here on Tuesday.

According to Rais, owing to the ease of communication, certain aspects of culture, like language, might face challenges.

He said the truncating spellings used in SMSes could jeopardise the integrity of Bahasa Malaysia besides posing challenges to ethical issues in inter-personal relationships.

“There have been cases of consumers using SMS, MMS, chatrooms, Facebook and Twitter to spread rumours and with speed, spread hatred among people,” he said.

He said abuse of these applications should be addressed together by raising awareness on the ethics and proper norms of using sophistcated communition tools in this ultra-modern age.

On the contest, he said it was a very good programme and should be continued in future.

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia’s team emerged the overall winner with its “Flyer: On-The-Fly Flash Composer And4 Community” mobile content and walked with total prize money of RM60,000 for the university and the team.

For the Mobile Entertainment category, team Genex of Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) walked away with the top prize while team Vicegerent of Universiti Islam Antarabangsa (UIA) won the Mobile Info Base category.

Both teams took home RM10,000 each.

Team Qlip.in from UPM were awarded a special prize for their product which was themed on developing a 1Malaysia community. -- Bernama