/issue/2016.07

The Internet landscape in Southeast Asia has been making tremendous strides following the ASEAN Economic Community. According to a new report released by Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek and Google,
 

124000 people are expected to come online everyday and this will continue for the near future.  It has already become the 4th largest Internet market place in the world with more than 260 million active online users.

Not only are the number of people going online increasing, they are actively participating in online services. The Internet economy in Southeast Asia is expected to reach US$200 billion by 2025, a 6.5X increase over 10 years. The bulk of these are going to come from E-Commerce spending and travel. One should not neglect the mobile population, which stands at 700 million (130% of the population)

When looking at the global charts, China, India and Southeast Asia make up 3 of the top 4 online populations in the globe and with their penetration nowhere near potential; the future is definitely looking bright for the online space in Asia.

Freshly repackaged, ICANN 56 Policy Forum was held in Helsinki, Finland last month over the Nordic Midsummer.  The streamlined meeting eschewed ceremonial opening and closing events, the ever-popular public forum, as well as pre-meeting working days for many of the ICANN supporting organizations and advisory committees.  The spotlight focus was on the cross-community opportunities for discussion on common hot topics such as new gTLD subsequent procedures, auction proceeds, and frameworks for future cross-community working groups.

DotAsia’s CEO, Edmon Chung, along with other Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) executive committee members (http://uasg.tech/), led efforts to advance the cross-industry work of the UASG in Universal Acceptance.

The policy-focused meeting allowed the ICANN community to ‘get back to business’ on policy work that was put on hold during the intensive IANA transition proposal development during the past year. Word-of-month responses has largely been positive, with many remarking that this ICANN meeting was considerably ‘less stressful’.  Here’s to looking forward to the upcoming extended ICANN 57 in Hyderabad!

This year, WHD Global has partnered with local host IDC点评网 (www.hostucan.cn) for the China audience. On July 20th, the first 2016 WHD China event took place in Shanghai featuring veteran domain industry speakers such as Tobias Flaitz, CEO of Sedo and Jianguo He, CEO of 22.cn.  .Asia CEO, Edmon Chung also participated in the CEOs roundtable discussion on domain investment and new gTLDs.  .Asia is excited to be at WHD China for all three shows in 2016, look for Abby Zhang (张晓) at the .Asia booth in Xiamen (Sep 9) and Beijing (Nov, 18) to receive a .Asia giveaway.   WHD China is touted as one of the most influential IDC and cloud event in China.  We hope to see you there!

Next month, on August 10th, we will be in Malaysia to speak at the 6th annual Exabytes eCommerce Conference (ECC).  The ECC brings together South East Asian freelance webmasters, new online startups, decision makers, Internet entrepreneurs, branding & advertising specialists and more to learn, meet and network.  Pavan Budhrani will have more update for you in our August newsletter.  Stay tuned!

NetMission Ambassadors (est. 2009) is a group of dedicated youth devoted to promote sustainable Internet development and engaged in the Internet Governance discourse.

New this year, the “Youth Internet Governance Forum Hong Kong (HKYIGF)” [http://hk.yigf.asia/] Program, introduced by DotAsia Organisation and NetMission Ambassadors and fully supported by Microsoft Hong Kong, aims to empower and engage the Next Generation from Hong Kong high schools to take part in global discussion as digital citizens and understand their rights and responsibilities to the digital society. HKIGF began on 25 June with the Netizens Seminar, followed by the HKYIGF Internet Governance Training Camp held from 8-10 July, and concluded with the Youth Internet Summit on 16 July.

Youth representatives from HKYIGF will be elected to attend the 11th United Nations Internet Governance Forum in Mexico from 6-9 December 2016 and exchange views on Internet Governance Issues with stakeholders from around the world.

Food Revolution day (FRD) is an annual global day of action that celebrates good, fresh and real food.  To align with this year’s theme “Feed the future”, Go.Asia designed a series of online and offline campaigns in collaboration with commercial partners, NGOs as well as volunteers and participants throughout May. These included an online Cooking Challenge, and a day of celebration with celebrities Mr. Ronald Cheng & Ms. Sammie Yu who led 200 students and volunteers to make a healthy salad. We received over online 4,000 likes and shares in a month, more than 110,000 engaged on our website and Facebook, together with over 25 media outlets coverage in HK.

Since joining DotAsia as the stakeholder engagement manager, Ajitora has been busy zipping around to promote a more collaborative Asia and spread his mission on doubling tigers by 2022!  

Honored to be appointed as the official ambassador of the Tx2 (#doubletigers) campaign, Ajitora was excited to attend the 3rd Asia Ministerial Conference on Tiger Conservation during 12-14 April in Delhi, India. Prime Minister of India, Mr. Narendra Modi made a strong pitch to urge for international collaboration at a strongest level among governments on tiger conservation. Participants are all showing their 2 thumbs up with Aji to support the upcoming Global Tiger Day on 29 July.

Invited by Weathernews Inc. from Japan, Ajitora boarded the SHIRASE, an enormous icebreaker ship, to have fun and raise funds on 22 May and 9-10 July. Over 4000 people joined the event with almost 95,000 yen in donations received for supporting Aji’s tiger and forest conservation efforts.

Aji also went to different industry events to advocate on how Internet can contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Check out his interview with ICANN wiki at ICANN Marrakech: https://aji.asia/icannwiki.

What’s next? Aji is constantly on the road. Follow him on his facebook or twitter!