I have a two year old son, so I am no stranger to watching annoying television, a three hour Barney or Teletubbies marathon would be enough to make James Bond crack, but it gets worse than this and I'm talking about Richard Quest on CNN, I am indeed talking about the show 'Click' on BBC World. Someone asked me the other day if my inspiration for this site came from our BBC namesake; hell no!

For those of you not familiar with BBC click, it's basically a 'computers for dummies' type show with a very annoying presenter and often laughable content. I know as someone who works in the IT industry I'm probably not the target audience but still, surely the BBC with its massive resources can come up with something better than this. They're lucky I'm not still in the UK and being forced by the state to pay my TV licensing fees for this crap, otherwise I might be forced to write a very stern letter to my local member of parliament regarding the issue.

Today's show was one of the worst to date, they started off with a five minute piece on the new Apple iPhone, after giving us all the 'inside scoop' the presenter went on to say that once they had managed to get one they would give it a proper review?! We then moved onto a piece about professional computer game teams in Korea, which consisted of a gang of spotty oiks living in a shared house training (playing War Craft for 14 hours a day) who had now gained pop-star status amongst Korean school girls. After the excitement of that piece we moved on to the ever enlightening mail bag, where we had one guy ask if it was a good idea to install XP Service Pack 2, and no this wasn't a 2005 rerun!

Anyway rant over.

The site has now been up and running and viewable by the general public for two months and the traffic although small has been steadily increasing. I always knew that this project would be a slow burner, I mean a site that revolves around professional level IT in Cambodia is never going to be a high traffic affair. Even if every developer, hacker and system admin in the whole country logged in at the same time, we would probably still have less than 1% of the traffic a site like digg.com gets at 3am on Christmas Eve!

Despite the steady increases in traffic though, I had been quite disappointed with the lack of comments and user input, this site always started out with the ambition of being a user community where anybody who had something to say or offer could contribute in anyway they liked. As of yesterday it had been about one month since the last person joined despite picking up a handful of users early on. This had left me wondering what the problem might be, was the site too nerdy? Surely not, I know more than a few propeller heads in Cambodia. Was my writing crap? Possible! Were people simply not interested in OOP, databases, debuggers and other such thrilling subjects? Impossible!

Today I headed off to the ICT World Expo. The event was held at the Mondial Center, which is also famous for being Cambodia’s largest wedding factory. The expo was split over two large floors with the speeches and seminars upstairs and the trade exhibition downstairs. There was a good showing from local companies and even a splattering of international outfits from Vietnam and beyond.

The conference was pretty much what I have come to expect from such events in Cambodia, especially when it came to the seminar. The brochures were in near unreadable English with 60% of the pages talking about the various Excellencies (which is Khmer for ‘politician’), and the less said about the rest the better.

The third annual ICT World Expo is scheduled to take place 6-8^th April. The expo will feature key note speeches from various private and public sector leaders as well as a trade exhibition featuring companies from Cambodia and beyond.

You can find more information relating to the expo at www.idgcambodia.com/ .

I haven’t attended any of the previous events mainly due to the fact that most Cambodian conferences, product launches and presentations are total bore fests. The numerous keynote speeches will all inevitably be made by predictable politicians in order of seniority rather than industry leaders in order of innovation.

"Digital Divide Data provides high-quality, cost-effective data-entry & digitization services. We also provide for the social, human & economic development of our Cambodian staff". This is the message that first greets visitors to the DDD website. DDD are as far as I'm aware Cambodia's first company whose primary function is to undertake outsourced IT work and after the successes of India and more recently Vietnam in this field who is to say that Cambodia can't be the next outsourcing new kid on the block.

Cambodia seems to have similar demographics to India and Vietnam, in as much as it has a very young population and far more graduates than there are jobs to accommodate this ambitious generation. Although it appear DDD are at present only involved in data entry which is the bottom run of the outsourcing ladder, if India and Vietnam are anything to go by, this type of industry is a self fulfilling prophecy, with students joining professional well managed companies to perform trivial work such as data entry, whilst their employers invest in their education in the hope to posses a more skilled work force who could then be utilized in more profitable undertakings such as software testing or business process outsourcing.

Check out the BBC news article here

Google’s Khmer language search engine found at google.com.kh has been in existence for over a year now, but after reading comments on khmeros.info (keepers of the Khmer Unicode project) and other sites, it seems as if it was plagued with typos and misuse of the Khmer language.

Anyway it looks like the contributors here in Cambodia have finally got everything to an acceptable level as today anyone who goes to google.com using a Cambodian IP will be redirected to google.com.kh. Google is a popular site here in Cambodia and hopefully people who are currently using the true type Khmer fonts such as Limon and ABC will consider making the switch to Khmer Unicode in order to be able to search Khmer language content on the web.