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Asia Pacific Information Technology Summit Andrew S. Grove (8:55 a.m.) ROBERTO ROMULO: Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce an icon of the information technology industry, an inventor, an accomplished scientist, and, indeed, a very successful businessman. The founder and CEO of Intel Corporation, a very good friend of my own country. Ladies and gentlemen, I have the distinct pleasure of introducing Dr. Andy Grove. (Applause.) ANDY GROVE: Good morning. I would like to welcome you to Silicon Valley North. (Laughter.) ANDY GROVE: For many, many years, those of us who live in the South Bay have regarded ourselves as living on the outskirts of San Francisco, and after a few decades of that, the situation is slightly reversing, which is a testimonial to the significance of what we are here to talk about, information technology. And along that line, I would also like to welcome the uncounted and uncountable number of people who are watching this presentation through Web casting. Welcome to PECC. In fact, I think it is extremely significant and very appropriate that the first ever Asia-Pacific Information Technology meeting should be held here. The San Francisco Bay Area and the West Coast of the United States in a more general sense had been not just geographically but culturally and economically a part of the Pacific basin. And I have a significant personal experience on this because I started crossing the Pacific for that kind of -- building of that kind of ties many, many years ago, about 27 years ago for the first time, and have seen the development of the ties and seen the development of the region year by year. And I dug out a couple of pictures to illustrate my first trip to Malaysia. Maybe it was my second trip. The first time was 1970 to '71. We hired a group of people to build us a plant in a little known place, little known over here and generally little known in the world, called Penang. And when the plant was under construction, we went to visit it, and unfortunately it rained. So what happened is our car got stuck on the road leading to the plant, and some people who were herding water buffaloes on both side of the road came to help and unstuck the car, but it didn't work too well so we ended up having to walk to the plant which looked like that. (Laughter.) ANDY GROVE: You get to guess which one of those is me. (Laughter.) ANDY GROVE: Well, a couple of stories, a couple of comments to add to this. That afternoon, I had a meeting, the first ever meeting, with the chief minister of Penang who asked how my visit went, and of course I told him that it was not so good. We got stuck in the mud on the road, et cetera. And this was early afternoon. By the latter part of that afternoon, a gravel loaded truck convoy, truck after truck after truck, appeared on the scene, and by the end of the evening, the road was covered with gravel, and next day, we didn't get stuck. And that kind of tells, in a little vignette, the story of what it has been like to work in the Asian economies. The can-do attitude, the no-nonsense, result-oriented business culture that has allowed us to operate there very, very effectively and has allowed the local companies to grow and become part of an interdependent information economy that we are all part of today. And just to finish the story, the plant that grew out -- or, rather, six or seven plants that grew out of the end of that road looks more like -- looks something like what you see there today, and it's a place where we employ over 8,000 people today. So with that, let's get on with the keynote. And at a time when this conference was planned, and at a time when I accepted to give this talk, none of us expected; I didn't expect and anybody I knew didn't expect the financial instability and turbulence that would hit the region as of today. And I really don't have a whole lot to add to that. I don't have an economics background. I don't have a financial background. But I have lived through 30 years or almost 30 years of Intel, and through that I experienced a few periods of comparable, on relative scale, difficulties. For instance, in the mid-'80s when our revenue stream that has been growing for 17 years before suddenly took a reversal and a couple years declined by 20 or 30 percent, which is a very major decline and a reversal for a growing company, and at that time as we were beginning to figure out what to do, in a state of shock, our founder and then CEO, Gordon Moore, made a comment that has stayed with me throughout the years of Intel which is, "You can never recover out of a recession on the basis of the products that you had when the recession started. You can only pull out of the recession on the basis of new products." And throughout all of that period of time -- in fact, throughout all the difficult setbacks that we have had in our history -- we have always plowed on, increased what our company is about, which is R&D, research and development, spending and activities. And, in fact, Gordon's rule prevailed every single time we pulled out of the recession, we always pulled out of the recession on the basis of the new products. And I think there is some kind of an analogy that I would like to suggest that we can draw to the present problems of the region. All setbacks and -- but when they end, the way we're going to pull out of them, are going to be on the moral equivalent of new products, new ways of doing business, new technologies, and, I think, information technology is going to be a major kernel of those new ways. In fact, information technology has been very, very good for the Asia-Pacific region. You have enjoyed, both as economies and as companies that make up those economies, tremendous benefits from being producers of information technology product, being exporters of information technology products. When we look at some numbers, you see that the high tech exports out of selected countries in Asia have been very large, multiple tens of billions of dollars per country, and growing phenomenally for year after year. This is the absolute measure, but even relative to the growth domestic products futures of these countries, you see a growing percentage of the gross domestic products of these countries made up of information technology exports, making up 5 to 10 percent of GDP, which is very, very significant portion. The question that's ahead of us is given that high technology has been a strong export business for the Asian economies, how and what has the Asian economy -- have the Asian economies done internally with using and deploying information technology and relying on them. And the picture, looking at it that way, is not nearly as strong. Let's take a look at some numbers again. Information technology's spending, spending on computer hardware, software, by corporation, by individuals, is substantially below the export numbers, typically in the single-digit billions of dollars for these countries. When you look at it as a percentage of the gross domestic product, you see a very slow growth, and you see numbers below one percent of the GDP. I don't mean to hold the U.S. up as a paragon of virtue, but as a point of comparison, the number of between three and three and a half percent of GDP. There are other communicators that basically communicate the same message, paint the same picture. If you look at the percentage of office workers who use personal computers as part of their daily work, you see numbers ranging from the single digit percent, some of them very low single digit percent, to up to 15 percent. Again, the comparable U.S. number is closer to 60, six zero, percent. Now, this is bad enough looking backwards, this disparity is bad enough looking backwards, but it is particularly significant when you consider it in the context of the biggest trend in information technology, and, in fact, I submit the biggest trend in commerce, which is the onset and appearance and pervasiveness of the Internet. For in the simplest form this phenomenon is a technical phenomenon. Not a simple technical phenomenon, but basically the Internet is a universal global network that connects personal computers all over the world. On a bit more powerful level, I think we can safely say that in the future, all computing will be networked computing. Computing without becoming part of this international global universal network simply will not exist. Let me give you some illustration of that assertion. When you try to figure out the number of personal computers that are in businesses and homes that are connected to the Internet, you see a very large growth rate, steady growth rate, projected to continue all the way to the -- I mean, to the year 2000 is how far we've projected here, being about 150 million unit level, 150 million unit connected computers are part of the global network, and continuing a steady growth. And I will submit to you that someplace within the next decade, we are going to see a community of about a billion computers that will be able to send and receive messages to and from all other computers connected to this network. That is a very, very large community. That is a community approaching 15, 20 percent of the world's population in terms of computers. And it's kind of a weird feeling to follow President Clinton giving part of my speech here, but to reemphasize, that is how all activities will increasingly be done in this world, and I intend to demonstrate it a little bit in the rest of my speech. But again, in order to reach the benefits of this connected universe, you have to be connected. And you have to be connected in every country and in every office and in as many homes as possible. And again, when we look at the picture of the selected countries, the connected rate is, in businesses, which is where this connected phenomenon started in the United States, and Europe is not that good. You see 15 percent and lower numbers of computers in businesses that are connected which compares to a number, again, in the U.S. 40 to 50 percent of business computers are connected today. Another measure of looking at the same phenomenon is to take a look at on-line presence around the world, and you see in the blue portion of this chart is the on-line population, the portion of the on-line population that's in the United States, and it is well over half. And the 12 and the 6 percent figures, the red and the yellow figures, correspond to connectivity, the portion of the worldwide connected population in Japan and Asia-Pacific. Clearly not in proportion to the connected of the business segments. But you look at the total -- another way of cutting the same data, looking at it by a different measure, total adult users of the Internet, you see something like 60 million users estimated to be in the United States, and single-digit numbers and some very, very low, even well below a million users, in these -- the Asian countries. You might argue that the population is smaller in many instances than in the United States, so we can take a look at it on a percentage basis, and what you can see is the disparity is every bit as big or maybe even bigger. Now, why is this significant? I submit to you it is significant because no matter which issues you think face us as a society today, a large part of the solution lies in information technology delivered to you in a connected computer -- Internet-connected computer fashion. I picked three issues that I think you could agree are among the biggest issues facing any country in the Pacific basin. They are education, health care, and global commerce, participation in global commerce. I would like to give you a little bit of flavor how information technology could come to the aid of any society trying to address these problems. Let's take the first one, which is education. There are about a half a billion or larger number than that illiterate adults living in Asia. To address this problem, we have to take extraordinary measures, measures that can penetrate large number of people, that is inexpensive and is broadly available. And I would like to give you a flavor of how this could be done, and let's take a look at the first demonstration. Let me welcome Chris Lo here. Chris, give me a demonstration of how connected computers can be used to learn. CHRIS LO: Good morning, Andy. What I have here today is a fairly typical Pentium® II processor-based PC, but it is different in one major way. It is connected not the way most people connect, over a phone line or ethernet, but it is connected to a satellite dish from Hughes, the direct PC satellite dish, along with a card added in here to talk to that dish. ANDY GROVE: The significance of which would be the satellite coverage would be probably the easiest and cheapest and most pervasive way to cover most of Asia. CHRIS LO: Yes. We can run this anywhere we've got power, and just point the dish, locate the satellite, and we can receive digital data broadcast down from the satellite to the PC to do any number of things. In this case what I'd like to show is how you can use it in education. I'm going to go ahead and log in here. I put in my log-in name and password. And when I click enter, we see a schedule here of a number of classes that are being broadcast, a class in the Philippines, advanced chemistry, and it's about 9:15 and we're in the middle of the chemistry class and why don't we look at that. As I click on that, you see it brings up some information here on chemical models, 3-D models of ammonia and what not. And one thing you'll notice -- ANDY GROVE: Not what not. Ammonia. Those of us who studied chemistry recognize that. CHRIS LO: I'm not sure what the other one is. I recognize one as ammonia. You'll notice we're looking at this in a Web browser and you'll notice these pages are coming up really quickly. As soon as I click, the page is right there and that's because all this data has been broadcast, pushed down, if you will, from the satellite through the dish to the PC's hard drive last night so it's ready for us now. We're not actually on the Internet. We're just using Internet technologies and the browser -- ANDY GROVE: Using Internet technology to load that data from the satellite to this PC, and right now you are accessing it from right this PC. CHRIS LO: Correct. But what we're missing, we have some of the materials that we'll use in the class, but what we're missing here is the teacher. So what we can do is we can use another capability of this satellite system, high-quality digital streaming video, to bring the teacher to everyone out there who has this dish somewhere looking up at the sky. So what I'll do is I'll bring up our video viewer here and go to the channel for the chemistry lesson and this should bring in the teacher. Let's listen in. (Audio through PC: "Making it outer shell complete. This makes the entire ammonium compound very stable. Molecules can be far more complex than these simple ones. Select the DNA molecule --") ANDY GROVE: This is a live video stream that we're getting from the satellite to the personal computer. CHRIS LO: Yes. The teacher is sitting in her office broadcasting up through the satellite and she's told us to click on the DNA molecule. You'll see here we have even more data stored on our hard drive broadcast from the satellite that we can interact with. I can look at all sides of this molecule, and with the power of the PC, we can show these very complex models or other data like video or animation. But as I said, this is all just broadcast down. If we've got another connection like a phone line, we can connect to the Internet using the satellite to give us a high-speed Internet access, and use the phone line to communicate back to have pages downloaded or another thing we could do is actually to ask a question of the teacher. I can enter a question in here asking about this page that we missed, I didn't quite know what that molecule was, so I want to send a question back to the teacher. So over the smaller connection, the phone line, I can enter my question and click send, and it will go over the Internet back to the teacher and show up on her screen so that she can repeat the question to everyone else. ANDY GROVE: A small amount of data, your question can go on the phone line. The large amount of data on the video screen comes back through satellite. CHRIS LO: Yes. (Audio through PC: "I've just received an interesting question from Chris. Chris asks why is the ammonia molecule flat and the boron tri-chloride molecule hinged? That's a great question, though --") CHRIS LO: So we can get an answer from the teacher. Like I said, with this phone line we've got a connection to the Internet. We can research it on the Internet, or any other subject matter that is out there that we can learn, or go on to some of the other classes that were being taught here. ANDY GROVE: OK. Thanks very much. CHRIS LO: You're welcome. (Applause.) ANDY GROVE: Just very quickly again, what you have seen here is the use of a terribly potentially extremely broad communications reach, which is satellite technology that is being used today for television purposes. That satellite technology can be used to deliver information to a computer's hard disk that can be accessed and used for learning purposes by the student with an ordinary personal computer. At a point in time, the satellite can be used to broadcast live instructions and, additionally, if a regular phone line is available, interactivity with the teacher is available. What we are talking about is, in fact, a broadly available, cost-effective and adaptable system coming on the basis of Internet connected personal computers. The second issue that I suggested we need to talk about and see how high technology -- information technology can be used to address is health care. And again, the magnitude of this problem pertaining to Asia is staggering in magnitude. Fifty percent of the world's population lives in Asia, and one -- when we look at one simple measure of the availability of expert medical care, which is the number of doctors per 100,000 people in a population, we find that, again, using the U.S. as a benchmark, which as heaven knows bears a lot of improvement itself, we see in most instances, more than an order of magnitude discrepancy in the number of doctors available per person. Now, this problem cannot be solved by increasing the number of doctors available per population by tenfold or twentyfold. We have to find ways with which we can leverage technology to extend the reach of those doctors so that, in effect, the productivity, the reach, the availability of that medical knowledge that doctor, that trained doctor, represents is available to a large number of people. Again, Internet connected personal computers provide the possibility of doing exactly that through delivering pervasive telemedicine. So let's take a look at how that might work. Let's welcome Mark Elston. MARK ELSTON: Good morning. ANDY GROVE: He's our trained medical technician. MARK ELSTON: Yes, I am. And what I'd like to do is give you an example of telemedicine in the form of me, the traveling medical technician, visiting your house, doing a post-surgery follow-up. And what I have here is my traveling kit that allows me to carry all the acquisition devices that I need to take with me on the road. And this is a distant care package by a company called Telemedicine Corporation of America. Aside from the typical device you might think I would have in here like a thermometer and blood pressure cuff and a few other things, I have a few other devices that are digital in nature. I have a digital camera here, and we have a nice laptop computer that can provide us with a lot of great -- (Dropping laptop computer on floor.) Well, fortunately it's a case-hardened laptop, so it's able to take the abuse of us clumsy lab top technicians on the road. (Laughter.) MARK ELSTON: So why don't we walk over -- (Laughter.) MARK ELSTON: -- over to this table here and give you an example of what the application looks like. And just to make sure everybody believes this is a real computer, let's go ahead and turn it on and with any luck it will come up. What we have on this machine, we have it wired up and we actually have the application up and running, and I know not too long ago you had a small little bicycle accident in which you suffered some cuts and abrasions and trauma to your hand. So what I did before I came out here I downloaded all of your information into the laptop computer and have all of your patient information here, and the first screen, we have visit information here that keeps track of all the data that was collected as we visited you. Again, at your location. So if we can pull up your current visit, I've already created some basic information, and these are things we'd collect such as vital signs, blood pressure, temperature, those type of things. ANDY GROVE: And my weight. (Laughter.) ANDY GROVE: I'm emaciated, starving to death. MARK ELSTON: Need to put you on a little bit better diet there. The doctor can provide us with special instructions on what to do with a patient or any additional information to collect. Now, what I have is a couple of digital images that we collected before. ANDY GROVE: I hope everybody here has had breakfast before you look at it. MARK ELSTON: And you had a nasty little ankle injury there that wasn't too much -- the idea is that we can actually take a couple images here -- let me click on the right button. We can actually compare a couple images so the doctor either remotely viewing this or me in the field, I can actually take a look at both these images and compare them side by side so you can actually see healing processes and things like that as they happen and digitally compare those on the laptop computer or back at the office. We have a couple other images we took of your hand because you had a little bit of hand trauma, and we can -- ANDY GROVE: It's from keyboards. (Laughter.) MARK ELSTON: Is that how you type? And then, of course -- It looks a little bit like a claw there. And of course with something like hand trauma, what's more important is not so much the wound itself but things like range of motion. So we can embed video into this file, and again collect all this information at your location. And we can either take this back to the office, all stored on a laptop computer, or if we have something just like a plain old telephone connection, we can actually upload that information to the server. And that's typically what we would do, upload the information to the server and at a predetermined time we'd actually conduct a video call, again over that same telephone line, no large ISDN or large communication devices, very small bandwidth connection and have the video consult remotely from your home. We will actually do that and actually make a call to Dr. James Rosser who is an associate professor of surgery at Yale University. So we're calling Connecticut right now. ANDY GROVE: And a well-known expert on telemedicine. MARK ELSTON: Yes. A very big proponent. Well, good morning, Dr. Rosser. Can you hear us? JAMES ROSSER: Yes. MARK ELSTON: Let me return to video here, so now after we establish the voice call, we're able to initiate a video call and we'll see his picture too. JAMES ROSSER: Hi, Andy. How are you doing? ANDY GROVE: Good. Thank you very much, Dr. Rosser for joining us. We would like to have your views on the importance and significance of telemedicine. JAMES ROSSER: Well, yes. Telemedicine, of course, is the way I feel, Andy, that we can help to bring the basic right of health care to every individual on this planet. And through that, we can have a healthier work force, and that can lead to productivity. And if we increase our productivity, we can have countries to be able to elevate their economy and, therefore, the well-being of their constituents. But if we're going to make this happen, it must come from cost-effective tools. In particular, the PC, and the mobile PC that you saw today. This is something that's real, this is something that's affordable, and this is something that is available for everybody. It serves to extend the expertise of the surgeon or the caregiver, like myself, to every part of this planet. So that the modern-day miracle of health care can be enjoyed by everyone. ANDY GROVE: Can you give us -- JAMES ROSSER: It enables you -- ANDY GROVE: Can you give us some examples of where it is used? JAMES ROSSER: Yes. The example of where this has been used is in (inaudible) it is used today, in postoperative checks for patients that have come from hundreds of miles away to have me perform special surgery; for orthopedic rehabilitation, especially children who have orthopedic problems and this sort of thing. We're using it currently in the first quarter in Ecuador to be able to help in their telemedicine projects and reach their constituents out in the jungle. Also, through Dr. Gracia and Pacific Med, we're getting strong alliances with mainland China so we can have this deployed in next year, second or third quarter. ANDY GROVE: Thank you very much, Dr. Rosser, for the explanation and giving credibility to our demonstration, and I congratulate you for pioneering -- your pioneering work in this field. Thank you. JAMES ROSSER: Thank you. Goodbye. ANDY GROVE: Goodbye. (Applause.) ANDY GROVE: The demonstration that you saw here today involves the use of the medical technician -- use by the medical technician of a portable computer, hardening the case because this in fact is moving, going around to generally remote, not accessible places because otherwise the patient would have to brave the journey in the other direction, and the patient in the scenario we have described and in the application Dr. Rosser has described is a recovering postoperative patient. The medical information, prior to the visit by the technician, is downloaded from the server that you see in the lower left onto the notebook, so that the notebook comes with the full medical records. With the use of a digital camera that you saw here, that record can be updated in a visual form. And if ordinary telephone connection is available, that medical information can be uploaded real-time to the doctor, and, in fact, even real-time consultation can be arranged. Quite clearly, as technology like this is embraced and deployed in a broader fashion, the reach of those doctors and their ability to serve a large number of people for each of them for any given day will increase dramatically through the use of connected technology. The last thing I want to talk about, global commerce. Electronic commerce is not new. It has been around for over 20 years. It started its origin in what is known as electronic data exchange. It has -- Because of the large expense and the proprietary nature of these schemes, was confined -- its use was confined to large companies and financial institutions doing business with other large companies and financial institutions. It typically involved the batch or the bulk transfer of data from one proprietary system to the other, and it required the use of expensive, value-added proprietary networks. What is new is the pervasive availability of the Internet that changes this landscape and provides the possibility of a great equalizer for electronic commerce. Internet commerce, by reducing the minimum economic scale that is required for the deployment of electronic commerce, allows small companies and individuals to become part of the electronically-connected community, and beyond that, instead of batch processing, allows real-time matching of sellers and buyers on the Internet. And consequently reduces the cost of the infrastructure and the cost of the business processes that are involved. There's two types of electronic Internet commerce that we need to look at. One, the consumer to business version or type which has received most of the attention. But, in fact, underneath it all, the one that is perhaps more significant than that, is the business to business electronic commerce which right now represents the majority of the use, majority of commerce taking place on the Internet. And the portion that it is going to represent, the company to company version of electronic commerce, is slated to increase even as the total amount of goods traded and handled through Internet commerce increases. Again, I would like to demonstrate to you some very basic and practical applications of Internet commerce, company to company as well as consumer to company Internet commerce, and introduce Elaine Chang who is going to give us a demonstration. ELAINE CHANG: Good morning, Andy. What I'd like to do today is show how a business can benefit from using the Internet, both as way to reach to customers and as a way to communicate with the suppliers. I am playing the role as a purchasing manager for Keyboard Technologies, a keyboard manufacturer based in Asia. And I would like to start by giving a quick tour of our Web site. We actually have two areas. One is the public area where a customer can get detailed part information. ANDY GROVE: A customer like myself. Suppose I want to buy a keyboard for my computer. ELAINE CHANG: That's correct. And we also have a private area, a password-protected area, for us to communicate with our suppliers and business partners. So I'd like to start by showing our public site here. We actually have multilanguage here so we can communicate with customers worldwide. I would like to show you our Mandarin site. This is basically a way for customers to get detailed information about our keyboards, and customer can also place an order on-line. Now, Andy, I would like you to help me out by placing an order to illustrate a concept. ANDY GROVE: You better go back to the English page for that. (Laughter.) ELAINE CHANG: That's right. But before I do that I'd like to show what's very significant for this Web site is that it's actually integrated into our inventory control system. So any new order that's entered into the system will automatically update our process control system. So let's illustrate that by having Andy entering an order for me. OK? ANDY GROVE: OK. First of all, I'm not going to buy one keyboard. Once I go through this trouble, I'm buying 100,000 keyboards for my company. Can I do that? (Laughter.) ELAINE CHANG: That's great. ANDY GROVE: The Asian economy needs my business. ELAINE CHANG: That's right. (Laughter.) ANDY GROVE: Should I buy this 4900? ELAINE CHANG: Yeah, that's the more expensive one, so that's good one to buy. (Laughter.) ANDY GROVE: OK. ELAINE CHANG: If you can go to order now. ANDY GROVE: Will my name do here? ELAINE CHANG: Yes. OK. And also -- ANDY GROVE: I will pose as a buyer for my company. OK. And what else do I need? ELAINE CHANG: And you just need to select a quantity. There you go. ANDY GROVE: And this is the 4900; right? ELAINE CHANG: That's right. ANDY GROVE: So 100,000? You think you can handle that. ELAINE CHANG: That would be good, yes. (Laughter.) ANDY GROVE: OK. ELAINE CHANG: This is asking you to confirm, make sure you're OK with this order. ANDY GROVE: That looks like exactly what I ordered so I'll submit the order. ELAINE CHANG: OK. And the computer has received your order and gave a confirmation number. What I would like to do next is let's imagine the computer over there is actually at my desktop, sitting thousands and thousands miles away. Let's see what that order did to me? And there is actually a trigger of a sequence of actions. Looks like I've received an urgent e-mail. I suspect that might have something to do with the order that you gave me, so let's take a look. I've actually received an e-mail from our inventory control system. Now, this e-mail is automatically generated as a result of that order. It's saying that I don't have enough plastic assemblies to fulfill the 100,000 keyboards that you just ordered. And the system also gave me a list of three vendors to choose from. So what I need to do now is to send an urgent e-mail to my suppliers to ask them to submit for quotation. Now, these suppliers happen to all be in China, and I think they prefer to communicate in Mandarin; however, I find using the traditional keyboard to input Chinese characters extremely difficult, and I have never really learned to use it. So what I do instead is I will use a software called Via Voice from IBM. This is a speech recognition software. So let me just show you that really quickly. (Computer speaking Chinese.) ELAINE CHANG: (Speaking Chinese.) (Computer speaking Chinese.) ELAINE CHANG: What I've done here is actually as I speak into the system, it's searching against the database of over 30,000 characters to recognize what I'm saying and generate the characters here. ANDY GROVE: Did you have to train the system to recognize the words as you pronounce them? ELAINE CHANG: Yes. I don't speak perfect Mandarin, and everybody has a different accent, but the system, what the software allows you to do is create a person profile and spend some time to let the system or the software get to know your voice. So there is a way for you to train the system. And, also, because you need to compare the database against your personal profile, it takes an extreme amount of processing power, and the higher the performance of the PC you have, the more it becomes accurate and the faster the recognition rate becomes. So let me quickly take a look to see how accurate I was here. Actually, it's very accurate. I think it's more than 95 percent. But on average, the -- with a little bit of training, the software can take up to about 95 percent accuracy. But let me just put it in perspective. I've just started learning typing on Chinese character using the keyboard, and I type about one word per minute. (Laughter.) ELAINE CHANG: For a good Chinese typist, I think they can get around 20 words per minute. But with software like this, and with a high-performance PC, you can easily get up to 140 words per minute with speech recognition. ANDY GROVE: OK. ELAINE CHANG: So now I've done this -- created this document. What I would like to do is send an e-mail. And this is embedded into the software. I will select the three vendors that my inventory control system has suggested that I do. And this document is automatically attached, and I'm send off the e-mail. Now, what I've just done, for those of you who don't understand Chinese, is I've asked -- I've sent an e-mail to those three suppliers asking for the quotation, but I also asked them to check out our extranet site for detailed technical specifications for the order I need. ANDY GROVE: So you don't have to attach the technical specification. You just attach the address where it is contained. ELAINE CHANG: That's right. I haven't attached the address here because the suppliers happen to deal with us on a regular basis. They have that already. But this is just to alert them to go into the extranet site and take a look for the details. So let me just quickly show that. This is a secured site, so it's password protected. And this has a list of all of the outstanding requests for quotations and have all of the technical specifications here. ANDY GROVE: Good. Thank you very much, Elaine. ELAINE CHANG: You're welcome. (Applause.) ANDY GROVE: What you have seen here is first the consumer or buyer, myself, entering an order for a keyboard, and, secondly, you have seen the -- basically the material requirements planning process between several companies taking place in a real-time interactive fashion computer to computer. The key benefit of electric commerce is that -- it's twofold. On the one hand, as you have seen with the utmost simplicity with which it operates and the speed with which it operates, it reduces the cost of sales and distribution for the sellers. And, second, because being able to shop on my computer screen between vendors, being able to receive quotations from several vendors at a given time, it turns buyers, commercial or individual buyers, into more efficient purchasers. Now, the most important point is that when this is deployed in a country or a region and it is deployed broadly, that country or region will have a very efficient supplier base and a very knowledgeable purchaser base. And an economy that is made out of efficient suppliers and knowledgeable buyers is going to be an awesome economic power, a very, very competitive economic system. So the question you have to ask, then, what makes fertile ground for the deployment of Internet commerce? And it is really fairly simple. You need home and business PC penetration, you need to have those PCs connected to the Internet, and you need low-cost available local telecommunication services as well as long distance telecommunication services. Regions that will have that will very rapidly be able to avail themselves of the system-wide economic benefits of Internet commerce. Regions that don't will be disadvantaged relative to those that do in a growing, growing and growing divergence. The key message I would like to leave for you is we're heading toward a world of a billion connected computers. In a world of that mass of broadly available connected computers, problem after problem can be addressed easier with that technology. Information technology and investment in information technology is not a luxury in a world like this. It is nothing short of a competitive necessity. And the way out of the difficult economic times for a company is new products; for an economy is new ways of doing business. Thank you very much. (Applause.) (9:43 a.m.)
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