 Good morning ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of ICD-Cata is my pleasure to, it's our pleasure to work with the government on this event and we hope that you will enjoy the interactions and discussions this morning. What I'd like to do is to share with you some thoughts and ideas about how we in Qatar are progressing towards the knowledge society as well as some strategic directions that we think will be useful to guide us into the future. ICD-Cata supports our national development goals through the use of ICT and we aim through the use of ICT to enrich the quality of life in Qatar to increase economic efficiencies and competitiveness as well as current access to all the information and technologies that people can use. Over the past four years, we have seen very good progress in terms of ICD development in the country. The latest report from the World Economic Forum has ranked Qatar as a rank of 29th among 134 countries. This is based on the Network of Redulence Index, which is a way to benchmark ICD competitiveness of those countries. So ranking of Qatar has progressed quite steadily, very steadily over the last four years and this is good news for us. We have also done local surveys of the ICD landscape in Qatar and we have gotten very good evidence that indeed ICD adoption and integration has been happening quite well in schools, in education, in businesses, as well as in government. As an example on this slide, the Hukumi government portal has been an excellent example of how government entities have come together and to provide more than 300 online services through a single online gateway. So while there has been good progress, we certainly must not rest on our laurels and we believe that the future ahead of us is going to be a lot more exciting and a lot more challenging. So what is this future going to be like? And I'm going to share with you some thoughts about what it's going to be like. We believe that the world around us is moving towards what I would call Knowledge Society 2.0. I'm not going to give you a definition of what it is because the world around us is still discovering what it is and we may never get to fully understand what Knowledge Society 2.0 is until we are through it. But what I can do is to illustrate what it is and what it's going to be by speaking about three particular phenomena. And this is just three out of possibly many, many phenomena that will characterize Knowledge Society 2.0. The first phenomena is about the new field for hyper growth. It may seem ironic to talk about new fields in our economy here which is heavy in fossil fields but there is a new field and it's called Knowledge. Human beings started producing information about 20,000 years ago. Now if we liken this history of 20,000 years as a tower of a thousand floors and someday there should be such a tower in Doha. Now in terms of the passage of time the most recent 20 years is nothing more than the top floor of this 1,000 floor tower. However, in terms of the amount of information that has been produced in the most recent 20 years it is easily 99% of all the information that's ever been produced in the past 20,000 years. So think of it. Think of all of this information that we have produced in the last 20 years and how that has changed our lives. And all of that is Knowledge Society 1.0. Now think of the next 20 years. Think of the millions of floors that you add to this tower over the next 20 years. Think of all the creative views that we can find for this new information. Think of all the new knowledge-based businesses and knowledge-based professions that will be invented over the next 20 years. This is what I believe would be a huge phenomenon driving us forward. The second phenomenon that I would like to highlight is what I would call the shift in the power of E until today we see a lot of the power of E all the e-commerce, e-government, e-whatever concentrated on the core concentrated in the governments in the big corporations in the huge central ICD facilities such as data centers. What we are seeing today is that this power of E is rapidly shifting to the edge. The edge is where we are at. All of us. The individual consumers and our widgets or devices we are at the edge. This power be knowledge, be computing power, be the freedom of choice or freedom of expression, be the ability to contribute socially or economically. All of this is shifting rapidly to the edge where all of us are at. So this phenomenon shift in the power of E is going to bring big changes in the ways that we have to develop and manage this power. So I think this is another very important phenomenon. The third phenomenon that I'd like to just share is what I would call the grand conversions. When we worked on IT strategies 10 years ago and at that time when we spoke about technology conversions we were only talking about how computers, communication networks and content are converging. That was 10 years ago. Today, that technology convergence is taken for granted. It's an opinion. Today, the convergence that we're speaking about is much, much grander. All of this online tools, social media which many of you are using YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc. All of these tools are converging on you users. It's bringing to us to our disposal just about everything we need in order to work. So this is a grand convergence that's happening and with this grand convergence on us on you you are now able to work and live anywhere, anytime across cultures you are able to interact seamlessly not just man to man but between man and machine you are able to operate in both the physical and the virtual world. It's like even as I'm having a physical conversation with you right now maybe your avatar is having a parallel conversation with my avatar online at this moment. I don't know. So this grand convergence is going to be again phenomenal in the way that we have to bring ICT to you and exploit that advantage for your company for your country for your operation. So we realise that as we move ahead over the next 20 years things haven't been a lot more exciting and challenging and definitely very, very different. We are beginning a process of conceptualising what might be in our national ICT strategy for the year 2015 and we know for sure this process of developing the next strategy we have to learn about we have to adapt to and fully exploit all the opportunities that Knowledge Society 2.0 will bring to us that is going to be very important and it's not going to be easy because we're going to discover what Knowledge Society 2.0 is as we go along. We will need a whole new set of models of collaboration among the public sector private sector and the people sector it's no longer about everything happening at the core it's no longer about governments doing e-government companies doing e-commerce it's going to be about everybody from the core to the edge participating in this process we're going to need a deep focus on innovation because if you go back to my example of the 1000 floor towers and you think of the millions of floors that will add to this tower over the next 20 years it's no longer going to be just having more information to use or using that information it's going to be very much about having very creative use of that information and knowledge so innovation is going to be key another key focus for us is sustainability it is one thing to have 1000 floors boom and it's another thing all together to have 1000 ICT initiatives sustained for the years to come and it's not going to be easy because initiatives are not going to be run just out of the core but all of us along the edge are going to be involved so there's going to be millions and millions of initiatives that we can all participate in so we need to take into account all of this phenomena all of these driving forces to shape the policy direction that will place the forefront of modern society 2.0 if you have any ideas so also questions I'm all ears and we hope to work together with you to develop this strategy and move forward, thank you