IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Cebu City’s goal of becoming a "smart city" is expected to move closer to reality after it recently forged a partnership with PLDT Enterprise, the corporate business arm of PLDT, Inc.

The collaboration is seen to provide reliable connectivity, with the initial roll out of free, unlimited public wi-fi in 50 barangays, including Guadalupe, Tisa, Basak San Nicolas, and Talamban.

The corporate business arm of PLDT Inc. teamed up with the provincial government of Cebu to expedite its digital transformation for the benefit of constituents and thriving business communities.

The collaboration will provide advanced digital solutions and reliable connectivity with the initial roll-out of free, unlimited public Wi-Fi in 50 barangays, including prominent areas like Guadalupe, Tisa, Basak San Nicholas and Talamban.

The Comelec on Sunday said a total of 9,018,256 registered voters were found to be without the needed data—consisting of digital fingerprints, photos and signatures—as of the last day of registration and validation on Oct. 31 last year in preparation for last May’s midterm elections.

First District Election Officer Stephen Roy Cañete announced that the 75,000 Zamboangueño voters with incomplete biometrics will be able to vote in the May 9, 2016 national and local elections.

Cañete told the Philippines News Agency on Saturday that the Commission on Elections (Comelec) promulgated a resolution allowing voters with incomplete biometrics to vote in next year’s elections.

“The farm-to-e-market portal will make the farmers more mobile and better aware of the prevailing prices of agriculture products in the market at any given time,” said Eriberto P. Barriga, Jr., ICT Davao, Inc. executive vice-president.

A related but limited system driven by text messaging was initiated by the city government and Smart Communications, Inc. three years ago.

It is common knowledge, as it should be, that the world’s resources are finite. Soon, waters may dry up, soil may become barren, land may be extinguished of its minerals. It is the hard truth – the Earth, our only home, may soon run out of resources if we do not know how to utilize it now.

This may not sound so alarming if not for the rising population of the world. World population is projected to rise to 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100.

A few years ago, a city in Metro Manila claimed to be the cleanest city, despite the fact that its rivers were still heavily polluted.

Recently, another city claimed to be “smart”, based on the fact that its CCTV cameras are now connected to a centralized monitoring center.

When Ferdinand Marcos Jr became president, he laid out a policy of immediate digitalization of vital government services to boost the ease of doing business and combat corruption. This was an important policy as the Congressional Policy and Budget Research Department observed that digital transformation can be an important boost to the Philippines’ economic recovery in the post-pandemic period. Globally, digital transformation is nothing new as the ongoing process of digitalization has been shaping how countries do business and trade.

The estimated value of the Philippines’ digital economy in 2020 is around $7.5 billion with a projected annual growth rate of 30%. There are also expectations that the sector will expand substantially between $28 billion and $40 billion in 2025. Robust public-private cooperation is essential to this growth. E-commerce leads the Philippine digital economy in terms of sector, followed by online media, transport and food and online travel.

The newly formed ICT Council, which was organized by the local business chamber, also cited the city’s lack of infrastructure to house would-be locators. "We hope to make Zamboanga City the next wave city and hope to take a share of the $50-billion information and communications technology industry by 2016," Pedro Rufo N. Soliven, president of the Zamboanga Chamber of Commerce and Foundation, Inc., said in a recent interview.

The portal provides a library of the agency’s on-going and completed projects nationwide. It also details their fund allocations and cumulative disbursements, completion period, percentage of accomplishment and other relevant data, including regularly updated photos, which were provided by the attached agencies, corporations and regional field units of the Department of Agriculture.

Taguig city government recently completed the roll-out of the Taguig Tracking Device System (TTDS) enabling people to monitor the flow of transactions at City Hall, said Mayor Ma. Laarni Cayetano.

Cayetano explained the system was developed to suit the needs of investors in Taguig and to improve efficiency in completing transactions and releasing documents which are being processed by the city government.

The city will pioneer the Community Health Information Tracking System (CHITS) using mobile phones which enables healthcare professionals to collect patient data at the point of care and merge it with health centre stored data through the internet.

Mobile CHITS or mCHITS enables real-time updates on patient data, even on the go. And stored data can be retrieved automatically without the difficulty of searching through hundreds of health center files and folders.

Candon, a city in northern Philippines with 56,270 inhabitants, was chosen in 2010 by the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry as the most business friendly city in the country.

Candon City has reported exceeding its tax collection mark of P14 million (US$325,052) during its first 20 days of operations at the start of 2011.

According to Makati City Mayor Jejomar Erwin S. Binay, the app, which was developed by the city’s Urban Development Department, earned praises for the sophistication of its architecture which draws information from the city’s expansive traffic management infrastructure, CCTV cameras and weather stations so that updates are provided in 15-minute intervals.

Launched by the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology and the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG), the e-dalaw (visit) project allows the inmates to talk to their love ones via the free video chat application—Skype— in a Wi-Fi enabled room.

Quezon City Jail chief Supt. Joseph Vela said the e-dalaw program will let about 3,000 inmates, who do not receive regular visitors, talk to their relatives up to five minutes through Skype.

The total budget for the master plan is Php50 million (USD 1.1 million) and will consist of several components such as Cloud adoption, implementation of a structured cabling system, and the implementation of a centralised Geographic Information System (GIS).

The project will implement the adoption of mobile technology in the city’s financial transactions to help cut administrative costs, increase transparency, reduce potential leakage of government funds, and make doing business with the government easier for citizens.

The Philippine embassy formally launched the service last Tuesday, the Department of Foreign Affairs said Friday.

"Manuel A. Leonardo Jr., a Filipino working as a singer in Jilin City was the first to file his application for the ePassport at the Embassy's consular section. He thanked the Embassy for the speedy processing of his ePassport application," the DFA said in a news release posted on its website.

Cagayan de Oro City (population, 163,676) was ranked first of the 10, followed by San Fernando City, Pampanga, Makati City, Valenzuela, Mandaluyong, Cebu City, Balanga City, Bataan, Angeles City, Batangas City and Taguig.

The 2014 E-Readiness Leadership Awards “recognise city mayors who are pioneering the adoption and strategic use of ICT to enhance their delivery of government services , improve revenue/tax collection efforts and promote transparency in government operations”, a central government statement said.

For 2008, the government is estimated to have spent US$390 million on IT, 52 percent for hardware, with IT services accounting for 27 percent and the remaining 21 percent on software. The Springboard Research report adds that IT spending is heavily centralized at the national level with local governments controlling an estimated 7 percent of spending. It notes that government spending was centered on education, defense, healthcare, utilities, taxation, social services and transportation.