Melis­sa Doughty

get­ty­im­ages.com

As the world ca­reens to­ward an age of lim­it­less tech­no­log­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties–killer ro­bots, 3D print­ers, rapid biotech­nolo­gies (mo­bile ro­bot­ic arms), and Star Trek-in­spired in­ven­tions, the list of things one can't do and can't achieve have been con­sid­er­ably re­duced.

Ap­pli­ca­tions, tablets and smart­phones, among oth­ers, have trans­formed hu­man com­mu­ni­ca­tion and life as we've known it, but have al­so earned ma­jor play­ers in the mar­ket tremen­dous wealth.

Most are fa­mil­iar with tablets, smart­phones and var­i­ous forms of dig­i­tal prod­ucts but tech­nol­o­gy can mean much more.

In its broad­est sense, it means "the pur­pose­ful ap­pli­ca­tion of in­for­ma­tion in the de­sign, pro­duc­tion, and util­i­sa­tion of goods and ser­vices, and in the or­gan­i­sa­tion of hu­man ac­tiv­i­ties," ac­cord­ing to busi­ness­dic­tionary.com. In many ways, the re­gion and T&T are play­ing catch-up to the rapid de­vel­op­ment of dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy.

Caribbean neigh­bour Haiti, how­ev­er, had an en­trance in­to the high-tech mar­ket with an An­droid tablet called Surtab. The tablet was found­ed and es­tab­lished in Haiti in 2013.

The com­pa­ny that man­u­fac­tures the Surtab has shown se­ri­ous growth over the last year. Ac­cord­ing to its Web site, they have "ex­pand­ed from four am­bi­tious en­tre­pre­neurs to more than 50 Hait­ian em­ploy­ees." The com­pa­ny will con­tin­ue to grow as they in­crease ca­pac­i­ty, it stat­ed. If Dr Mar­garet Bernard's (a se­nior lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies' Fac­ul­ty of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy) pre­dic­tion is ac­cu­rate, then the re­gion's tech­no­log­i­cal fu­ture lies in soft­ware de­vel­op­ment.

"I think where we are is a good way for T&T to go, the fo­cus is on soft­ware. The de­vel­op­ment of mo­bile apps in health, ed­u­ca­tion, sports, all dif­fer­ent ar­eas." Soft­ware, she said, can be de­vel­oped with very lit­tle re­sources that can then be mar­ket­ed to the world. Asked how eco­nom­i­cal­ly vi­able she saw the de­vel­op­ment of mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tions for the re­gion and T&T, Bernard said "very, very eco­nom­i­cal­ly vi­able."

She said, "T&T and the Caribbean, we can­not just be users of the tech­nol­o­gy and de­pen­dent on the US, Eu­rope and Asia for im­prove­ments in tech­nol­o­gy and im­proved us­age in tech­nol­o­gy. We in the Caribbean al­so need to be­come in­volved in cre­at­ing tech­nol­o­gy and cre­at­ing dif­fer­ent us­age or ap­pli­ca­tions. We need to make strides in that area to keep up on a glob­al stage."

The top­ic, she said, has been wide­ly dis­cussed but the is­sues re­main how to get it done. Strides, she said, have been made in some ar­eas. Her face beamed as she demon­strat­ed da­ta.tt, its open da­ta repos­i­to­ry, which gives in­for­ma­tion on road fa­tal­i­ties, Namde­v­co's whole­sale fresh pro­duce mar­ket re­ports among oth­ers.

Its Agrinett project (an open da­ta repos­i­to­ry), it said, would as­sist in the de­vel­op­ment of ap­pli­ca­tions such as one cur­rent­ly in works to alert farm­ers to price changes above a cer­tain lim­it for plan­ning of crops and time etc.

"It is an agri­cul­ture project fund­ed un­der the re­search and de­vel­op­ment im­pact fund...Ini­tial­ly we looked at what was there in Trinidad...tech­nol­o­gy in agri­cul­ture, not mech­a­ni­sa­tion but com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy...out of all our in­ves­ti­ga­tion we de­cid­ed to go the way of open da­ta."

The group's cob­ble ap­pli­ca­tions were de­vel­oped us­ing da­ta from its open da­ta plat­form. Bernard said open da­ta is a huge glob­al phe­nom­e­na. "Sort of the next big wave of things hap­pen­ing in the world...There are large datasets, sci­en­tif­ic da­ta as well as busi­ness da­ta, and even now ed­u­ca­tion­al da­ta, cli­mate da­ta, genome da­ta, that kind of thing... There is a huge move­ment in the world to­ward stor­ing and man­ag­ing that da­ta. Huge amounts of very dy­nam­ic da­ta."

Open da­ta, ac­cord­ing to Wikipedia, "is the idea that cer­tain da­ta should be freely avail­able to every­one to use and re­pub­lish as they wish, with­out re­stric­tions from copy­right, patents or oth­er mech­a­nisms of con­trol."

The group, she said, de­vel­oped an open da­ta plat­form (the plat­form con­tains sta­tis­tics on price changes for cer­tain crops, crime da­ta among oth­ers) which al­lowed ap­pli­ca­tions to be built, many of which were mo­bile.

She said the mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tions be­ing de­vel­oped cur­rent­ly would as­sist farm­ers to im­prove agri­cul­ture and food pro­duc­tion in the coun­try, over the long term.

"That is one of the high­est goals we have had...all na­tions have put food se­cu­ri­ty high on the agen­da. That is a big goal for the coun­try, and we think our work can help to im­prove that."

T&T, Bernard said, was one of the few coun­tries in the Caribbean with an open da­ta plat­form which could be made avail­able for use by oth­er Caribbean coun­tries.