The team at Simply Intense Media: Ameeta Jackree, foreground, Justin Beausaleil, Miles Abraham (director), Emily Ferreira and Dexter Banfield. Photo: Keith Matthews

T&T’s information technology (IT) industry is far behind that of the developed world, said Miles Abraham, director, Simply Intense Media (SIM). “T&T is about ten years behind first-world nations. What was happening in the United Kingdom (UK) about ten years ago is where we are at now. The mobile phone market was liberalised and then prices dropped, then the Internet exploded, so that’s where we are. Then broadband becomes mass market and everything goes online.” Abraham was interviewed on Monday at SIM’s Belmont office.

E-commerce
Talking about e-commerce, Abraham said many T&T businesses do not use e-commerce effectively. “The Internet sector is a bit behind where it should be. The sector is fairly behind because of the drawbacks of e-commerce. Many of the banks are not using e-commerce as they should be. They should be making it a bit more available to people. “They are trying to facilitate it, but it’s not really available to the average man on the street. You’ve got to have a fairly large account and maybe a credit card, but there are cheaper alternatives.” Abraham said there needs to be more a professional approach in the way online marketing is done.

“We have people who are trying to push e-commerce, but the infrastructure is not there,” he said, citing as well people’s distrust of declaring their personal details online. “How many people will use their credit cards to buy things online here in the Caribbean? If you go on Facebook and you see some of the merchandise of local that’s being advertised there, you can tell that they have not been properly set up.” Abraham said e-commerce needs to be applied more sophisticatedly. “E-commerce is a lot about the visual aspect about selling a product in a world-class way, generating trust. To sell things online, it takes a lot more thought than what people are doing here at this point, thought in terms of visual in terms of how the person is using the computer about how brands are structured. People here don’t think about how you should be selling things online.”

Skills
Abraham said he believes the skills and talent to develop T&T’s IT industry exist locally. “Half of the people in this company come from Costaatt (College of Science, Technology and Applied Arts of T&T), or some sort of government training programme, and they are under 30, so they’re fresh and have not got experience.” Abraham said SIM works with professionals in other countries. “We work with people from Spain and New Zealand. We work with professional Web design people from these countries and other places in Europe.”

Competition
Abraham said the industry SIM works in is not very competitive because of the small number of companies that provide similar services. “There are only two or three competitors that I know of in T&T. I don’t know who their clients are, though, but there’s enough work to go around. “Everything we produce is of the highest quality we consider it to be. We spend a lot of time on our projects with our clients. I can do 25 Web sites in a month, but I prefer to do two or three large, effective ones,” he said. He used Telecommunications Services of T&T’s (TSTT) Blink Web site as one example of how people are reacting to SIM’s work. “When you look at the feedback on the Blink Web site that we redesigned, the feedback has been good. The overall acceptance of what we did on that site is very high.”

The start of SIM
Abraham, who studied interaction design in the United Kingdom, said SIM was launched four years ago, but Abraham has been in the IT business for 12 years. He said he decided to get into the online business because activity in that area was limited, that is, up until a few years ago. He said he worked around the world, including the UK and the United States, before deciding to bring his skills and competencies back to T&T, where he thought the IT industry was not as developed. He said SIM now focuses largely on online marketing, among other things. “We focus on the equivalent of what advertising agencies do, but we do it for the online market. We provide online services, as in building large complicated Web sites, online advertising, social media management.”

Goals
Abraham said he sees “exciting times” ahead for the local IT industry because people are starting to see the value of operating online. He said despite the present problems with e-commerce, there’s a future for it in T&T. “E-commerce is starting to come of age, for one. At the end of the day, doing things, like saving people time and money and having systems that could replace the average mundane tasks of employees. We do online marketing for clients just like there is the off-line media, like the press and radio. We do the same thing, but online, and we track those things, and it really generates sales.”