Minister wants Singapore to build a ‘national operating system’ for 100m smart devices

Minister Vivian Balakrishnan (right).

Vivian Balakrishnan, Singapore’s foreign minister and the minister-in-charge of Smart Nation, has always been at the forefront of technology: visiting Silicon Valley with the Prime Minister, making trips to Israel, and attending tech events here and abroad.

So at InnovFest unBound, a technology conference in Singapore sanctioned by the government, he said something interesting. “I want IDA to create a national operating system for 100 million smart objects. Stop to think about it. 100 million smart objects, just in Singapore,” he said on stage.

IDA, of course, is the Infocomm Development Agency of Singapore, which is the government agency in charge of making the country a tech utopia. At first glance, the national operating system he speaks of could be referring to the Smart Nation Operating System (SN-OS), although an IDA spokesperson told Tech in Asia that the minister wasn’t referring to the SN-OS, but was speaking in general terms.

Given that Smart Nation is still in its infancy, it might take time before plans become crystallized. Nonetheless, regardless of how the plans take shape, the government hopes to build a platform that’ll parse and make sense of the data from the multitudes of sensors around the island. The insights will then be sent to various government agencies to help them craft policy and make decisions.

What’s new here are the details the minister shared about this proposed operating system, which IDA told me is to be taken in purely aspirational terms – an ideal to try and achieve – and not as fact.

The minister wants this OS to have a capacity for 100 million objects, which sounds like a lot. And it should be built within five years. The minister hopes it’ll be an open platform, which means the private sector maybe able to contribute data or take advantage of it, perhaps via some sort of API.

With so many objects slated to be connected, one wonders if 100 million is enough. I guess that’s just the start.

Let’s make sense of this. Singapore has about 5 million people, and a 150 percent mobile phone penetration rate. So assuming there are between 5 to 7 million smartphones lying around, that’s still a small percentage of the 100 million figure.

The other objects he’s referring to? They could be smart cars, smart street lighting, CCTV cameras, motion sensors, maybe even the fancy satellite-based electronic road pricing system that’ll cost the government US$400 million to build.

With so many objects slated to be connected, one wonders if 100 million is enough. I guess that’s just the start.

So, if all goes according to plan, we’ll see a nationwide nervous system that’ll send signals to the brain – which is the Singapore government. Who knows, the private sector may be able to use it for their own ends.

The government promises that the data will be anonymised, although it’ll need to balance that with the urge to protect against terrorism and crime using its wide array of sensors.

It’s not clear what safeguards will be put in place to prevent government agencies from overstepping its boundaries, or to prevent criminals from abusing the data for their own ends.