• Axiata Group
• Bharti Airtel
• China Mobile and Vodafone Group
• Digicel Group
• France Telecom / Orange
• KDDI Corp and Sumitomo Corp
• Millicom International Cellular
• MTN Dubai
• Ooreedo (aka Qatar Telecom)
• Singtel, KBZ and M-Tel
• Telenor
• Viettel

That means that of the 22 who submitted a pre-qualification application (it was rumoured that over 90 were part of the pre-qualification stage) 10 were not successful.  

At the same time the Government issued its invitation to tender, which includes a draft licence. Applicants now have until 29 April to submit questions on the tender and comment on the licence. Responses will be made by 13 May and the responses to the tender are due by 3 June. Although the timetable seems ambitious, the current plan is for the winning bidders to be announced on 27 June.

     The initiatives adopted are:

The plan is certainly ambitious.

Perhaps the biggest challenge (which the plan openly acknowledges on pages 14 and 15) is Singapore’s small domestic IP market, which means that the plan can only be achieved by tapping into international markets and bringing in expertise and capability.

With concerns about importation of foreign talent and expertise very much on Singapore’s domestic political agenda it will be interesting to see how Singapore manages to balance those interests with attracting the international talent required to turn Singapore into Asia’s IP Hub.

In my view, to achieve its objectives Singapore will need to significantly liberalise its market for service providers further – for so long as patent filing and IP litigation is restricted to local firms and some practicing restrictions remain on international law firms in Singapore, Singapore will find it hard to turn aspiration into reality.

For those interested in more detail on the IP dispute proposals, @singarbitration view’s can be found here.

Myanmar’s long isolation from the international community has meant that it has lacked many of the protections available to international investors elsewhere. It is therefore very encouraging that on 7 March 2013 the Myanmar parliament agreed to sign the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of arbitral awards.  

There is an excellent blog post here for anyone looking for a detailed analysis of current protections and how this move will reinforce provisions of Myanmar’s Foreign Investment Law and the ASEAN Comprehensive Investment Agreement. However, at a very high-level once Myanmar signs the New York Convention and effectively implements appropriate provisions into Myanmar domestic law it will mean that private parties can have disputes resolved by international arbitration outside Myanmar with the award enforced in Myanmar.

Whilst speakers had run through the organisational benefits from BYOD, and it is clear from my experience that generation X and generation Z are increasingly demanding the ability to bring their smartphones and tablets to work, as any change requires the buy-in and collaboration between at least IT, legal HR and senior management many organisations were struggling to actually change in a structures where any stakeholder saying ‘no’ could stop implementation.

My message that the legal issues (whilst important and needing to be dealt with) shouldn’t stop BYOD deployment seemed to give comfort to some of the delegates I spoke to.

As is always the case with these things, two days after I had delivered the talk the UK Information Commissioner published their guidelines on BYOD. I was heartened to read that the guidance covers pretty the same ground as my talk, albeit (not unsurprisingly for regulatory guidance) with a somewhat more negative view.