The 19th International Exhibition of Computers and Office Machinery and the seventh edition of the fair on smart cities, known as Irancom 95, opened on Friday evening in the holy city of Mashhad in northeast Iran.
Irancom is focused on e-governance, electronic education, smart schools, e-commerce and a range of web services such as design, analysis, hosting and administrator management as well as hardware and computer networks, ISNA reported.
The exhibition, which will run until September 6, is hosting 116 local and six foreign firms. Foreign exhibitors come from Germany, China, Lithuania, Australia and Thailand.
Speaking at the opening ceremony, Amir Hossein Davaei, Telecoms Ministry’s deputy for technology and innovation, stressed the importance of developing local messaging applications.
“The private sector should play a central role in creating such networks. Knowledge-based firms should draw on the experience of international firms so as to prepare the ground for providing services to tens of millions of users,” he said.
“We intend to involve the younger generations in this process and focus on localization of the computer systems and networks.”
Davaei noted that local-made messaging apps should be able to compete with foreign competitors in terms of speed and quality.
“Only if these conditions are met can people trust the local apps and use them instead of foreign ones,” he said.
Chaired by President Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s High Council of Cyberspace in May gave popular online messaging networks a year to move their servers to Iran.
Foreign messaging applications that are in high demand in the country will have to do all data storage and activities related to domestic users in Iran, IT IRAN reported.
Although the council did not name the services, the ruling will most probably affect the most popular ones: German-based Telegram and US-developed Facebook-owned WhatsApp messenger.
Touching on this issue, Davaei said, “We do not intend to have Telegram move its servers to Iran.”
He stressed that such measures will undoubtedly be ineffective, adding that more effort should instead be put in local management of servers.
Addressing the same event, Hussein Hajj Hassan, a Lebanese politician, said mutual cooperation should help expand cooperation between the two nations.
“We have attended this exhibition to help remove existing trade obstacles,” he said.
Hajj Hassan added that information technology is an extremely important area in Lebanon and “we are ready to expand our ties with Iran in this realm.”
