Sunday, 11 October 2009 08:05

Dapat Vista CEO Aziz Arshad with Royal Malaysian Police Superintendent Alwee A Ghani receive the Prime Minister's Best of the Best award at APICTA 2009
Dapat Vista won the Prime Minister's “Best of the Best” Award, the top award at the MSC Malaysia Asia Pacific ICT Alliance (APICTA) 2009 awards at the Putra World Trade on the evening of 8 October, for its Rakancop (Friends of the Police) SMS e-community.
That same day, Dapat Vista also won the award in the the Best of e-Inclusion and e-Community category for Rakancop.
The “Best of the Best” award was received jointly by Dapat Vista chief executive officer Aziz Arshad and Royal Malaysian Police assistant director of operations, Superintendent Alwee A Ghani, since Rakancop is operated in partnership with the police to encourage the public to collaborate with the police to fight crime together.
All the public need do is to register with Rakancop by sending an SMS message from their phone with the message “RC <state> DAFTAR <nickname>” and send it to 32728 and the sender will receive the Rakancop code via SMS. “We don't want to know the member's real name,” said Sup. Alwee.
Thereafter, they can submit alerts of suspicious activities, accidents, traffic jams or other problems to the police, which will direct a patrol car to the scene within 15 minutes or even faster in some cases as Sup. Alwee claimed.

Aziz Arshad and Sup. Alwee A Ghani
“In one instance, a family from outstation got lost whilst looking for the National Heart Institute and sought our help via Rakancop and a police car arrived to escort them to the institute,” said Sup. Alwee.
Rather surprisingly, despite being known only be their nickname, Rakancop receives less than 0.1% of crank SMS from the public. “Even then, rather than false reports, they messages are trivial, such as - it's going to rain,” said Sup. Alwee.
The police on average have received 1.2 million Rakancop notifications per year over since Rakancop began in 2004.
Rakancop is operated for the police by Dapat Vista, though all identities are known only to the police. The police do not pay for the service, whilst Dapat Vista earns revenue share from SMS charges with the respective mobile operator.
Dapat Vista also operates the help desk handling enquiries and complaints with the Rakancop system.
More information about Rakancop is available at www.rakancop.net