Hong Kong's High-Tech Technology Incubator

Austin Huggins writes "The BBC is reporting on a new hi-tech complex built in Hong Kong to attract tech businesses. 'It has taken four years to build and comes complete with a hi-tech hotel, apartments, shops and services.' And they have a 100 mbs network to boot." As the article points out, Hong Kong has a suddenly harder time keeping ahead of booming cities in mainland China.

Comments

Re:100Mbit..

[Avial]

their internal network is 10Gbps, with a 1Gbps external connection according to this page: http://www.cyberport.com.hk/userdata_hkcmcl/ITT_En glish/ipn.html

Re:All the digital content you can eat

[xstein]

Credentials first: I work at Cyberport in Hong Kong.

The idea behind this complex isn't purely the technological benefits, such as bandwidth, etc, but the fact that all of our tech companies are housed in one complex.

Hong Kong is a fairly large city, and when you throw into the mix the fact that many firms are now moving their offices further north to Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Shanghai, Cyberport offers a definte advantage in terms of helping consolidate the various tech and tech-related firms. Using the cited example, creators of digital content are given an incentive to house their operations at Cyberport as they can have all required outside work done by firms within 3 minutes walk of their offices--whilst I'm not familiar with digital content creation, I'd imagine they have things like packaging done out of house.

This is essentially taking the Silicon Valley concept one step further in that all firms are literally in the same building. The hotels help accomodate to multinational companies that have foreign executives come in for meetings and to house guests for seminars.

It's already the end of high-tech in Hong Kong.

[HungWeiLo]

I just learned that the University of Hong Kong, the largest university in Hong Kong, has just closed its electrical engineering department due to lack of funding and enrollment. However, the Chinese University of Hong Kong still maintains its EE department.

There's no way Hong Kong can catch up technologically with mainland China now, not without heavy academic research in new arenas of technology.

We have places like that. And they're vacant.

[Animats]

Here in Silicon Valley, we have lots of office space with similar facilities. Available now, at low, low rents. Try $0.90/square foot for class A R&D space. The Excite@Home facility is still completely vacant. The area near Moffett Field, where SGI used to be and Google is now, has acres of vacant buildings.

The huge new 150,000 square meter Pacific Shores Center complex still has entire buildings vacant, and it's filling up. EA and Dreamworks moved in. Shrek 2 was made there. Health club, Olympic size swimming pool, public hiking trails, baseball field, soccer field, ampitheater, cafe, day spa, and an incredible view of the San Francisco bay. Ample parking. Gigabits of bandwidth.

Pacific Shores alone is one and a half times the size of Hong Kong's "Cyberport."

So there.

Reminds me of a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

If Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa, Chief Secretary Donald Tsang and Financial Secretary Henry Tang were in a boat and it turned over, who would be saved?

Answer: The Hong Kong people

There's been alot of coverage of the huge number of protests against the current government and it's economic policy, and the undemocratic process in which the Chief Secretary is chosen (basically a 400 man group hand-picked by Beijing chooses it for us). The Cyberport, with it's lack of transparency on the bidding process, was a hugely controversial project which did not strengthen the support of the current government at all, and it's still to be seen it's effect on boosting the economy.

tech? in hk?

[sewagemaster]

hong kong is known as a one of the major financial capital in asia. parents raise their kids to be businessmen. almost all of them value success as in making tons of money that they'll never even get to spend. being encouraged to study in degrees of electrical engineering or computer science is very rare. lot of people on /. agree that people got into tech only because of the pre-bubble times, not because of their interest in the subject. well in hk, all you get are the bandwagon types. not making this up. i spent 10 yrs of my life there.

it's not the educational system because math and science cirriculum is far more advance and fast paced than in canada and the US, so it's not the fault of highschool programs not preparing the kids well enough to pursue their careers in that direction.

cyberport is mostly for IT (damn i hate that term) - and the buildings were only built for the "looks". honestly, if i want to build a startup there, let's say a fabless semiconductor company, do i really need the 100 megabits a second network? we need the CAD licenses, engineers with experience and fresh grads in EE - which are tough to get there because hong kong university recently shut down their EE department...

another thing, people in hk always have the misconception that they are more advance in tech than north americans. all they see is that they have more variety of advance products to choose from, but it's not them that do any of the in-house design.

all said, it's good to know that there are still people that would invest (or throw away money) for the ...um IT industry. at least after i finish my masters in electrical engineering here in canada, i'll have something to fall back on, knowing that i speak the language there...