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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.
Is that millibits? Man, and I thought 300bps was slow.
Why go there just for the bandwidth, when they can locate their factory in mainland China and enjoy the benefits of genuine slave labor.
Services too are being outsorced to Asia. Naturally research dollars will follow. This can only be bad for American students.
Toyota, in just decades is at the fore-front of the car industry already. This is a company that made a car 40 years after Ford and GM. Contrast that with GM, the alleged giggest car producer. You will go to every continent and find Toyota in good numbers, but not for GM. Now, Ford has been replaced by Toyota. GM will be next.
Having lived in a number of Asian countries, I can attest to the fact that Asians are simply driven to succeed. They will pirate/copy and do anything to get to where they have to. Sometimes, their respective governments support them.
Pretty soon, the Asian block will be in position to threaten "economic sanctions" on the US. After all, even the flu-shot vaccine will soon be Asian made.
My beloved country USA will be left with rhetoric as the only means to apply influence arround the world.
Open source will not help us that much because already, M$'s influence is already on the decline at least in Asia.
Where is America's edge left?
Cyberport is a MASSIVE waste of government money and worse still was just a large luxury building contract HANDED OVER to everyone's favourite Hong Kong cartel.
Anyone from Hong Kong reading this report is currently laughing their ass off at the idea that this is somehow indicative of Hong Kong 'racing ahead'. Cyberport was nothing more or less than a gigantic gift to Li Ka Shing's estate (via his son the ever popular Richard Li).
I bet you guys think our partially state-owned Disney land is a good idea too. Seriously, if you like this stuff you can have Chief Executive Tung Che Hwa. Please, take him!
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
help a poor college grad get a free Mac Mini
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.
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.
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.
>There is a distinct qualitative difference between duplicating digital content for your own private use/entertainment and duplicating IP to create goods and services to sell.
Agreed. One is a bunch of greedy individuals leeching off of the work of others for their own benefit and the other is bunch of greedy corporations leeching off of the work of others for their own benefit.
<FX: drum fill> Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.
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.
...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...
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
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