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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.
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!
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.
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.