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Places Where the World's Tech Pools, Despite the Internet
Slatterz writes "A decade ago people were talking about the death of distance, and how the internet would make physical geography irrelevant. This has not come to pass; there are still places around the world that are hubs of technology just as there are for air travel, product manufacturing or natural resource exploitation. This list of the ten best IT centres of excellence includes some interesting trivia about Station X during the Second World War, why Romania is teeming with software developers, Silicon Valley, Fort Meade Maryland, and Zhongguancun in China, where Microsoft is building its Chinese headquarters."
Do these pools drain into the series of tubes that makes up the internet?
All of the VA/MD area around Washington is a big center for computers/IT. NIST is in Gaithersburg, MD and DARPA in Virginia Square, VA, as well as several universities (e.g., UMD, JHU) that are doing interesting research in human language technology - a big area of interest for the military and intelligence communities. Lots of major corporations have facilities in the area, too - IBM, SRI, and BBN to name a few.
And they all happen to be male.
The list:
10. Boston
9. Romania
8. Fort Meade, Maryland
7. Finland
6. Zhongguancun, China
5. San Fransisco
4. Japan
3. Bangalore
2. Taiwan
1. Silicon Valley
I see lots of other places around the world where folks insist on segregating themselves by ethnicity and/or religion.
Yeah, I can't think of any fanatic groups of people who cling to various beliefs like so many religions, segregating themselves from others.
Excuse me while I go sacrifice a goat to Larry Wall.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Richard Florida (an economics prof.) wondered why his home town didn't keep the geeks that graduated from his school. They would graduate and then move elsewhere. Hi-tech companies couldn't get employees in spite of the fact that they graduated within five miles of the company.
What Florida discovered was that geeks want to live in certain places and not others. He wrote lots of papers and finally produced a popular book, 'The Rise of the Creative Class'.
He pointed out how Silicon Valley was able to flourish in spite of the fact that Boston was established in the hi-tech game. In Boston, employers can block employees from taking their knowledge to competing companies. In California, they can't.
Lots of things determine whether geeks will gather in a particular place. The place I would look for the next hi-tech paradise is southern Ontario. It has all the characteristics Florida found that attract geeks and hi-tech companies.
The internet concentrated the jobs instead of spreading them out. Now if you're not geographically in Silicon Valley, your job can be done in Taiwan, so all the job seekers come to Silicon Valley. In the old days, you could have gotten a job in Nebraska. Not anymore. No-one even knows what Nebraska is anymore.
This list is just silly. I mean Japan?! Come on. Japan is the size of the entire east coast of the US. How much sense would it make to put "The entire east coast" as one of the top 10 "places" where Tech is pooling. None. This list is nonsense.
Lots of places would like to be a high-tech hub.
High tech is prestigious, brings high-paying jobs, has good health and safety and low (local) environmental impact.
Lots of places build out infrastructure (roads, office parks, networks, schools, housing) hoping to become a high-tech hub.
Some of these places succeed, some fail.
It turns out (can't recall the source, sorry) that one of the best predictors of where you will actually get a high-tech hub is the size of the local homosexual community.
Why?
Geeks and gays are both seeking the same kind of social tolerance.
So, I guess Cisco, IBM, GlaxoSmithKline, Bayer, Sony Ericson, NIH, EPA, NetApp, EMC, Red Hat and others don't count? And don't forget, as I've mentioned before, the Sanrio store...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
Silicon Valley is special to me because of its cultural diversity. In one medium sized company you can work shoulder to shoulder with people from every major world ethnic group and every major world religion (including no religion). They work together, peacefully, to make better lives for themselves and their children. Look around the rest of the world. This place is unique and special. I see lots of other places around the world where folks insist on segregating themselves by ethnicity and/or religion. They must hate my home, Silicon Valley. Peace.
Hate to break it to you, but this happens in most of the United States. In my experience, a lot of the people in California just think they are special.
I used to live in California. They may not discriminate on ethnicity or religion, but go visit the Bay Area with an NRA teeshirt and a rifle to hunt some deer and see how nice everyone is to you.
One of the big reasons high-tech has been so successful in California is the provision in the California Labor Code that prohibits employers from owning what you do on your own time. No employment contract in California can override that. So you can do a startup while still employed.
Employers hate this, but it's one of the big reasons for Silicon Valley's success. It also boosts innovation in aerospace and Hollywood, both major California industries.
Others note the relatively cheap real estate
Silicon Valley and “cheap real estate”? Compared to what? The moon? San Francisco?
Have a nice time.
Probably directly proportional to how nice you are to animals. In some places, they don't like it when you shoot animals for fun.
Thank you for proving my point.
I actually don't hunt myself, but I am of the opinion that animals need to die for humans to live and I would have no problem killing something that I needed to eat. If someone actually wants to go through with all the BS it takes to hunt nowdays (hunting permit/draw, gun permit, learning to shoot reliably under pressure, finding the animal, skinning the animal and packing it out), more power to them. It's a little piece of history that most of us don't appreciate about when we are in a hurry to buy our chicken and cow meat in the supermarket, on the way home to watch Survivor or get on the internet.
People were meant to kill animals and plants to eat them and use them as resources to live. Much in the same way that animals kill each other for life to continue. The key is to do it responsibly, like the other animals do.
Sometimes, humans even need to die for other humans to live.
Welcome to the real world, it's a messy place.
I'll tell you why Pittsburgh isn't listed. Once you graduate CMU, you leave. If Pittsburgh could hold on to the CMU graduates, they'd have something, but they can't, so they don't.
Paul Graham talked about this very thing, including citing the problems of Pittsburgh-CMU conundrum. He posits that it's the lack of venture capital (or "rich people" as he put it) in Pittsburgh, but I suspect (as he seems to) that there's something more missing.