Hong Kong's High-Tech Technology Incubator 172
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.
Re:100Mbit.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:All the digital content you can eat (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Blade Runner (Score:2, Informative)
Looks like Asia and should be able to compete without the billion dollar 4 year price with faster networking to boot!
Hong Kong: great place to work and live (Score:3, Informative)
It's already the end of high-tech in Hong Kong. (Score:4, Informative)
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. (Score:5, Informative)
The huge new 150,000 square meter Pacific Shores Center [pacificshorescenter.com] 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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Why not Cyberjaya, Malaysia? (Score:1, Informative)
Why not Cyberjaya instead?
For those who don't know, Cyberjaya has turned out to be little more than a joke. It was launched by Mahathir in 1995, and now, almost 10 years later, there's little more than one giant country road with barely a dozen buildings scattered about.
Mahathir thought he can build a success with bare plantation land and big words. Not so. Very little of his big words and grand plans have materialized, to the point of being embarrassing since the project was touted as being 'world class'. It's a world class mismanaged white elephant, all right.
The 'high tech industry' in Cyberjaya is mostly call centres or ordinary offices. Much of the construction is substandard, especially the housing units in the area. The largest bunch of people are students of the Multimedia University. There is very little of anything else.
It still might become something in the far future, but that's not how it was portrayed. Their world class cyber thing has turned mostly into an embarrassingly ordinary college level campus area. And a very remote and empty one at that.
tech? in hk? (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:What the hell is wrong with BBC/Slashdot? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why Hong Kong (Score:2, Informative)
Hong Kong is still a beautiful showcase of unregulated capitalism. Hong Kong still has the most free market in the world. Not only are there no signs of this changing, but we're legally prohibited from doing so in the next 42 years.
Being Beijing's little brother isn't exactly the worst thing to be. We serve as a port to Greater China, and don't have to worry about silly things like defense budgets.