By Lain Thomson & Shaun Nichols
Why Z-Park in China where Microsoft is building its Chinese headquarters? Why Romania is teeming with software developers? The information technology revolution has rushed the globe but there are still some areas that are more IT friendly than most. There are some places around the world that are hubs of technology just as there are for air travel, product manufacturing or natural resource exploitation.
1. Silicon Valley
No doubt, Silicon Valley is the capital of the IT world, the stretch of land encompassing San Jose and San Mateo County has become home to so many companies that it is now simply referred to as ‘Silicon Valley’. The list of companies headquartered in the Valley is HP, Sun, Oracle, Apple, Cisco, Google, Yahoo, Intel, McAfee, Symantec, AMD, eBay, etc. and the list just continue to be rich.
The history of Silicon Valley reads much like the history of computing itself. From the garage where Hewlett and Packard first joined up, to the house where two guys named Steven started building computer kits named after a piece of fruit, to the fabled labs at Xerox PARC and even the dormitories at Stanford University that housed the likes of Jerry Yang and Sergey Brin, the area is crawling with high-tech historical landmarks.
There are numerous reasons to put forward for the growth of Silicon Valley. Some point to the proximity of Stanford and UC Berkeley, which combine with the Livermore and Ames research labs to chum out a river of engineering and programming talent. Others note the relatively cheap real estate and liberal Northern California culture with helping to foster ambitious startups and crazy ideas. Regardless of the reason, there’s pretty much no debate as to what the world’s top technology hot spot is.
2. Taiwan
The small, crowded island off the coast of China has become nearly synonymous with high-tech. In a region that is rich with big names in consumer technology, enterprise technology and semiconductors, Taiwan has been established as a centre for all three. Taiwan has been established as a center for consumer technology, enterprise technology and semiconductors with big names, for example, like Asus, Acer, TSMC etc.
Arguably, no other country or region in the world is as dependent on the IT industry for its economic well-being. This became even more apparent when the government of Taiwan stepped in to prop up the country’s ailing DRAM memory chip businesses.
Taiwan produces around 80 per cent of the world’s laptops and a significant proportion of other computer components. The country is a mainstay of the IT industry, which is both a good and bad thing. One good thing is Taiwan has enabled the country to grow its economy at high rates for nearly three decades and the bed thing is the pollution’s terrible and one day China is going to take the place over and then we’ll all be in trouble.
3. Bangalore
Bangalore has been an important city in India for centuries but over the last 25 years it has built up an IT industry that has given it a new name of the Indian Silicon Valley.
The city accounts for more than a third of all IT jobs in the country and is home to some of the biggest names in worldwide technology. It has also spawned local start-ups that are now so successful that they are buying up the IT infrastructure of bankrupted Western companies. The city’s IT business is proof of the value of targeted government and business development plans. Clusters of firms set up for business in ‘clusters’, like Electronics City and Whitefield, and students are encouraged to train in IT to provide a workforce. But it’s not just IT workers who have benefited. The growth in the IT industry employs millions directly and indirectly and has helped the Indian economy by bringing in billions in revenue. Maybe in the years to come Bangalore billionaires will lie by their pools and talk about the good old days, as happens today in California.
4. Japan
A walk through the streets of Tokyo, Osaka or Yokohama and you’ll see shops stuffed to the gills with every gadget you can imagine and a few you can’t. It’s geek heaven and any technology enthusiast paying a visit must exercise considerable restrain or face angry calls from the bank manager.
Japan leads the world in robotics, green technology, intelligent software and consumer electronics. Not only is the consumer electronics industry much bigger in Japan, it is also far more advanced in a number of areas such as gaming consoles and smartphones. Take the iPhone, for example: when consumers in Europe and North America were queuing up to get their hands on the device and raving over all of its features, analysts were worried that the Apple phone would be too ” primitive” and short on features to really make a dent in the Japanese market.
5. San Francisco
San Francisco should be considered a separate region from Silicon Valley because the differences between the two areas, especially in recent years.
On the surface, it seems like San Francisco is sort of the mouthpiece for Silicon Valley; a place where the reporters and PR staff are kept so that they don’t bother the engineers down in Palo Alto and Cupertino. In reality, San Francisco has a technology sector all its own, one which blossomed with the rise of the “Web 2.0″ era. Because an internet-based service doesn’t require a large lab or factory space, startups were able to move from garages to small offices and apartments.
Today, companies such as Salesforce.com and Craigslist maintain their headquarters in San Francisco, while web sites such as Twitter have taken up residence in the trendy South of Market neighbourhood and made the former warehouse district the new hot place to find a start-up.
Silicon Valley is where you go to start up a business that needs lots of space to grow. San Francisco is where you come if you’re a small services startup with low headcount that wants somewhere with good coffee and the best sushi this side of the Pacific.
6. Z-Park (Zhong Guan Cun Science Park), Beijing, China
A Chinese man, called Chen Chunxian, who was invited to visit the US on a cultural exchange in the late 1970s relations between China and the US were on the up. During his visit he saw Silicon Valley and was so impressed he decided to do something similar at home.
The result is Z-Park, a city that has only existed for half a century but is already the hub of China’s IT industry. Z-Park, or to give it its proper name “Beijing High-Technology Industry Development Experimental Zone,” is built around seven technology hubs and is home to companies like Lenovo and Baidu as well as Western imports. Microsoft is building its Chinese headquarters there for example.
Anyone who thinks China is still a communist country is kidding themselves. Sure, the leadership can reminisce about the Long March but China’s youth are more capitalist than anyone else on the planet and they are very, very good at it. As we move from the American century to the Chinese one Z-Park is a sign of things to come.
This has improved in recent years, with the Chinese government agreeing to step up enforcement of laws against copyright violation, but it is still something that has in the past and could in the future sour many technology firms from jumping wholeheartedly into China.
7. Finland
Probably, the weather may be terrible and the food not much better, but Finland has still carved out a niche as one of the better places to be a geek. It’s the home to one of the kings of all geekdom, Mr. Linus Torvalds. The Linux creator shares a homeland with mobile phone titan Nokia and aptly-named security software vendor F-Secure. Nevertheless Finland has proven a generator of IT innovation that far outweighs its population or size. Part of this is due to the fact that education is largely free there, so the populace is highly skilled and technically very switched on.
8. Fort Meade, Maryland
Maryland contains the headquarters of the top guns of IT – the National Security Agency (NSA). The NSA is the computer and intelligence arm of the US military and routinely scoops the best and the brightest to work within its organization. It has been responsible for intelligence gathering since the early 1950s but the computing era has seen it expand exponentially, to the extent that it is now around four times as large as the CIA.
The NSA is also better than Santa, in that it really can tell if you’ve been bad or good. It’s the US hub of the ECHELON intelligence gathering system, which can monitor pretty much any phone call, fax or email on the planet, something that causes concern elsewhere in the world and is a boon to writers of popular fiction.
It also helps to develop encryption standards such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) that are used by all of us. It also funds academic research, although this has caused some problems as it occasionally asks some researchers to bury their results if they stumble across something potentially disruptive.
9. Romania
Why Romania has more case than other Eastern Europe countries? An executive from a Romanian security firm talk about programmers in Romania, he said that much of it dates back to the country’s days within the Soviet Bloc. Under the Ceausescu regime, college students were basically forced to choose between majoring in computer science or finance. Furthermore, trade embargoes forced the country to develop much of its own technology. The result was a generation of savvy programmers seasoned in writing and working with large, complex programs.
Of course, this hasn’t entirely been a good thing for the world. A glut of programming talent makes fertile ground for cybercrime, particularly in a region still struggling to emerge economically from the ruins of communist rule. As such, Romania has also built up a reputation as a hotspot for malware writers and other online criminals.
Even that, however, has brought some good. With the talented hackers have come some very smart security researchers. Romanian developers have often taken the forefront in such things as heuristics and vulnerability detection.
Romania is a perfect storm of malware. It has lots of good coders, a fairly well wired society and local corruption, which allows malware kingpins to live in peace. You can’t expect a local police chief to enforce the law when he’s being paid fifty times his government salary to look the other way.
10. Boston
Boston may be the home to tea-throwing revolutionaries but it also contains Cambridge, home to both Harvard and MIT. The Cambridge area has educated and inspired some of the finest minds in IT, including the founders of Intel, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, 3Com and Qualcomm. Harvard and MIT are both at the pinnacle of educational excellence and it shows in the alumni. Once at college the minds of students can be enriched by some of the best educators on the planet and it’s no surprise that scarily a year goes by without a Harvard or MIT alumni getting a Nobel Prize.
Honourable mention – Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park, or Station X as it was known in the Second World War, gets a mention because it’s where it all began. It was the birthplace of computer encryption technologies, location to one of the earliest programmable computers and was the home to the great Alan Turing, a pivotal figure in the development of computer software.
Even to us folks over here in the colonies, the facility holds a special place due to the awesome amount of technological achievement that it generated in such a short amount of time. Not only were many technologies we see today pioneered at the facility, but its work during World War II is credited with saving tens of thousands of lives.
The computing industry is by its nature very quick to move forward and discard the seemingly “obsolete” things. This is what makes Bletchley Park so special, it is one of the few truly historical IT locations. Though there may not be any billion-dollar companies or commercially successful devices emerging from within its walls, Bletchley Park definitely deserves to be named as a computing hotspot.
Honourable mention- Seattle
The emerald city gets relegated to an honourable mention because really, only one name springs to mind when you think of technology in the Seattle area; Microsoft. Granted, Microsoft is the biggest name in the technology business and its own campus in Redmond employs a city’s worth of people, but the company’s dominance of the city keeps Seattle out of the top ten.
That said Microsoft’s presence has also created a small ecosystem of analysts and partner developers in the Seattle area. And the contributions Starbuck’s has made to the lives of developers and IT workers around the world might just make them an honorary technology company.
Back when Microsoft was just a small company they got the contract to produce the operating system for IBM’s new PC buy buying an operating system called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from a small firm in the city. The rest is, as they say, history.
Maybe it’s the constant rain that keeps people indoors and coding, or the coffee fetish in the city (want to feel like a freak in Seattle? Ask for tea) but the city deserves its spot on the list.
Tags: IT, offshore, outsourcing, software