Electronics giant Philips has launched Inno Hub, a test-bed facility to test and fine-tune products developed at its Philips Innovation Campus. It’s part of the US$90M Philips is investing in Singapore, to develop products under the Connected Planet programme.
Philips has also announced its participation in the Infocomm Development Authority’s “Connecting the Community” pilot project.
If the United States strangles broadband, multi-nationals could just move to Asia. Where the broadband is. Many already have. More than half of Fortune 500 firms get at least some of their software development, engineering design or routine office functions done in Bangalore, where a vast pool of educated workers and low wages have made the southern city a major hub for international outsourcing.
The average broadband customer in Europe gets 512 kbits/s; in the States, it’s an average of 1.5 Mbits/s. In Japan and South Korea, 6 Mbits/s is not unusual. For about $20.
With 100 million game consoles worldwide about 73 million PlayStations, 16 million Xboxes and 14 million GameCubes “we now have what we’ve never had in gaming history,” says Technology Research analyst P.J. McNealy. A license to print money.
Consider these broadband hubs:
- The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore is creating a “Games Bazaar” to offer game companies hosting services and bandwidth for their online titles. It hopes will entice publishers to consider Singapore as a hub.
The government of Singapore is getting into the video game business and they hope to establish Singapore as the first Asia-Pacific node within the Global Operational Grid.
This initiative is undertaken by HP and National Grid Office (NGO). The Adaptive Enterprise@Singapore, with partner Hewlett Packard, is a projected S$22 million strategic collaboration designed to enable enterprises to benefit from grid and utility technologies. The Global Operational Grid is being built by a worldwide consortium of partners, including e-Science in the United Kingdom, Tera-Grid in the US, CERN and HP.
According to IDC, the Asian online games market could hit US$1 billion by 2006.
Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority is similar to India’s Bangalore International Tech Park, Korea’s Incheon or Hong Kong’s Cyberport (above).
- Bangalore is getting competition from Southern India’s Kerala state which plans a 1,000-acre “Smart City“, designed to attract software developers and call centers two of the Indian economy’s fastest growing sectors. It will be created and managed by Dubai’s Internet City. It is being built with an initial investment of US$400 million and offers foreign companies 100 percent tax-free ownership, no currency restrictions, easy registration and licensing and protection of intellectual property.
- Korea’s ambition to become a Northeast Asian hub gained momentum as three districts of the western port city of Incheon were designated as a “free economic zone”. Incheon, formerly an estuary harbor near Seoul, will play a critical role as a Northest Asia hub.
South Korea, a country of 48 million people, is the world leader in multi-user online games, helped by tens of thousands of PC salons where people can get affordable high-speed Internet access. About 65 percent of households have broadband. KT serves about half of them. KT Corp. competes with Hanaro Telecom and Korea Thrunet for high speed access.
- Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) is a hi-tech incubator for information, communication and technology. The highly successful program is being followed by other countries, especially emerging countries, said corporate vice president, Mobile and Embedded Devices Division of Microsoft Corporation, Ya-Qin Zhang. “MSC is really the focal point, and its success is beginning to travel to other regions”, he said.
- The Hong Kong Government has spent $2bn, developing Cyberport - the newest “teleport” on the planet. Cyberport has taken four years to build and comes complete with a hi-tech hotel, apartments, shops and services.
Perhaps the United States should do what what Asian countries do — create an International zone.
Japanese VDSL modems connect to fibre optics cable. It delivers 100Mbit/s down and 70Mbit/s upstream for about $28/month. What side of the Pacific do you choose if you’re in business?
The Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) is a National Institutes of Health initiative involves a consortium of 15 universities and 22 research groups that participate in distributed collaborations in biomedical science centered around brain imaging of human neurological disorders and associated animal models. The development of the National LambdaRail (video), Lambda Light Switch and the Opticomputer make it a reality. Here’s a riveting one hour lecture by Larry Smarr.
Related DailyWireless stories include; Gollum Blows Hollywood, Transnational Media Production, Outsourcing US, Sony’s Cell Comes Alive, Grid Becomes Self-Aware, Creating an International Zone, West Coast Grid, Unreal Games, XBoxLive: 1M subs by June?, X-Box + IBM Chips, Playstation2 Goes Grid, Telepresence Now!, Grid Conference, GIG-BE, Multi-Player Frontier, and Korean Gaming.
