Thursday, Nov. 4 —
The Internet is beginning to bloom in a big way here, but everything is relative. Hong Kong reminds me of New York and San Francisco three or four years ago, when it was obvious the Net was going to change things and smart people began to figure out how they could get a piece of the action.
I stopped by the Internet World Asia trade show. It’s a junior — very junior — version of the increasingly behemoth Internet World shows in the United States.
The exhibits fill a relatively small hall on the seventh level of the Hong Kong Convention Center, but the panel sessions are well attended. A sign of the Asian times: Another journalist tells me it was standing room only at the session on Internet stock valuations.
Intel had a huge booth, relatively speaking. Some of the computers in the booth showed the Chinese language, but otherwise the booth was pure English. That was a great demonstration of two things: economic imperialism and the reality that, so far, English is the most common tongue in technology.
What Silicon Valley Thinks of Asia
Thursday, Nov. 4 —
That’s one of the topics of my talk tomorrow at the Foreign Correspondents Club. I’m still working on this speech, but I’ll certainly be noting some ironies in that overly broad notion.
First, Asia is many places — Japan, Singapore, India, China and all the others. Of course, China is many places, too — Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland (which is also many places). Second, depending on who you are and where you are, Asia is a supplier, marketplace or competitor, often several of those.
This gets granular pretty quickly.
I also have to talk about how Silicon Valley looks from the inside. That’s easier, though I suspect there are only about three people who genuinely understand the place. And they’re not talking.