Hong Kong 2nd in Cloud Readiness in Asia in front of Singapore?

Singapore government heavy handed approach is definitely working in propelling Singapore as a leading destination for various enterprises to setup their data center. Who's in Singapore? A quick search on data center knowledge paint a fairly evident picture. Some brand name companies are IBM, Adobe, Amazon, OpenDNS, Salesforce.

I am glad to see Hong Kong government is trying to do the same. While visiting HKTDC's ICT Expo, I attended the "Canada - HK Innovation and Technology Partnering Forum". This is where it was first brought to my attention the Hong Kong government is finally trying to do something about the data center industry.

Few months later, HK SAR government launches their website dedicated to attract data center operators.

Recently, I came across this article on Computer World, which talks about Cloud Readiness in Asia.  According to the "Asia Cloud Computer Association", in their whitepaper on Cloud Readiness, Hong Kong rank 2nd in the cloud readiness index, behind Japan and ahead of Singapore.

Hong Kong may rank higher in the cloud readiness survey, but I don't believe this is a true reflection of how the industry is shaping up to be. A simple search in Data Center Knowledge website and you will see all high-end cloud companies setting up shops in Singapore: Amazon, Salesforce, Adobe, etc. Whereas in Hong Kong, you only get companies from the lower-end of the spectrum, which are really just co-location companies such as NTT, Equinix, Rackspace. Why is this important? Because I believe it represent a greater commitment by companies to build a cloud service offering such as AWS, Salesforce, Omniture platforms then companies offering rental spaces for servers, which is what co-location really is. The former will require a more sophisticated workforce hence creating better job opportunities for the area.

Hong Kong may be "winning" in this so call "Cloud Readiness", but sophisticated cloud companies are choosing Singapore over Hong Kong.

GitHub: Distributed Social Development

I read quite a bit about GitHub and all the buzz around it, but it was only recently did I get to experience it. I was using the Java Wrapper Library for createsend for a web application which I am working on. I encounter the classloader issue which another user has observed. I quickly forked the createsend-java repository, fixed it, push it back to Git-hub and issue a pull request!

The next day, tobio, the maintainer of the main repository pull in the changes, and it is in the official branch. No more emailing around. Doing crazy diff commands to create patch. Emailing your patch to the maintainer, and hoping he has time to check and merge in the changes.

Bottom line, GitHub has removed a lot of friction in open source software development.

Is this a new beginning to software development?

Is this enough? I am not sure. In the blog entry "The Drupal Crisis", the author made some observation in the development of Drupal and how he thinks it is not working. If you read the hacker news comments on the article, one of the most contraversal statement is:

Without any doubt, it's merely an economical truth that free contributions and commercial enterprise interests are mainly incompatible, and of course, everyone needs to decide on their own on how to use and invest their resources.

I more or less agree with the above statement. After all, economical force is what drives a lot of activities in today's world.