Thought Garage

 

"Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping Their Futures   and Yours" Removing half a billion people from poverty and into the productive workforce will profoundly affect on the world economy. India and China are doing just that with insane growth rates and lots of what used to be American jobs: China is the factory floor and India the back-office, software shop. China is top-down party driven. India is a messy, vibrant democracy

Remember Cisco’s code appearing in Huawei’s software without any modifications?

As per a WSJ report the famous Chinese Web Filter program appears to have been lifted off from CyberSitter, an application developed by Solid Oak Software in California.

The Chinese application contains

• Old new bulletin promoting CyberSitter
• list of terms to be blocked
• CyberSitter serial numbers and
• an update that makes the software compatible with older version of CyberSitter

Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co.,  the Chinese company that made the filtering software, denied stealing anything. "That’s impossible," said Bryan Zhang.  Mr. Zhang insisted that the software is his company’s. "How is it possible that my coding is exactly the same as theirs?" he said. "This is unfair to me. Everyone is taking my software apart now. This is illegal … I can’t answer any more of these pointless questions."

- WSJ News Article

As per a Feb 2009 Report, “The Atlantic Century : Benchmarking EU & U.S. Innovation and Competitiveness”  from The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), China stands at 33 with 36.0 points while India finishes the last in the list of 40 countries in the world with 21.6 points.

What is the basis for these Rankings?

To create a holistic understanding of how a country is performing in terms
of global competitiveness and whether or not that performance is expected
to continue, decline, or increase in the future, ITIF used the following 16
indicators to evaluate the global competitiveness of the United States and
other countries:
1. Human capital: higher education attainment in the population ages
25–34; and the number of science and technology researchers per
1,000 employed.
2. Innovation capacity: corporate investment in research and
development (R&D); government investment in R&D; and share of the
world’s scientific and technical publications.
3. Entrepreneurship: venture capital investment; and new firms.
4. Information technology (IT) infrastructure: e-government;
broadband telecommunications; and corporate investment in IT.
5. Economic policy: effective marginal corporate tax rates; and the
ease of doing business.
6. Economic performance: trade balance; foreign direct investment
inflows; real GDP per working-age adult; and productivity.

And when it comes to overall change from 1999 to Feb 2009 on similar ranking, China tops the list with 19.5 points while India secured the spot of 14 with 13.6.

So these rankings indicate that over the last 10 years, China is becoming competitive and innovative faster and better than the rest of the world while it has lot catching up to do in absolute world rankings. And India still lags behind China with wider margin in both the change as well as absolute rankings.

 

That’s why calling China merely “the next Silicon Valley” misses the singularity of what’s happening there. The Valley has never been like this, and I don’t say that to knock the Valley. In many ways,  our steady development has been healthier. But it’s also a lot less electric. In the next ten years or so way more money will be lost amid the China chaos, but I’m betting way more money will be made too.

…

China, as a country, is developing in parallel. The wagons are running constantly and going in nearly every direction. It’s a time of chaos that can burn people out, but it’s also one so unique in the history of modern economics that many ambitious people can’t ignore it. That’s why most transplants from the West who survive their first two years in China tend to stay for more than ten.

Given all this, China is a lot more inwardly focused than other places like Israel and Europe where start-ups have to be global from day one to have a big enough addressable market. When it comes to the Web and mobile, the biggest surprises will likely come from local, non-English speaking entrepreneurs, maybe even those outside the largest cities. They probably don’t read TechCrunch and may not even know where Silicon Valley is on a map. But that won’t matter, because their local market will necessarily develop very differently than ours.

Excerpt from Techcrunch

China is fast and furious, if I have to summarize my understanding in two words. I believe, innovation is born out of constraints.  May be lack of democracy helps quick turn around.  May be lack of freedom in every aspect of life help them focus better in what they do.  Lack of English speaking people make them innovate and create solutions for the local market and even create complete interfaces in their own language.

Even though, many of my friends say I in India stands for IT and believe Indians are some of the most intelligent people on earth, I haven’t seen a computer with interface in my own language or any other Indian language for that matter. The closest I got so far is type my own language in English and let an application translate that to native script.  I guess, Indian entrepreneurs and people like me are busy solving (or working on) problems of US and Europe rather than our own.

And we are quite proud of India being the largest democracy of the world, whether it works or not.  And, some how we got to a stage where we say, our sluggish beauracracy is our best defense against racing China. And without a doubt, most of us pray China to fail rather than India to change and many of us are quite sure (somehow) that China would eventually fail for the same reasons that are considered as its strengths today. And then India will move forward, just like in the fairy tale, that says ‘slow and steady wins the race’.

Well even in that aspect, China is a lot different than the rest of the world. Isn’t it? Look at the Olympic medal tally of China and India. If all India has got is this powerful and proven “slow and steady wins the race” strategy, wondering how long will it take for India to even stand in the top 10 and prove me totally wrong and stupid for my skepticism of what a lethargic democracy can achieve.

At first look, it struck to me like an Engineering marvel and epitome of architectural expression of China’s creativity. But there is lot more to this magnificent building than just amazing aesthetics. 

For one, Going green is not an afterthought but an integral part of design and engineering. The beautiful arch is in fact array of solar cells. The building is built with 88% energy efficiency. Wow !!

The Sun-Moon Mansion, Himin Solar Energy’s headquarters in Dezhou (Source: BusinessWeek)

More about the mansion here.

 

Sun-Moon Mansion is the main conference hall of the 4^th International solar city conference in 2010. The building, covering an area of 750,000m², functions display, R&D, working, meeting, training, hotel, recreation, etc. It adopts solar technologies on hot water supplying, heating and cooling, PV power generation, etc, which breaks phenomenon of tremendous conventional energy consumption. Perfectly combining solar applications with construction, this building is undoubtedly prized as the model of comprehensive solar applications in construction.

Energy efficiency is high up to 88% with 70% in total and 60% in heating and cooling, which is much higher than 50%, the national standard in public construction. It can save standard coals of 2640ton, electricity of 6,600,000kwh and reduce pollution of 8672.4ton.

China has a National standard for Public Construction to achieve a 50% energy efficiency. Wondering how other developing and developed countries fare on this kind of commitment to go green.

Few amazing pictures of the building:

The outside view of the Sun-Moon Mansion

Night view of the Sun-Moon Mansion

More about the mansion here.