Google’s Three Asia Data Center Locations

Google announced its three data center locations in Asia - Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

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The logic of the three locations being in the center of the Asia Pacific region is hard to argue against. Which most likely disappointed governments in Australia, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Phillipines, and India.  Here is Australia news.

Google will build three new data centres in Asia to service increased internet demand from the region, but Australia has missed out on being picked as a site location.

A Hong Kong-based spokesman, Taj Meadows, said Google used a stringent process to choose locations for the new facilities. The three cities met the criteria better than Australia, he said.

“We have a rigorous process in place around selecting sites for our data centres, taking many technical and other considerations into account. Some of the key things we look for in a site include closeness to our users, robust local infrastructure, reliable power, availability of skilled workers, reasonable business regulations and cost”, Meadows told IT Pro. He later added close proximity to existing underwater communications cables was also important.

Here is news about Singapore and Google’s Green Data Center plans.

“A data center here would be among the most efficient and environmentally friendly in Asia, subject to the same high technical and environmental standards we use worldwide,” Google said. It added that Singapore was chosen based on its proximity to users, access to robust infrastructure and reliable power, and reasonable business regulations, among others.

Hong Kong is a site to reach China.

Google faces stiff competition in Asia, particularly in the mainland market where homegrown search services such as Baidu are household names.

An Economist Intelligence Unit study released on Tuesday said Asian economies are closing the gap on the West in terms of IT competitiveness.

The United States is still the most competitive IT industry, but seven Asian economies made it to the top 20, including Singapore at No3 and Taiwan at 13.

And Taiwan makes the third.  

Three

The number 3 (三, Pinyin: sān, jyutping: saam1) sounds similar to the character for “birth” (生, Pinyin: shēng, jyutping: saang1), and is thus considered a lucky number.

Google to build US$100 million data center in Taiwan
2011/09/28 11:39:08




Taipei, Sept. 28 (CNA) Google Inc. will acquire 15 hectares of land in Changhua County to build a data center that will offer faster access to its services, the company announced Wednesday.
The world’s largest Internet search company said in a statement that it plans to invest over US$100 million (NT$3.04 billion) in the data center, which it expects to come on line in one or

.

Google opens Hamina Data center

WSJ reports on Google’s Hamina data center.

Google Inc.'s opening of a €200 million ($273 million) server hall in Hamina, Finland, over the weekend is boosting Scandinavian hopes that other big Internet companies will choose to build data centers in the region, attracted by its cold climate and low electricity prices.
SERVER

One interesting speculation in the WSJ article is Facebook is looking at a site in Sweden.

Mr. Engman has been active in promoting Luleå as a hot spot for data centers, and he has undoubtedly had some success. An undisclosed major U.S. Internet company, widely believed to be Facebook, is planning to build a giant data center outside the town center, in an investment estimated by local officials at between three billion and five billion Swedish kronor ($459 million to $764 million). Facebook has declined to comment on the matter.

The plan has been delayed by legal action brought by a private individual on concerns the data center may harm wildlife, but should the latest appeal fail, the center will represent the single largest corporate investment—more than three times the size of the nearest contender—ever made in the city.

Mr. Engman, who takes pride in having attracted the U.S. company to Sweden, says there are several reasons other than climate that contributed to its interest in Luleå.

"We've got a unique electricity infrastructure up here. The electricity network is built for [energy intensive users such as] paper mills and the metals industry, and our supply of hydroelectricity means electricity prices here are among the lowest in Europe," Mr. Engman says.

And the folks in Lulea claim they haven’t had a power outage since 1979.

"You can't have a blast furnace shutting down because of electricity shortages. Luleå hasn't had a power outage since 1979. When we informed executives at U.S. software firms about this, they had a hard time believing it," Mr. Engman says.

One of the reasons Sweden and Finland are interesting is proximity to Russia.

But it is not just the cool climate that makes the Nordic countries attractive, supporters say. "There are several factors," says Tomas Sokolnicki, a senior investment adviser at Invest Sweden. "We have political stability, excellent fiber-optic infrastructure, minimal risk for natural disasters and a favourable climate.

"Also the fact that we are geographically close to Russia is important. Many players want to establish data centers close to the growing Russian market, but few dare establish data centers in Russia itself."

Is Foxconn using Robotics as its manufacturing push out of China?

Reuters has an article on Foxconn's plans for the use of robotics.

Foxconn to rely more on robots; could use 1 million in 3 years

Employees work inside a Foxconn factory in the township of Longhua in the southern Guangdong province in this May 26, 2010 file photo. REUTERS/Bobby Yip/Files

By Lee Chyen Yee and Clare Jim

HONG KONG/TAIPEI | Mon Aug 1, 2011 8:48am EDT

(Reuters) - Taiwan's Foxconn Technology Group, known for assembling Apple's iPhones and iPads inChina, plans to use more robots, with one report saying the company will use one million of them in the next three years, to cope with rising labor costs.

Foxconn's move highlights an increasing trend toward automation among Chinese companies as labor issues such as high-profile strikes and workers' suicides plague firms in sectors from autos to technology.

The one thing that caught my eye is Foxconn buying plants overseas.

Foxconn plans to buy a set-top plant in Mexico from Cisco Systems and is looking into investing more in Brazil, where it is already making mobile phone handsets.

It has bought LCD TV plants from Japan's Sony Corp in Mexico in 2009 and Slovakia in 2010 and is in cooperation talks with a number of top Japanese hi-tech firms, including Sharp, Canon and Hitachi.

Could server manufacturing be moving out of China as well in the future?

That's one way to solve the 100%+ tax for importing servers into Brazil.

Environmental Impact of Washing Machine, more time for reading, sometimes it is better to use more carbon

Hans Rosling has a TED video on the Magic of the Washing Machine.

If you go to the TED stream you can click on the transcript to jump to sections I refer to below. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html

Let's start with the end point.  Hans is an environmentalist who discusses the benefit of the washing machine. In the end the environmental impact in his case gave his mother time to read.

And what's the magic with them? My mother explained the magic with this machine the very, very first day. She said, "Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry; the machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library." Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children's books. And mother got time to read for me. She loved this. I got the "ABC."This is where I started my career as a professor,when my mother had time to read for me. And she also got books for herself. She managed to study English and learn that as a foreign language. And she read so many novels, so many different novels here. And we really, we really loved this machine.

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And what we said, my mother and me, "Thank you industrialization. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station. And thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books."

Thank you very much.

Hans discuss the environmentalist extremist view who says not everyone in the world should have washing machines.

But when I lecture to environmentally-concerned students, they tell me, "No, everybody in the world cannot have cars and washing machines." How can we tell this woman that she ain't going to have a washing machine? And then I ask my students,I've asked them -- over the last two years I've asked, "How many of you doesn't use a car?" And some of them proudly raise their hand and say, "I don't use a car." And then I put the really tough question: "How many of you hand wash your jeans and your bed sheets?" And no one raised their hand. Even the hardcore in the green movementuse washing machines.

(Laughter)

Hans makes the point that energy use is growing in Emerging Markets, and part of the factor are a woman like below voting for an official who brought electricity to her home.

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This is what we hope may happen. It's a real challenge in the future. But I can assure you that this woman in the favela in Rio, she wants a washing machine. She's very happy about her minister of energy that provided electricity to everyone -- so happy that she even voted for her.And she became Dilma Rousseff, the president elect of one of the biggest democracies in the world -- moving from minister of energy to president. If you have democracy, people will vote for washing machines. They love them.

You could say Data Centers and cloud services are like washing machine and changes people's lives, but just like the washing machine the features that people purchase are energy and water efficiency.  The old days of simply getting things to work have moved to using the least resources to accomplish the task.

Africa's Mobile Internet is built on a spoken tradition, voice-activation opportunity

The Economist's Intellgient Life has an article on Digital Africa.  Think of about this.

digital Africa will become a spoken tradition. African cultures are among the most oral in the world. Storytelling under the tree is still commonplace. Speaking is still preferred to writing and Africa happens to have timed its digital age to coincide with new voice-activated technologies. The generation gap between those who were trained to guide a fountain pen with their fingers, those whose kinetic memory is dominated by their thumbs, and those even younger who are used to the sweeping movements of the touchscreen, will give way to the return of voice—Africa’s voice.

Most don't even think about Africa, but I would bet as a percentage growth Africa is the largest data center expansion than any other continent.

Ethan Zuckerman's blog on Africa has some interesting posts.

I’m also utterly fascinated by this graph:

It’s a visualization of round-trip ping times between a test server and servers around the world. Basically, it’s a way of testing actual speed, rather than promised speed, of internet connectivity in different corners of the world… and it’s a reminder that there are many countries (at least when this data was generated in 2009) that are connected primarily by satellite, where packets take more than half a second to make the round trip.

But the data set I’m most enjoying is this one: the number of Facebook Friends various African leaders can claim. Some leaders have official pages, some private, personal pages. A large number simply have fan pages, put together by a community of supporters. Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan leads the pack – by a lot – with 341,759 friends in December 2010. He’s embraced Facebook rather aggressively, going as far as to announce his candidacy for the presidency on the site, probably to preempt the announcement of a rival.

A close look at African leaders with lots of Facebook friends might offer a caution for Jonathan. Here are the top leaders, in terms of followers, as of December 2010″

341,759 Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria
232,424 Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia
61,510 Mwai Kibaki, Kenya
59,744 King Mohamed VI, Morocco
57,072 Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe (Prime Minister to Robert Mugabe)
21,306 Jakaya Kikwete, Tanzania
15,723 Hosni Mubarak, Egypt
15,377 Laurent Gbagbo, Ivory Coast
14,714 Jacob Zuma, South Africa
12,658 Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Algeria

Back to the Digital Africa Article, three companies are highlighted in the article - Facebook, Google, and Nokia

The first is Facebook. This social network, born at Harvard and based in Palo Alto, California, is not just a skin on internet-enabled African mobiles, it is the skin. Pricing is driving its popularity. The site was zero-rated in 2010—that is, made almost free of data charges in several African markets (the bill is footed by Facebook, the network operators and the phone manufacturers). “The zero-rating of Facebook was the most significant tech story in Africa in 2010,” says Erik Hersman, who has two influential blogs, White African and Afrigadget. So while text messages are cheap, sitting on Facebook is even cheaper. Facebook’s own numbers show growth coming fastest in Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.

Google is next, but note the mention that Google is adding data center capacity in Africa.

The second company is Google, the search and advertising colossus, also based in Palo Alto. In Africa, Google looks omniscient. It wants to make the internet a part of everyday life in Africa by eliminating entry barriers of price and language. Even with the drop in prices, Africans still pay many times more for broadband than Europeans do. Google hopes to bring the price down further by establishing data caches in Africa, greatly reducing the time taken to reach popular websites—particularly those with African content. Detractors say Google is buying up swathes of Africa’s digital real estate at bargain prices: it seeks transparency of others, but reveals little of itself. How much is it spending on the new infrastructure? “We don’t discuss numbers,” says a Google executive, “but we are committed to Africa.”

Nokia gets mentioned as the biggest cell phone provider.

The third big player in Africa’s digital revolution is Nokia, the mobile-phone maker from Tampere in Finland, which has history and substance in African eyes. It claims a 58% market share in Africa and vies with Coca-Cola as the continent’s most recognised brand. It was Nokia’s ability to distribute phones through subsidies in rich countries that allowed it to sell basic models at low prices in Africa. Nokia has lost ground at the high end in rich countries to Android and the iPhone. Nokia executives admit the company has “lost the thought leadership” in some markets, but not in Africa.

Apple and Nokia are mentioned.

Apple is nowhere in Africa and shows little interest in democratisation, but Nokia is facing stiff competition at the top of the market from BlackBerry, the smartphone made by Research in Motion, based in Waterloo, Canada. The head of BlackBerry’s Africa office, Deon Liebenberg, says his company’s sales defy logic. BlackBerry had seen itself as providing a secure platform for businessmen and government officials. Now it is selling models with consumer appeal: rounded phones in shades of tangerine and strawberry lipgloss. To the young African professional, the smartphone is highly aspirational: it is the house and car you can’t afford. In a culture where so much is shared, the smartphone is a space which is all yours—your music, your plans, your tomorrow.