Internet - Lilian Pizzichini probes the rationale behind two Far Eastern e-ventures
SilkRoute.com is a website made in Singapore. It is also an ambitious internet company based somewhere in the skyscraping city that dominates the Strait of Malacca - the city that, if Singapore's government has its way, will soon be controlling the traffic generated by the internet throughout the whole of Asia. Hence the name: a reference to the old trade route that took silk, spices and Buddhism out of China and into the rest of the world. This website's founders have big ideas.
They also have £200m in the bank. The site was "born" (how coy these thrusting young executives can be) in 1994. The home page proclaims that SilkRoute is "the Leading E-commerce Holding Company" (where and over which competitors it does not specify), and goes on to state boldly that it is "Powering Asia's Global Competitiveness". These are just the first in a series of upper-cased, declamatory statements on this vapid, glossy brochure of a website.
We learn that SilkRoute is an "incubator", and that SilkRoute's staff are just itching to "Turn Powerful Ideas into Innovative Business Models". This is a disingenuous way of saying that SilkRoute finances new e-ventures at the early, conceptual stages, and puts its management oar in as and when it sees fit. The policy may prove financially rewarding in the short term, but if every Powerful Idea is being geared towards cost-effectiveness in the market place, then the self-styled Mission leaves very little room for the pure anarchy of creativity - as anyone who has ever worked in Silicon Valley would tell them.
What is really powering firms such as SilkRoute is Singapore's current dogfight with its neighbour, Malaysia. The two governments are fighting to control access to the internet in the Far East. And Malaysia has gone to mind-boggling efforts to ensure that it is in the lead. From Kuala Lumpur's famous twin Petronas Towers in the city centre to the international airport in the south, 45 miles of land have been razed in order to build a multimedia super-corridor. This strip of land has been turned into a computer-friendly environment.
Temperature-controlled warehouses with powerful air-conditioning have been built to the specific requirements of mainframe computers that are in permanent danger of over-heating. Then there are offices and apartments to house the people who tend them. This grandiose, shape-shifting project was undertaken before the crisis in Asia's tiger economies. The force behind it is the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDC), which was launched by the former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, as part of a move from labour-intensive to high-tech industries.
So far, however, the real winners seem not to be the indigenous population, nor indeed the lush terrain that is the backdrop to the country's thriving tourist industry. Step forward the property developer MK Land Holdings, which aims to be - yes, you guessed it - the "largest property developer in Malaysia", a kind of "supermarket where everything is there . . . good contractors, quality suppliers, bankers".
How handy. The company's ambition is founded on Silicon Valley being probably the wealthiest piece of real estate in the world, with the highest concentration of billionaires. Whether Malaysia's new, high-tech, architecturally correct infrastructure will attract similarly wealthy consumers remains to be seen.
Cyberjaya is the corridor's showcase "intelligent township". Its inhabitants, or operatives - whatever you wish to call them - have state-of-the-art access to the obligatory internet and multimedia interactive services. There is an impressive array of systems nearly up and running: traffic management, surveillance, a "geographical information" system, a "home automation" system, street lighting systems - in short, more systems than you could throw a rogue computer hacker at.
That's enough of the virtual reality. The physical reality is that, although Cyberjaya was supposed to house the world's top internet researchers and dotcommers, the town languishes like an idle industrial park. There are ATM switches galore, high-capacity fibre links to the US, Europe and Japan, but very few takers. Why, with all this expensive hardware, not to mention the temperature-controlled buildings to house it? Because the software is missing; immigration barriers prevent the free movement of software engineers, and not enough local talent is being produced. So no one has the requisite skills to take advantage of all that lovely hardware. But I do think that someone should give a job to the boy from downtown KL who gave us his love bug - or, indeed, to any number of the shady coves involved in what seems to be the Malaysian businessman's favourite pastime: offshore betting. The expertise needed to run gambling rackets and fiddle the Lottery could be re-routed into inventing things to do with software packages.
I asked David Bain of the e-commerce research and consultancy firm Lafferty for his response to Malaysia's seeming e-failure. "Malaysia's attempt at high-teching itself has all the hallmarks of a Soviet-style project," he said. "It has little to do with entrepreneurial spirit. MDC and Cyberjaya are likely to be expensive white elephants in the face of the much more realistic and sophisticated technology infrastructure in Singapore."
So, round one goes to SilkRoute, as Bain explains. "Singapore was the first city in the world to be completely wired up for universal broadband access. But the government still plays a role in Singapore's cyberspace efforts. This will definitely stifle developments." The putative webmasters at SilkRoute can rest easy - there is no hint of government involvement in their activities. However, they would do well to remember that the Silk Road consisted of disparate caravan tracts, not just one humdinger of a highway.
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