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1. Guangdong unveils ambitious delta plan

2. Cheung Kong deals may net $1b

3. Asia's star to rise above IT gloom

4. Teoma stamps authority on search engine cyber-babble

1. Guangdong unveils ambitious delta plan
Pamela Pun and Olivia Chung, The Standard 14 January 2003

Guangdong governor Lu Ruihua yesterday unveiled an ambitious plan to build Guangzhou and Shenzhen into a regional financial hub in the next five years, while appearing lukewarm to Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa's call for economic integration.

In his government report at the opening of the provincial people's congress in Guangzhou, Lu said Guangdong would strive to improve its investment environment to attract more multinational giants to set up regional headquarters and research and development centres in the province.

Lu pledged to turn the Pearl River Delta into a world-class manufacturing base by boosting development of high technology and modern services.

But Lu devoted only a few lines of his lengthy work report to the issue of upgrading economic co-operation with Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.

He said the manufacturing, logistics, finance, tourism and service sectors would be the backbone of economic co-operation between the four centres, but did not spell out any concrete moves on Guangdong-Hong Kong economic co-operation.

Speaking after his address, Lu denied downplaying Guangdong's ties with Hong Kong, saying the two places were ``like brothers'' who could join hands to develop the Pearl River Delta into a world economic centre.

Responding to Lu's speech, Chief Secretary for Administration Donald Tsang dismissed fears that Guangdong would hold an edge over Hong Kong in attracting foreign investment, saying each had their own special areas of development.

``International companies wanting to do business on heavy industry could consider the mainland, while those wanting economic infrastructure and a platform to work with the world market could set up headquarters in the territory,'' he said.

Stressing the good relations between Guangdong and Hong Kong, Tsang said Lu had recently acknowledged that the two centres had separate areas of expertise.

A spokesman for Invest Hong Kong also expressed confidence in the SAR's position as a world financial centre, saying its competitive advantages as a world-class international centre of finance, business and logistics were irreplaceable.

Bank of East Asia chairman David Li said Guangdong's plan to set up a regional finance centre would have little impact on Hong Kong because ``the SAR has rule of law and excellent talents''.

Richard Wong, director of Apec Study Centre at University of Hong Kong, said Lu's vision for Guangzhou and Shenzhen would not pose a threat to Hong Kong as the mainland currency was not convertible.

Lu set moderate annual growth targets for Guangdong in the coming five years, including:

Gross domestic product to average around 9 per cent;

Fixed investment to grow by about 10 per cent;

Exports to expand 5 per cent; and

Urban residents' disposable income to increase by 5 per cent a year while farmers' incomes grow 3.5 per cent.

Lu will step down at the closing session of the provincial parliament conference on Monday and be succeeded by executive vice-governor Huang Huahua.

During Lu's tenure over the past five years, Guangdong's GDP has grown an average of 10.2 per cent a year. GDP last year was 1.167 trillion yuan, up 10.8 per cent from a year earlier.

2. Cheung Kong deals may net $1b
Staff reporter, The Standard 14 January 2003

Two Singapore-based funds are in talks with Cheung Kong (Holdings) to buy the Metropolis Residence phase two development at Hung Hom for more than HK$1 billion.

Their negotiations began after Hong Kong's largest developer held roadshows in Taiwan, Shanghai and Southeast Asia to promote its serviced-flats projects to investors.

Cheung Kong hopes to capitalise on the government's immigration policies which encourage foreign investors to settle in the city.

Executive director Justin Chiu yesterday confirmed that the developer was in talks with two funds about acquiring the entire phase two of Metropolis Residence.

Both potential buyers were interested in investing in Hong Kong's serviced residential units, Chiu said, and wanted to acquire the property to generate rental income, expected to realise an annual return of 7-9 per cent.

At the same time, another renowned Singapore developer also hoped to acquire an equity interest in some of Cheung Kong's serviced residential apartment projects, he said.

If a deal is reached over Metropolis Residence, the developer could reap more than HK$1 billion for the phase two development alone, based on a target price of about HK$4,500 psf.

If 662 units in phases one and two were sold, the developer could pocket over HK$2 billion.

Cheung Kong expected to receive presale consent within a few days and the flats would be available to buyers during Lunar New Year, senior sales manager Joseph Lau said.

Metropolis Residence is a joint development between Cheung Kong and the Kowloon-Canton Railway Corporation.

The project comprises 662 serviced apartments of 696 sq ft to 663 sq ft each. The units are part of Cheung Kong's Metropolis complex, near Hung Hom Station Terminus, which also includes a 15-storey office tower, a five-star Harbour Plaza Metropolis Hotel and a shopping mall.

3. Asia's star to rise above IT gloom
CAROLYN ONG, SCMP 14 January 2003

A turbulent 2002 saw the computer and telecoms industries struggling with a weak global economy, but industry analysts are predicting that this year may be better.

Carolyn Ong talks with analysts from research firms the Gartner Group, International Data Corp and Pyramid Research on their forecasts for 2003.

IDC: Linux is here to stay. IBM's backing, its suitability in the service provider space, potential to unify the Unix market, synergy with the IA-64 entry-level server market, clustering capability and rapid adoption in the embedded systems space all give it long-term staying power.

Larger-scale implementations are also impacting on Windows NT migration. Over time, it may be that Linux and Unix converge, with the same application able to run on either operating system.

The Linux server market has proliferated in the Asia-Pacific over the past few years, driven largely by the need to build Internet infrastructures. For the most part, Linux servers have been deployed for a host of applications sitting at the edge of the network, such as Web-hosting, caching and load balancing. Recently, we have started seeing customer interest in deploying Linux servers for clusters-based high-performance computing applications.

In unit terms, in 2002 about 52,000 Linux-based servers were shipped in the Asia-Pacific ex-Japan, accounting for 9 per cent of total server shipments in the region. This proportion will increase to about 11 per cent in 2003 and shipments will grow by 39 per cent.

Gartner: PCs are becoming a commodity in most developed countries. Price point is no longer the focal point for customers in 2003. Rather it is the style, quality and functionality. PC pricing has been very stable throughout 2002 in Hong Kong and we do not expect to see a high rise or drop in pricing. The PC market will be mainly driven by PC replacement in this mature market, both from corporate and home users.

The increasing acceptance of wireless LAN in the office environment, together with the idea of home entertainment networking, will help to catalyse PC replacement this year. SMEs [small and medium-size enterprises] will be the main driver for the PC market in Hong Kong as many of those SMEs still operate under a traditional style.

Pyramid: 3G is evolutionary just as MMS is SMS with pictures and SMS is communicating with text instead of voice. One has to believe that, over time, people will become more familiar with larger piles of data going through phones. People will have to get used to switching between PC and phones, and more used to sending data over these devices. If the medium becomes convenient, usable and cheap enough, people will use it. To see 3G as a watershed is a mistake - everything is evolutionary and various standards will co-exist for some time - and they will not stop with 3G.

There is a lot of confusion surrounding 2.5G and 3G and we must realise there are still a number of inherent technical issues with the network, such as handing off from 2G to 3G. Delays are inevitable.

How big will Wi-Fi networks be in 2003?

Pyramid: Wi-Fi will be much more in the news than 3G in 2003. Wi-Fi will become a greater threat to wireless operators in the province of high-bandwidth mobile Internet and data. If you want to download huge chunks of data such as e-mail, you are more likely to find a hotspot with your laptop than using GPRS to your hand-held. GPRS is expensive and does not have the speeds of Wi-Fi. PCCW, for example, plans to exploit the growth of mobile workers armed with Wi-Fi-equipped laptops.

They have set up about 100 hotspots already and that number is growing. PCCW has a favourable wireless LAN strategy that strengthens its core product offering, which is connectivity and its Wi-Fi implementation. This poses a definite threat to the local mobile carriers' wireless data strategies.

IDC: Enterprises are in the throes of evaluating and adopting wireless LANs or Wi-Fi. WLANs have been rapidly becoming more widely recognised as a general-purpose connectivity alternative. One concern has been security related to WLANs, which should be addressed as standards evolve.

4. Teoma stamps authority on search engine cyber-babble
David Wilson, Technopedia SCMP 14 January 2003

How boring the field of search engines has become - it is rather like watching Ferrari win yet another Grand Prix. The champagne always goes to Google. Spare and zippy, it can do no wrong, attracting the kind of widespread and relentlessly positive coverage that must make Altavista, Yahoo!,

Alltheweb and other rivals want to spew something other than facts.

"The champ", "perfection", "one of the seven wonders of the Web", the critics rave. Very soon, someone will say it is better than sex.

Maybe they already have - just ask Google or, possibly, a competing search engine founded in 2000 called Teoma. Like Google, Teoma looks pretty tame at first sight, offering a mostly blank page broken up by a few bright colours.

A clue as to what makes Teoma different lies in it name, which is Gaelic for "expert", and the search engine's slogan: "search with authority". This means that, if you harness it, you should supposedly avoid falling prey to the lies, misinformation and hogwash rife on the Web.

The mathematician and baloney-basher who founded Teoma, Apostolos Gerasoulis, says: "We are constantly amazed at the amount of junk information that lives on the Web. It is strange and distressing that people would try to contaminate the Internet with bad information. The proliferation of this makes it very important for a search technology to be able to discriminate between the good stuff and the bad stuff."

So how does Teoma achieve this?

First, it uses a method called "subject-specific popularity". This ranks a site based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it, not just general popularity, to determine a site's level of authority. This is supposedly the difference between consulting an ex- pert and any old idiot.

Three further proprietary techniques then come into play. The first, which does not ap- pear wildly proprietary, is "results" and means a list of hits. The second is "refine" and the third "resources".

To gain a sense of what all these techniques mean and how they coalesce, consider how Teoma handles a search on "snake oil".

Teoma spits out results detailing snake oil's supposed healing properties (cure for common cold and cancer), its taste (like liquefied chicken) and the best place to buy it at a discount (Albuquerque, New Mexico, US$7.50 an ounce). In addition, Teoma comes up with a swathe of credible results pertaining to encryption and forktongued salesmen among other areas.

But Teoma also advises on how to drill down on the subject (refine), pointing you for instance towards the Clifford Stoll book entitled Silicon Snake Oil. For resources, it directs you towards link collections produced by experts and enthusiasts - one in French, another dead and a third, concerning something called ChiroWatch, perplexing.

But you can see how it might work- Awarded five stars by Webuser Magazine, Teoma may not be better than sex but its drill-down capability means you can zero in on the data you need effectively and its expert dimension is reassuring.

That said, it is not going to wrest the tide of speed champ from Google. Indeed, sometimes Teoma staggers along so slowly it looks like it is recovering from a night at the local Gaelic pub. Another drawback is the lack of a cache feature (snapshots of vanished sites), which Google has.

Worse still, Teoma requires a quality as unusual as a talent for astral projection or saving money: intelligence. In contrast, Google has sometimes been called "Search Engine for Dummies".

Can Teoma beat it?

According to Mr Gerasouhs, Teoma is not trying to beat Google but compete with it just as Mercedes vies with BMW and McDonalds with Burger King. He says that, while he believes Teoma's technology is better than Google's, Teoma is "in its infancy and has some growing up to do!'.

He adds that, meanwhile, Google helps keep Teoma on its toes.

"Lack of competition creates complacency, and with the Web growing as fast as it does, search technologies need to constantly innovate and evolve.