Korea and Japan racing ahead
Of the top 100 cities by average internet connection speed measured by Akamai, which serves around 20 per cent of the world’s web traffic, 61 cities are Japanese and 12 are Korean. Hong Kong also makes the list.
By contrast, only 12 US cities and 12 European cities feature in the table, published in Akamai’s Q1 2010 State of the Internet report.
Qinghai is the largest province in China, stretching across the northeastern Tibetan Plateau over an area of 721,000 km2 - 7.5 per cent of the country. But Qinghai has one of the country’s smallest populations; 5.2 million people are scattered in pockets of the vast expanse of mountains, deserts and grasslands.
Research has shown that projects to promote life-long learning through technology within illiterate communities can strengthen inequalities rather than reduce them. The people who benefit from computers and internet access are generally younger people, instead of the intended people who are older, disabled or unemployed.
The ‘London Datastore’ web site, which is the same in principle to the Apps for Democracy initiative launched in Washington DC in 2008, gives London’s software developers the opportunity to unlock the commercial value of data and create applications that are useful for citizens, government and society as a whole.
Read more: Asian governments eye gains from setting data free
But there are triumphs despite the challenges. Take Indonesia. Policy loans from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) are helping Southeast Asia’s largest economy rejuvenate a tired and abused tax collection system into one that generated 40 per cent more revenue in 2008 than it did before a new system was implemented.