I have spent a few days in Singapore. The first thing that I learnt throught he headlines here in Newspapers and in discussions with peole was that Singapore is putting about s$200M/year for 5 years to build this country as an International center for Interactive Media Technology. They want to build both research and industrial efforts in this area so many jobs and companies in this area will be here. This is the second round of their such investments. In the first round they invested in BioTech. In the second round they are investing in Water Technology and in Media. Since Media is my major research interest, I find it very interesting. I feel that Singapore does have good research community in multimedia related area — they need to build strong base to capitalize on this.
The second interesting thing that I noted this time — more than earlier visits because I went shopping with Neil and Sudha was the number of camera and electronics shops here. Possibly Singapore and Japan have maximum camera shops. In relationship to other businesses, it appears that these two countries have twice or more as many camera shops. This is very intriguing. Why? Is this a reflection on photo-taking habits of this country? Japanese are definitely known for their camera. I did not realize that Singapore had similar culture.