World's top 10 IT locations

PC Authority, the Australian Computer Magazine team has compiled a list of top 10 IT locations which it has found to be more IT friendly than the rest of the areas in the world.

Below are the top 10 IT locations in the world as mentioned by PC Authority:

1. Silicon Valley
The Silicon Valley area has been central to the development of the IT industry for nearly fifty years. The list of giant companies headquartered in the Valley goes on and on like HP, Sun, Oracle, Apple, Cisco, Google, Yahoo, Intel, McAfee, Symantec, AMD, eBay etc., The intellectual quality of the local education here adds much to the engineering and programming talent.

2. Taiwan
Taiwan is established in the areas of consumer technology, enterprise technology and semiconductors and produces around 80% of the world's laptops and a significant proportion of other computer components. Among the big names calling Taiwan home are Asus and Acer and semiconductor firm TSMC. No other country or region in the world is as dependent on the IT industry for its economic well-being as Taiwan. Last week, the government of Taiwan even stepped in to prop up the country's ailing DRAM memory chip businesses.

3. Bangalore
The Silicon Valley of India accounts for more than a third of all IT jobs in the country. It has also spawned local start-ups that are now so successful that they are buying up the IT infrastructure of bankrupted Western companies. The IT industries here employ millions directly and indirectly and has helped the Indian economy by bringing in billions in revenue.

4. Japan
Japan leads the world in robotics, green technology, intelligent software, consumer electronics and is also advanced in areas like gaming consoles and smartphones. Most of the gadgets are not being exported may be because the Japanese manufacturers are convinced that western countries are so far behind the times that they wouldn't even know what to do with these things.

5. San Francisco
The most wired city in America and the home to companies such as Salesforce.com and Craigslist, Twitter and small services/startup businesses.

6. Zhongguancun, China
This "Beijing High-Technology Industry Development Experimental Zone" is the hub of China's IT industry and is built around 7 technology hubs and is home to companies like Lenovo and Baidu as well as Western imports. Microsoft is building its Chinese headquarters here.

7. Finland
Home to Linux, Nokia, Software sucurity vendor F-Secure. Finland has proven a generator of IT innovation that far outweighs its population or size. Part of this is due to the fact that education is largely free there, leading to a highly skilled and technical population.

8. Fort Meade, Maryland
Maryland gets this spot on the list because of the presence of US National Security Agency (NSA) here.

9. Romania
Plenty of programming talent exist in this country with savvy programmers seasoned in writing and working with large, complex programs. Romania has built up a reputation as a hotspot for malware writers and other online criminals as well as some very smart security researchers. Romanian developers have often taken the forefront in such things as heuristics and vulnerability detection. Microsoft even acquired an Romanian antivirus company GeCAD in 2003.

10. Boston
The Cambridge area has educated and inspired some of the finest minds in IT, including the founders of Intel,Microsoft, Texas Instruments, 3Com and Qualcomm. Harvard and MIT are both at the pinnacle of educational excellence which shows in the alumini.

Honourable mentions

Seattle
Microsoft's own campus in Redmond employs the city's worth of people, but the company's dominance of the city keeps Seattle out of the top ten. As the growth of Microsoft started from this city, this city gets a spot on the honourable list.

Bletchley Park
This historical IT location also known as Station X during the Second World War was the birthplace of computer encryption technologies, location to one of the earliest programmable computers and was the home to the Alan Turing, a pivotal figure in the development of computer software.