KEY POINTS:
Presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton has been in Silicon Valley trying to cosy up to America's hi-tech sector (www.guardian.co.uk), which she believes needs to "hit the restart button on the 21st century".
Lame slogans aside, Hillary is making a clever move. The US IT industry grew rapidly during the presidency of tech-friendly Bill Clinton and like Hollywood the IT sector has a more liberal bent, especially with the latest boom in user-generated internet services.
The last few years have been characterised by a lot of valuable IT work being outsourced to cheaper countries like India and the IT skills shortage has hit the US reasonably hard.
Hillary dangled a fairly big carrot in front of Silicon Valley executives today in the form of increased R&D funding, more IT training and a relaxation of Visa conditions designed to make it easier for foreign software engineers to work in the Valley for longer. Already, over half of Silicon Valley software engineers are foreign born.
Her bag of tech goodies includes:
- An increase in federal research and development budgets by 50 per cent over the next 10 years at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy's Office of Science and the Defence Department.
- The formation of a US$50 billion "Strategic Energy Fund" to create a research agency focused on tackling the problem of global warming.
- Increase tax incentives in an attempt to get increase broadband penetration in homes.
- Increase the number "H1B" visas to attract more highly skilled workers from overseas.
Hillary's rivals in the presidential race, including Barack Obama and Rudy Giuliani were also schmoozing in Silicon Valley this week.
I doubt our political parties will be pushing better policies and funding for the tech sector in the run up to our general election, but it will be interesting to see if anything is offered to back up some of the R&D incentives announced in the budget. From the conversation I had with a group of IT and telecoms executives last night, it seems that the sector is happy to stick with Labour, if only because National has never shown any leadership in this area. What could National, or any party for that mater, offer to win the vote of the tech sector?
