With his friend Kiyoshi Nishikawa, whose company, NetAge, was also setting up shop as an incubator, Mr Koike dreamed up the Bit Valley Association.

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Moving to the Valley was a bit of a culture shock.

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London, by contrast, is planning a 500-acre Olympic park, complete with athletes' village, indoor arenas and swimming pool, in the lower Lea Valley, an unloved bit of east London.

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One of the world's most conspicuously successful centres of enterprise lies in that bit of California known as Silicon Valley: computing is today's knowledge-based industry par excellence (see survey) The new jobs in tomorrow's industries, in manufacturing and services alike, will call for more than button-pressing automatons.

ECONOMIST: Education and the wealth of nations | The

It's a bit sad to see one of Silicon Valley's most venerable startups pulling an Elvis.

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Netsuite has been a bit of a punching bag in Silicon Valley software circles.

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So it's a bit sad to see one of Silicon Valley's most venerable startups, Hewlett-Packard (HWP), pulling an Elvis.

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Does not Junior accept that people will think he and the Valley are, well, a bit strange?

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Of course, for people outside of Silicon Valley, dividing the world like that is a bit arbitrary.

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The declared aim of Davos is rather to share ideas, to inspire change, to give the leaders the ammunition they will need once they leave this secluded alpine valley and return to the real world, ready to change things, bit by bit, until hopefully, one day, the world has become a better place.

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But Breyer explained that it is part of the culture in a different way from Silicon Valley, where technological success is the primary aim, with the financial success the secondary bit.

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And when we speak of Silicon Valley today, we are talking about their attitude, not the fact that they made 16K bit CMOS DRAM memory chips.

FORBES: Hear! Hear!