A few weeks back there was a NY Times article on South Korea's concept of the Ubiquitous City, where an area called New Songdo would arguably become the most networked place in the world. Following the crash of the Asian markets a few years back, Seoul made a concerted effort to move from an industrial economy to that of one based on IT. In this vein, they've created the concept for the Ubiquitous City. For example, recycling bins could use RFID to credit you with recycling a glass bottle, if you need a birth certificate you could get one printed from a city government kiosk on the sidewalk, there's even talk of pressure sensitive floors to detect a fall in an elderly persons home... Naturally, storing and processing all this data would be ideally suited for the Cloud and it seems that Korean government feels the same.
To develop their Cloud infrastructure, the government just announced that they will be devoting $172 million dollars over the next year to help the private sector promote, develop and deploy Cloud based systems. While that might not be considered a lot of money in some circles (especially when it comes to government funding) the fact that the Seoul is putting any money towards this nascent industry is a sign of forward thinking and can only bode well for SaaS vendors worldwide. Kudos to South Korea for putting its money where its mouth is...
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