Top 10 IT locations

2. Taiwan
Shaun Nichols: The small, crowded island off the coast of China has become nearly synonymous with high-tech. In a region that is rich with big names in consumer technology, enterprise technology and semiconductors, Taiwan has been established as a centre for all three.

Among the big names calling Taiwan home are Asus and Acer, as well as semiconductor firm TSMC.

Arguably, no other country or region in the world is as dependent on the IT industry for its economic well-being. This became even more apparent last week when the government of Taiwan stepped in to prop up the country's ailing DRAM memory chip businesses.

Iain Thomson: Taiwan produces around 80 per cent of the world's laptops and a significant proportion of other computer components. The country is a mainstay of the IT industry, which is both a good and bad thing.

On the plus side it has enabled the country to grow its economy at high rates for nearly three decades. On the bad side the pollution is terrible and one day China is going to take the place over and then we'll all be in trouble.

Too much of the IT industry's productive capacity is tied up in this tiny island state. China refers to the state as its own and one day will exert its control over the area, and to be frank there's nothing anyone can do about it.

The US might talk big about protecting Taiwan's sovereignty but when it comes to the crunch trying to fight the Red Army 2,000 miles from home soil isn't a rational notion. We will lose one of the most important computing environments and China will gain a valuable asset. It's happened before, look at Hong Kong for example.

1. Silicon Valley
Shaun Nichols: The unquestioned capital of the IT world, the stretch of land encompassing San Jose and San Mateo county has become home to so many companies that it is now simply referred to as Silicon Valley.

The list of companies headquartered in the Valley is absurd, but let's go ahead and rattle off a few: HP, Sun, Oracle, Apple, Cisco, Google, Yahoo, Intel, McAfee, Symantec, AMD, eBay. The list just goes on and on.

The history of Silicon Valley reads much like the history of computing itself. From the garage where William Hewlett and David Packard first worked togather, to the house where two guys named Steve started building computer kit named after a piece of fruit, to the fabled labs at Xerox PARC and even the dormitories at Stanford University that housed the likes of Jerry Yang and Sergey Brin, the area is crawling with high-tech historical landmarks.

The reasons put forward for the rise of Silicon Valley are numerous. Some point to the proximity of Stanford and UC Berkeley, which combine with the Livermore and Ames research labs to churn out a river of engineering and programming talent. Others note the relatively cheap real estate and liberal Northern California culture with helping to foster ambitious startups and crazy ideas.

Regardless of the reason, there's pretty much no debate as to the world's top technology hotspot.

Iain Thomson: OK, we're biased, we do live here after all. But the fact remains that if you want to find the greatest area of technical innovation you head to North California.

Like it or not the Silicon Valley area has been central to the development of the IT industry for nearly 50 years. Shaun's point about the intellectual quality of local education is well made, but I think there's something more primaeval at play here.

California is an odd place, a dysfunctional hodgepodge of cultures and climates. In culture terms it's the kind of place that inspires people with money to take a punt at a seemingly dumb idea. If something like Facebook, which has yet to make a profit, can be valued at billions by the locals then there's an engine for growth that is willing to take a punt on IT.

But there's also the climate. Two of the greatest cities in America are found here but it's also one of the most geologically unstable areas in the world. Everyone's waiting for the big one, and while this makes some more safety conscious (I got an email when I came here detailing where the emergency supplies were in case of an earthquake) it inspires others to acts of quiet lunacy, or as it's known, the American Way.

People here really do believe that if you build it they will come. It's the kind of madcap thinking that has been proved right too often to be ignored. It's the ideal place for venture capital to get strong, and the rewards have been great.