Chance beckons in the world's largest workshop.

(From South China Morning Post)

Byline: Michael Friedman Michael Friedman is technology director of TTC InfoAge, Shanghai

I am sitting on the bus watching the factories flash by. It is an ugly industrial landscape of dirty buildings full of workers making everything from key chains to shoes. I am on my way from our office in Shenzhen to a customer in Dongguang, the heart of the Pearl River Delta, what The Economist calls "the workshop of the world".

It is funny but, back in the dot-com era, most of those Internet and software companies that sprang up like mushrooms and then died like flies were focused on building global businesses. If they thought about China at all it was to support Chinese exports - …