I got an email from my friend Robin Chan this morning. He's in Beijing and attended a hackathon sponsored by our portfolio company 10gen (developer of the open source datastore MongoDB). He said the developers in Beijing were showing their love for Mongo and building some great web apps with it.
That caused me to run a Google Trends analysis on MongoDB and this is what it shows (click on the image to see it in a larger format):
The top regions for searches on MongoDB are Russia, South Korea, China, Ukraine, Sweden, Israel, India, and then the US. The top cities are Beijing (Robin was right), San Francisco, Moscow, Shanghai, Stockholm, and NYC. The top languages are Korean, Russian, Chinese, then English.
MongoDB is becoming a very popular datastore for new web and mobile applications. So this is a crude proxy for where the new web and mobile applications are being built.
When people ask me what the biggest trend on the web is, I tell them globalization. Web services are being used globally and they are increasingly being built globally. There is no place in the world that has a lock on talent, ideas, and execution. Web development is a global phenomenon.
