"The Gateway to Asia" is how the marketing brochures promote Singapore. But Brian Chen, CTO of the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), the government’s own IT shop, offers a more practical description: "Singapore is Asia 101," he says.

Or Asia Lite. Or Asia for Beginners. As opposed to countries such as China and India, where large labor forces are at least partially compromised by creaky IT infrastructures or cranky governments, Singapore is the plug-and-play marketplace?a super-wired country where, as the Singaporeans would have Westerners believe, the e-business is brisk and the living is easy.

"This is the place you go to get your feet wet in Asia," says Chen, who was born in Fujian Province in China, was educated as an engineer in the United States, and worked for Motorola in China just prior to joining the IDA in early 2000. And as Chen sits in IDA’s spacious, elegant lounge in the Suntec City Tower Three in Singapore’s Marina district (where pop rocker Christopher Cross had performed two days before), Singapore certainly seems to offer Westerners a home away from home. "It’s an easy adjustment," Chen concludes.

Singapore has attracted Western interests since 1819, when Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles of the British East India Co. stumbled upon the tiny island (246 square miles) and quickly established it as a trading post for the British Empire. With its central location (a short swim south from Malaysia) and its deep harbor, Singapore by 1869 had become a thriving port for Western coal merchants, ship builders and traders.

Fast-forward to the 1990s. Not only had the port become the biggest, busiest, most IT-savvy in the world (see "The Port of Singapore" on Page 96), but the city-state was now home to thousands of multinational companies, including Citibank, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems?the East India Companies of the late 20th century, looking to take advantage of the following:

• A stable, business-friendly government offering huge tax incentives (10 years 100 percent tax free if a business establishes a regional headquarters) and local partnerships.

• A largely English-speaking, Westernized environment complete with shopping malls and U.S. restaurant chains.

• A sophisticated telecommunications infrastructure, including a state-of-the-art broadband network reaching 99 percent of the population.

• A heterogeneous community of 4 million that’s 78 percent Chinese, 13 percent Malay and 7 percent Indian, making Singapore an ideal test market for a good slice of Asia.

"For a U.S. company coming into this marketplace, Singapore is very cosmopolitan, a melting pot of cultures," says Vincent Sim, senior marketing manager for Microsoft’s MSN business unit, which opened its Internet portal to Singapore in 2000. In two years, MSN was able to attract 800,000 local e-mail subscribers, and in 2001 it used Singapore as a laboratory to launch a successful series of live concert webcasts. "We find we can test new services in Singapore and then cross-share the learnings across Asia," Sim says.