Three years ago, Amazon's HQ2 competition showed the world just how many local politicians would happily sell their first-born child if it meant bringing tech jobs to their community. Hundreds of cities and regions made bids to land the everything store's new headquarters, offering all manner of subsidies and perks to one of the most powerful corporations on Earth with the hope that, by the grace of Jeff Bezos, they could one day become the next Seattle. Most of them never had a chance. Amazon largely ignored the offers from midsized contenders, instead selecting New York City and the Virginia suburbs outside of Washington, D.C., places with already-flourishing tech scenes where it would be easy to recruit talent. Although Amazon also promised to put a smaller office in Nashville, the outcome was a stark illustration of how, left to its own devices, the tech industry would likely continue concentrating itself in a handful of already-rich cities.

FedEx plans to house small technology hubs at locations throughout its network that will better handle its computing needs, its chief information officer says, with the first being installed in Memphis inside an air-transport container. The team-up with Dell Technologies and data center company Switch will support FedEx's growing technological requirements for its highly automated facilities, its in-development delivery robot Roxo, SenseAware ID tracking devices and more, CIO Rob Carter said in an interview. "We see a world coming where you need ultra-high availability, ultra-low latency compute – much closer to the action than what traditional data centers or even cloud data centers provide," he said. The three companies announced the collaboration Nov. 12, with a news release saying the technology hubs will allow customers "to make real-time decisions using capabilities like artificial intelligence, machine learning and 5G." The localized approach will give its consumers "faster access to their workloads and data for greater flexibility and speed" as businesses rely more and more on near real-time connectivity, Dell Technologies Global Chief Technology Officer John Roese said in a statement.

I recently spent a week in Toronto and Montreal working with new startups and can't believe the passion and energy I felt there. The DNA of Canadian entrepreneurs is charged with technical competency, commitment to creating value and a drive to make a difference. Unfortunately the Canadian startup scene has been plagued with a lack of investment dollars and experience, resulting in few mergers and acquisitions and major IPOs. The conditions to create the next unicorn have never been met. Canada, a place where education in subjects like math has always been strong, hasn't seen the startup success of other countries.

Google is finally going ahead with its plans to build a "landscraper" headquarters in London's King's Cross, more than three years after the project was first announced. The development, which will be Google's UK headquarters, was reportedly thrown into turmoil in 2015 when bosses in California threw out the original plans, by London-based architects AHMM, for being "too boring", and brought in a Thomas Heatherwick, designer of a new London bus, the Olympic cauldron, and the Garden Bridge. Further questions were raised in the wake of Britain's vote to leave the European Union about whether or not the search engine would want to base up to 7,000 employees in London. But in a speech on Tuesday at Google's current campus in King's Cross, chief executive Sundar Pichai confirmed the plans were going ahead. "Here in the UK, it's clear to me that computer science has a great future with the talent, educational institutions, and passion for innovation we see all around us," he said.