The top firms in California's Silicon Valley carry more weight on the global stage than many countries, which makes building diplomatic relations with them increasingly important, the world's first national technology ambassador said. Chosen to fill what his country's foreign ministry has dubbed the first "techplomacy" posting on the U.S. West Coast, Denmark's Casper Klynge will be tasked with building direct ties between his country and the likes of Facebook, Apple and Alphabet's Google.

The digital ambassador, who will lead the Danish foreign policy initiative dubbed ‘tech diplomacy’, was named on Friday as Casper Klynge, the current Danish ambassador to Indonesia.The digital ambassador will be based in Silicon Valley, California, but will have a global mandate to promote the tech agenda internationally and is therefore expected to frequently visit global technology hubs as well as engage actively with stakeholders in Denmark, said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Anders Samuelsen, the Danish foreign minister who appointed the first tech ambassador to Silicon Valley, looks for inspiration in Israel and other tech hubs. Samuelsen, 49, who has headed the ministry since November, has made digital and technological development in Denmark one of the key strategic priorities for the nation’s foreign policy. [...] The country also set up an innovation center in Tel Aviv last year, one of seven the Scandinavian nation has opened globally.

With technology empowering non-traditional actors who create asymmetric threats, there are real questions as to how the Department of Defense (DOD) can best ensure security and preserve privacy. For many years, DOD has worked to attract top technologists from Silicon Valley. I was part of one White House initiative called the Presidential Innovation Fellows, where technologists and venture capitalists go to Washington.

While the world of business is increasingly connected and integrated on the global scale, the nationality of a brand at times attains growing political significance in today’s marketplace. Some argue that with globalization a brand’s nationality—its perceived national association—has become so tenuous that contemporary consumers may not care where a brand is from or even know the country-of-origin information of the brands they purchase.

[W]hen Mr. Zhao, a Chinese tourist, arrived with his wife in September, they spent their first day wandering the humdrum suburban office parks that Facebook and Google call home. Joining a guided bus tour with a dozen other Chinese visitors, the two became part of the steady flow of Chinese tourists to Silicon Valley that represents — despite pervasive censorship and outright hostility from the Chinese government — the tremendous influence Silicon Valley wields in China.