After a 10.5 hour flight and a chance to catch up on films I missed over the last 6 months of cinema (Big Miracle, Contagion, Machine Gun Preacher, Crazy Stupid Love and I’m sure one more! …. Incase you were wondering) you’ll no doubt be pleased to hear that I landed safe and sound here in Shanghai.
Why are we here?
Well, Hewlett Packard have flown out around 500 people from all over the world to launch over 40 new products and share then with us all. There seems to be everyone and anyone here but for obvious reasons it’s tech based outlets including CNet, ZdNet, Wired to name but a few and then more blogging type outlets like us at HeyUGuys who are here to write up what we see in a more blog type form which is why I want to try to bring you daily updates on what we’ve been up to.
The event is called the HP Global Influencer Summit and it’s taking place at the Shanghai Exhibition Centre. As yet, I’m not really sure what to expect as we’ve been given pretty much a full day to just acclimatised and get our bearings.
Day 1
Normally when I get to these things, there is a little time to meet your fellow travellers and find out what we all do and we’ve been very fortunate to do so many trips now that usually I know at least one other person on it but this is a rare occasion where I didn’t know a sole. That has now changed of course as yesterday I got to meet and have an aventure around Shanghai with writers from various tech outlets in the UK. We did our best to navigate ourselves around one of the most vastly populated cities in the world without getting too lost or in trouble.
We got to see the old town and experience some local dishes before heading out in the evening for dinner. It’s a funny old thing jet lag, you just have to push through it even though all you want to do is curl up into a ball and say goodnight to the world but in the end managed to push on through for a big 30 hours awake with no sleep! I think the highlight of randomness for the day was when we attempted to get dinner last night at the ‘Cool Docks’ and when the restaurant had run out of tables, were ushered upstairs in to a private room all by ourselves and were treated like royalty after the usual language barrier issues.
Shanghai is an amazing place with really lovely people. I do still find it very odd getting into a plane and being taken to what could be another planet in the way that the culture is just so different to anything I’m used to.
I think I’ll stop writing there otherwise it’ll turn into Dave’s diary but today (Wednesday) we’re off to the first day of the HP Global Influencers Summit and we’ll hopefully have some product tech news to being you later on so stay tuned for more!
