As anyone following me on Twitter no doubt knows, I hit up the Shanghai leg of the China 2.0 tour this past Thursday and Friday. I’m a bit behind in posting about it, as it took me a few days to process the massive amount of brain-feed I crammed into those 48 hours.
Though I’m putting together a more in-depth summary of the tour for The Tech Dynasty, I thought I’d make a quick mention of the awesome experience here. A warning, massive linkbacking is about to occur – but you wont regret checking out any or all of these immensely clickable people.
As a quick intro, the China 2.0 tour was a “tour” of China put together by The China Business Network, CNReviews and Web2Asia, as a way for prolific Western bloggers and industry professionals to get an on-the-ground look at what China is really about.
Members of the tour (in Shanghai at least) included author/blogger Shel Israel, TechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher, Dutch ProBlogger Ernst-Jan Pfauth, freelance writer and blogger Sheila Scarborough, photographer Bart Lapers and Jamie Quint.
On top of those cool people, it was great to see Christine Lu again, and finally put faces to the avatars of Web2Asia’s George Godula and Markus Gruber, as well as ace-shutterbug Elliott Ng and Twittermaniac David Feng, both from CNReviews.
And if all that name-dropping/linking wasn’t enough… the tour gave me opportunity to catch up with Adam Schokora, John Guise and Kenneth Tan, raise (far too quick) a glass with Sean Leow, graffiti the walls at Tudou HQ with founders Marc van der Chijs and Gary Wang, and scarf down some amazing Sichuan food with Alibaba CFO Joe Cai, Mobinode’s Gang Lu, SpreadShirt founder and angel investor Lukasz Gadowski, CHINICT President Franck Nazikian, and JL McGregor’s Elias Glenn.
Just an insane amount of hand-shaking and card-swapping. Two things I’m not apt at. However, in spite of my networking shortcomings, it was an absolutely amazing time and well-worth the 30 minute train into The City.
Me and Shel Israel
And don’t forget to check out The Tech Dynasty for a more in-depth, less name-full, post about the innovative Chinese startups we visited. Should be up tomorrow-ish.
