Barcamp Shanghai Logo

But the most important thing is that I finally met the community in Shanghai. It takes time to do anything here when you don’t speak the local language and you don’t live at the right side of the river. The community in Shanghai is a very international mix of Hackers, Open Software fanatics, Apple zealots, masters of the electron and Social media gurus. All of them got together to share ideas and pizza.

All of them using my language.

Barcamp seating area.

Thanks to msittig for the picture.

A trade show is interesting these days not to see new products (we know the products perfectly the same day they are released to market thought the internet) but because they give you the opportunity to see who is the real person you had been communicating via email in the last months and because it provides you with a hands-on with the technology.

I went with Antonio and Ignacio (as in the old days). As usual, we arrived super late and all the parking lots on the exhibition center were full so we needed around 1 extra hour to park the car.

When we finally arrived at the IFEMA, we realized that there were lots of different trade shows at the same time in the exhibition center. There were one focusing on solar energy, another about office furniture, a trade show about physical security, one about digital storage and the Siti/asLAN. The funny thing is that the Siti only needed half a pavilion while the normal trade shows needed several pavilions. Plus we needed to go to an area we never had been before that was instantly named “the low cost area of the exhibition center” because it was clearly half-finished.

But the trade show was interesting indeed, for example we received a fast class about optical connectors and a demonstration of how to use mechanical fiber connectors. We also discover a very interesting Portuguese company with a working solution for Wifi localization inside buildings (and we are invited to go to see a demo in a hospital in Oporto) and lots and lots of surveillance cameras.

There were several non-techie interesting things, I lost a wii tennis match against Antonio (How it could be? I can’t understand…) and I gave a kiss… to a wireless robot. Yeah, this is the first time I gave a kiss to a robot. In public