Dear Friends,
Back in the Green Mountains for at least a few days after a great trip to China. I am heading out to Minneapolis for the Apple Specialist Marketing Coop Conference today. Jason L. and I will be riding our motorcycles to the conference and taking the Lake Express high speed ferry across Lake Michigan on the way out.
Kali and Dawn did not cover the Apple quarterly financial results last week but after a lot of doom and gloom predictions prior to the release of the results, Apple once again posted record sales and record earnings and that is an understatement by itself. Their success was driven to a large part by sales in China, with Apple making significant market penetration for iPhone and iPad in that market.
My trip to China certainly confirmed that as I saw maybe 50% of the people in Hong Kong with iPhones and iPhones present in even the remote parts of China that I visited. My guide in Hangzhou had an iPad that he used to show us pictures of his family, play some of his original music and entertain us while on a boat ride on the West Lake.
When we got to Shanghai, again the iPhone was everywhere and when we visited the Apple store there, it was as jammed packed as any store in the USA—maybe even more so. We spent one week working, attending shows in Hong Kong and visiting the factories of the companies where our Hammerhead products are produced. When we visited our man in China, Simon Liao, we had a grand welcome complete with fireworks and a great lunch with his family.
Since Grace was with me on this trip, we decided to spend some of Hapy’s inheritance and booked a great tour of China through Wild China, which included some amazing adventures such as a climb up Yellow Mountain (and its 1.2 bijllion stairs) and a night in a 600-year-old house in Xidi. I met a lot of very friendly and interesting Chinese people and really fell in love with the people and the culture. It was funny that many of the young women would ask to have their pictures taken with me or Grace either because of our tattoos or that we were some of the only westerners they have seen. I had my brief moment of rock star-ism.
Check out some photos from our adventure here.
After 21 hours of traveling, it was sure good to be back home and get our dogs from our friends who were watching them and then stop at the store to get a steak for dinner. Five days on, I am just now getting over jet lag from being on the other side of the world. I am giving a talk on the future of technology to another tech company in Vermont in a couple of weeks and the topic I chose was, “How Science Fiction Becomes Science Reality.” Certainly hopping on an airplane on one side of the planet and 15 hours later, getting off on the other side of the planet is one of those examples!