good travel tip…

“How to be safe in a foreign country” has some good tips on things to do prior and during your trips to any country you’re not familiar with. Do your research before you go there (protests in Bangkok perhaps?), make copies of your documents, take important contact information with you, and a host of other tips (like: don’t look like a tourist 🙂 ).

You can read the original post here. And if trouble does break loose, check out the “how to survive a riot” article.

And if things really go south, and you happen to get stuck in a war zone, the “Dark arts for good guys” series over at this site may be an entertaining – althought slightly worrying – read.

Riot

Mobile advertising the shanghai way

Here I was, standing at shore of the Huangpu river, quietly overlooking Shanghai, when this came floating by.

Now, there are a lot of screens already all over the city: huge LED billboards on buildings, LCD screens in taxi’s, plasma screen in subway stations, gyms and whatnot. You name it, they have a screen with advertising in or on it.

So when the whole city filled up, someone had the genius idea to throw a huge LED screen on a boat, put some ads on it and take it up and down the river. I guess this qualifies as “mobile” advertising. Or visual pollution if you happen to be in the mood to stroll by the water and take in the city views. Nothing is sacred any more.

Passing through China

Well, I’m not exactly passing through China, but rather visiting Shanghai for the Intel Developer forum. It’s an interesting city, and with a population of 18 million people there are actually more people living there than in my own country. Go figure. Actually, that could be a scary thought… or a comforting one, if you take into account the saying that “No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, 1.3 billion Chinese couldn’t care less.” To be honest, it might be up to 1.4 by now as the 1.3 figure was almost a year ago. Oh, and did I mention that they likely have the largest online population too now. Well, almost.

On board of my KLM flight was also a Dutch delegation on a one-week china trip. Follow their journey on marketingfacts.nl (Dutch only).

On a side-note, It was a bit of an adjustment to see all those people smoking everywhere again, as we’ve had so many bans on smoking in Europe, that it’s hard to imagine that many smokers all over the place again. I was also surprised that I didn’t see that many fancy new cars all over the place… mabe I was just in the wrong district.