Sitting in Hong Kong Airport on the free wifi. We ran a story on ChinaTechNews.com recently where the HK govt is planning to install lots more free wifi, and I hope it happens soon–can't use my China Unicom CDMA card down here.

Got back to Shanghai from the U.S. last Thursday night and just arrived in Hong Kong today. Will spend a short time here for some meetings and then head home. Hong Kong weather is so nice.

The trip to the States was good. Along with the CSR panel, I ended up also presenting on the Consumer panel at the Harvard China Review conference. BDL Media currently publishes a franchise-related online publication at ChinaFranchiser.com, but in the next week we're going to announce a new retail-related initiative that has been in the works for a few months. I bundled some of the information from the franchise, retail, and csr publishing we do for the presentation on that consumer panel.

I think that conference was much better than last year. Though this year it lasted only a day, the quality of presenters was high. Shi Wang, founder of Chinese real estate firm Vanke, was there along with the heads of Capitaland, Air China, and other Chinese firms (Capitaland is a Singapore-based firm). The heads of all the major investment banks doing business in China were also in attendance. Also the quality of the Q&A of the 2 panels I was on was also a relief–as many of the attendees were Chinese themselves, there was a high level of understanding of the business environment in China.

Before heading to Cambridge, I spent 2 days in Chapel Hill and spent a couple hours giving short talks on CSR in China and entrepreneurship. As the Kenan Institute there has strong ties to China and many of the students had either worked or lived in China, again the quality of questions was high. Though I can't ever see myself going back to school (I graduated with my undergrad degree after 3 years of study simply because I detested school so much and wanted to finish it quickly), I really like dealing with people who like to learn.

Happy to be back in Asia now. It's difficult to get good food in America.