After spending quite a deal of design time in China including guest lectures at Colleges and Universities, I still am regularly disappointed when I discover blatant ‘interpretation’ of successful international products.

This image is of a television in my hotel room in Shanghai and probably even more surprising than the unashamed alignment of the brand name [certainly not the tag line…] is the fact that a renowned hotel, famed for its Art Deco design would promote this product to its guests.

In my opinion China can and should and must change its international badge from ‘made in China’ to ‘designed and made in China’ if it wishes to value add to its exports. Then and only then will it really become an accredited member of the international manufacturing community and a powerful one at that! I hope that my company here can in some small way contribute to this transformation.

One another note, having invested time and energy into the design of our products, one is always bemused if they are copied by rival companies [and I am not just talking about China] but what is even more annoying is when the copying is done badly…and all the hard part was done for them!

Shanghai can be counted on one thing and that is producing the unexpected and Gerry Mussett along with James Shen & Martin Zhang headed off one Friday night on a bar finding expedition in Pudong.

Their pilgrimage eventually led them down an alley in the shadows of the skyscrapers into an empty Nepalese restaurant …last place to find a bar you might say and so they thought until the barman responded to their “what beer do you have” query by turning them around to see the best little micro brewery in town.

Gerry reported the brew was absolutely superb and despite heroically failing at draining the vats they nevertheless left their mark and vowed one day to return with reinforcements. A great find indeed.

The last weeks of World Expo here in Shanghai are not going to be a gradual wind down rather a headlong rush to get to see the worlds best on show. This weekend over 1,000,000 visitors PER DAY poured into the huge site and many queued for up to 12 hours to see a single pavilion.

Our on site team reports that there are 10,000,000 tickets purchased that have not been redeemed and that means the last 10 days are not going to slow down.

Sprocket’s RFID gate entry system, under the herculean efforts of John Li and his team, are working overtime and currently is handling a database of over 500,000 individuals including photographic records.

Sprocket is one thing and that is it is not static and, in tandem with the fast paced technology it develops, has moved to take advantage of the new business realities in a fluid global marketplace. Sprocket recently purchased the highly sophisticated kiosk and digital signage management software developed by OnQ and Bill Express for their Australia wide Coles Express and Dial Time rollouts.

The success of the re-purposing and deployment of this software for several high profile Sprocket clients has led us to rebrand the software  as Sprocket COGS (see COGS post) and to park the Sprocket Digital brand.

The recent highly successful deployment of Sprocket’s technology at the Shanghai World Expo has been the result of an immense amount of hard work by our partner Mr Li and to this end we have established Sprocket RFID as our vehicle for bringing this technology to the Australian and world markets (see Ssshh post) in addition to the burgeoning Chinese demand for sophisticated security technology.