Trend Taiwan – Day 1

So today I started my one week work with Trend here in Taipei. I arrived last night after a long flight from Sydney via Hong Kong and finally got into my room around midnight. Unfortunately the guy and gal next door were not ready to go to bed and I was not able to get to sleep for some hours (lucky guy next door).

So I arrived at the office today – caught a cab from the hotel which I managed without too much trouble – Trend have this little laminated card with the office and hotel address in Chinese on it which makes it really easy. Naturally my Chinese skills are non existent, so I rely on the cab driver to take me there.

I was shown to my cubicle and they’ve organised a laptop for me to use and business cards. Check out the photo below… oops – yup you guessed it, they forgot that I don’t read Chinese and loaded the laptop with Windows XP Chinese language. Well – this should be fun 🙂

So I did my first presentation for the day – 2 hours talking about what it’s like to be a reseller in the SMB Space, giving feedback of my own combined with everything that you have sent to me. I was presenting to not only marketing folk, but also to the actual developers who write the code behind the CS and CSM for SMB products. Naturally I brought a great supply of Freddo Frogs, Caramello Koala’s with me to hand out to those that asked great questions. And I taught them all how to say G’day mate. Lots of great feedback given and taken during this session. They had more of their development team connect in for the conference call from their Nanjing office.

Then lunch – more interesting food experiences – although we kept it pretty tame for now. After lunch we had some meetings to discuss things including, how Trend can work better with the community – lots of good ideas were exchanged and I hope to report more later on this once plans are complete.

The day finished with a surprise birthday cake for me as it is my birthday today – there are photos but I don’t have it. Thanks guys – Day 1 was great – looking forward to Day 2 when I spend the day working with the User Interface and Documentation teams.