Today our first company visit was with Motorola. They had reserved a meeting room for us at a
local hotel, since space was limited in their office building. The hotel was amazing. If
our hotel was a 5-star, this one was at
least 10.
Two Motorola executives were there for the
presentation. Biao was the VP of
Corporate Communications. He was a
They gave us a brief overview of the cellular
phone market
in
The latest things in Chinese phones are pen-based phones. These phones have a large touch screen and a stylus. You can write on the touch screen with the stylus, and the phone translates it into text. This is a huge improvement in Chinese text messaging. Text messaging in English is pretty straightforward. You have the 10 phone buttons to cover 26 letters. Chinese has over 16,000 different characters. Previously, in order to send a text message in Chinese, you had to type the word in regular English letters phonetically. Then the phone would make it into a Chinese character. This is cumbersome, since there are so many sounds in the Chinese language that really don’t translate into English. Chinese text messaging has almost become a completely different language, which I find very interesting. The pen-based phones eliminate the need for this. You can just write your message directly in Chinese.
Biao passed around the phone he’s currently using. It’s as thin as a RAZR phone, but has the
large touch screen. It also has a
feature that can scan a business card and import all of that info into
his
address book automatically. Pretty
slick!
Motorola is a huge brand in
After the Motorola meeting, we went back to the
hotel area
for lunch. We ended up eating in another
noodle hut. I was not very hungry, so I
didn’t order noodles. I just had a plate
of veggies with some kind of spicey sauce.
Very good.
After lunch, we went to our next meeting at the Bank of Montreal. This was within walking distance of our hotel. This meeting was not very interesting to me. I have never been too interested in the finance side of business, and investment banking just isn’t too exciting to me.
When I got back to the hotel, I took my laptop up
to the
Executive Lounge and worked on homework for awhile.
Then Happy Hour started, and some of my
classmates showed up. Then we all went
to a nice restaurant for Peking Duck.
We split into groups of 3 and took taxis to the
restaurant. Steppen and Jaime were in my
taxi. Steppen is a slightly crazy Korean
guy. I never see him without a drink in
his hand, and often also a cigar. In the
cab, we were discussing whether it was feasible to ship some stuff home
so that
we didn’t have to take it to
At the Peking Duck restaurant, we were led to the
second
floor and down a long hallway. We passed
by a number of small, private rooms.
Apparently this restaurant was all private rooms.
In our room, we all sat down at 2 large,
round tables. We were served almost
immediately,
family-style, everything except the duck.
We made a number of toasts to Leon and Phil and Erica. Then the Peking Duck was brought in. The chef carved it at the table, and then the waitress showed us how to dip the pieces in sauce and wrap them up in a tortilla.
After we finished eating, Steppen announced that
he was
going out to have a cigar. I had been
telling Erica about his towel issue, and as he passed our table, she
gave him a
little crap about that. Steppen FREAKED
out, and yelled, “I DON’T HAVE TO DO WHAT YOU SAY!
YOU AIN’T MY MAMA!” And then he ran
from the room. I have no idea what that
was about. I guess he must have been drunk.
As we left the restaurant, we were handed a
business card
that said, in English and Chinese, “Take me to
The next bar we tried was a little
hole-in-the-wall
place. Above the bar hung all kinds of
money from different countries, with writing on them.
I took out one US dollar and wrote on it,
“LFGSM 2006” and gave it to the bar tender to hang.
At this bar, I got a chance to talk to one of
my classmates, Jim, for the first time.
He works for Aon, which is a company that Mike has done a lot of
business with. Jim doesn’t work with the
consulting side that Mike worked with, though.
He does something with engineering and fire protection systems. He does a lot of work with the city of
We moved on to one final bar.
It was a really nice lounge-type place with
plush red furniture. They had a really
nice bathroom, too. At this bar, I got
to talk with another classmate, Pete. Pete
had lived in
At some point in the evening, we started playing the “Guess How Old I Am” game. I guessed everyone’s age within one year. For my age, I got guesses of 38, 36, and 33. There was a lot of back-pedaling when I revealed my real age.