Back from China & Off to Seattle

Well I got back into Guelph yesterday morning and spent the day learning more about the “restructuring” that happened at my work. While I currently have my job I lost 95% of my team due to “cutbacks” and am left wondering what the future will hold for me and the rest of the team.

Anyways on a positive note China was eventful and fun, met up with the Jianfei Zhu, who is the Yao Ming of the search world. Also had some really good meetings with Alibaba/Yahoo! China and maybe will end up sending some of my ex-team members into China to help Alibaba/Yahoo! China succeed on their SEO goals. The trip was a little long and I am glad to be back but sadly I have only 2 days here in Guelph and I have to fly off to Search Marketing Expo in Seattle.

Seattle is a city I haven’t spent much time in but will be good to go up for this event as it’s the first SMX and it should be very educational and full of interesting people. Will have a chance to meet up with Matt Cutts again at the event, it’s been a awhile since we met face to face as being in Asia all I could do was email with him.

As for Guelph it is getting warmer and prettier all the time, I am looking forward to this summer being able to walk around and enjoy some of the outdoor activities. I haven’t fully moved into my home yet, also my stuff from Singapore hasn’t arrived so won’t post any photos of my place just yet. Hopefully this month my stuff will arrive and my home will be ready to have a nice housewarming party as well as take some photos.

To all my ex-staff and to the editors and writers, I will do my best to help you find work within the industry as your knowledge is very valuable and if I had my own company setup in Canada I would be happy to take some of you in myself. The next 2 months you all will have many offers but take your time and don’t rush into the first job your offered. As while change is always difficult this might just be a really great chance to focus and find that dream job. If anyone has interest to work in China, either for copy writing, editing or SEO please drop me an email, but note that while it’s a job it is not going to pay a lot of money but will be a great personal and working experience.

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Search Engine Strategies China

I am back in China for the next 10 days, will be speaking at SES China on the Advanced SEO track, my presentation will be posted here once its finished. I am really looking forward to meeting up with some old friends at this year’s event. This will mark the 2nd year for SES in China and thanks to Inway and TimeV sure it will have many more years of great success.

Later today will be fun as I will meet up with several executives from the largest Internet company in China for some dinner and talk about the future of that company within the International marketplace. This dinner also happens to include an old friend from Singapore, she happen to leave Singapore to join this company and now landed herself a sweet directors role and an even sweet chance to meet up with me again tonight. I’ll try and post comments back from the dinner, but it should be interesting as a lot of great minds will be at the table.

Right now I am in Hangzhou but will be leaving for Xiamen on Thursday so if any other SES’ers are out there and are in HZ drop me a quick email and maybe we can grab some dinner or just say hi if we pass each other around town. I am staying at the Hyatt on the lake.

Its 6:30am here, which means its 6:30pm back in Guelph and surprisingly my body has been able to shift over to the new time zone relatively easy. Part of the easy of switching time zones came from the flight as it was non-stop from Toronto to Shanghai which meant it didn’t really feel like you where traveling. But sadly the flight was on Air Canada and boy even though I was flying “Executive First Class” it was far far from first class service.

To give you a basic idea of how old and poor the service was our leading stewardess was cerebrating her 40th year flying with Air Canada this week. Makes me almost embarrassed to say that I used to date a leading stewardess, but she was far away from doing anything for 40 years and looked far better then the staff Air Canada pulled out of the retirement home and gave a uniform to.

On a funny note related to domain/company names, the gentlemen sitting beside me on the flight was the CEO of a company which I thought was a really cool name, eSteve (ie electronic steve) or at least that is how I read his company name. Turns out it’s really Esteve and is a pharma company based in Spain. He did laugh when I told him I thought is company was eSteve and he said that it’s very often people don’t know how to pronounce the name. Got me thinking about eStephen.com, but sadly some damn domain parker has registered it so not much chance of getting that one anytime soon.

Ok its off to have some breakfast and then a quick nap so that I can make it though the day as want to make sure I am fresh and alert for tonight’s dinner.

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Thomas DVD Movie Rental

This weekend is my first one in my new home and thanks for Thomas Movie Rental it has become a movie weekend. The location of my new home, 2 Quebec Street, not only has a lot of great restaurants it also is less then 5 minutes walk to the video store.

So today I got a membership at Thomas Entertainment CD & Movie Rentals and picked up 6 great movies to get me through the weekend.

While the video store is not easy to find things in yourself, it does have a couple great employee's that know where things are. So ask if you can't find something as movies are not organized alphabetically and there are a couple sections for each type of movie, yes it is as confusing as it sounds.

They also have a websites, while not fully working it does have some tools and information. the website is http://www.thomasvideo.ca/ and the Thomas Video Rentals phone number is (519) 822-1451 and their address is: 60 Baker St. Guelph. Open 10am to 10pm daily.

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