One of the reasons for visiting Taiwan was a chance to see the 2nd largest computer show in the world, Computex. It is located in a series of halls surrounding the world’s tallest building: Taipei 101.
I was a little concerned about registering and getting into the show since it seems to be open to only “professional buyers” for all the days but the last day. So I had to give them some company name, phone number, fax number, plus a business card and I was able to get in. Good thing I brought along a couple 7 year-old business cards from home just in case. It worked, I got a International Visitor badge that says “Lon Matero, United States.”
I started in Hall 1 of the Taipei World Trade Center. I noticed a lot of networking companies with wireless cards, routers, antennas. There was a bigger booth for Enermax, who makes the power supply in my computer at home. They were showing off a power supply running like 10 hard drives, 4 video cards, 2 CPUs all at the same time. There were more companies on the 2nd floor. One showed me a demo of a router that can connect to a G3.5 phone signal. They were getting pretty good speeds, 60KB/s or so average. I think hard to get that in the US. In Asia I think you can get unlimited data transfer for dirt cheap using these: $15-$20 a month.
Another antenna company asked for my business card, so right away I used up my only two cards (well, they weren’t accurate anyway). Throughout the day it got pretty uncomfortable since these companies are selling and they want my “company” to buy and possibly resell or distribute in the US. They would all ask for my card and information on my company which I didn’t have. I think it is unusual for someone to come all the way here to this show without a company sending them.
I checked out Hall 2 (all WiMAX technologies), Hall 3 (mostly consumer electronics), and TICC which has some smaller showrooms and meeting rooms. It was strange when I visited Analog Devices. They had a few prototype hardware designs running, but I wasn’t sure exactly what they did. After being confused after a while, I asked someone but then he wouldn’t talk to me because he thought I was a competitor at an American engineering company and these products were confidential. So I left and decided that was enough for one day.