The Rest of the Visit to China: Info 2.0, PureXML, and Beijing Research Labs

I got back from a great, but very, very busy trip to China last Friday. The trip looked something like this:

• Saturday Night: Lauren gets to Beijing, suffers through a little bit of jetlag and a police station
• Sunday: Sightseeing at Ming Tombs, Forbidden City, Great Wall; Sunday night: work prep for Monday
• Monday: Work in the AM, Dinner with Jing Wei (IBM China technical guru) and a partner; Phone calls until midnight
• Tuesday: Meet with Peter Cheng (www.huihoo.org) for breakfast, PureXML event in the AM/early PM; Flight to Seoul, South Korea in the PM; arrive at The Shilla at 10pm
• Wednesday: Meeting with IBM South Korea folks, customer event, return to hotel at 7pm; phone calls until 10pm
• Thursday: Return to Beijing, More work based on what we'd learned from those meetings
• Friday: Pack up (which was no small task, let me tell you) and head to IBM Beijing Research Labs. Afternoon - hour cab ride through backstreets of Beijing (super cool, btw) and back to the airport.

Here's a pic of Mark presenting in Seoul for one of our customer events.

And here's a pic of the IBM Beijing Research Labs team:

I'll be following up shortly with slides from the PureXML event, but for now, check out more info on PureXML here. Also, here's a link to some demos. PureXML is a cool, relatively new technology (featured with DB2 9) that handles XML as a new type of data that is stored differently than relational data, so it can be quickly integrated and therefore speeds app development, search performance, and also allows for both SQL and XQuery to query XML data. Check it out... it's pretty kick-ass stuff./LC