Another trip comes to a close, and it reinforces for me once again the importance of being able to meet, face-to-face, the people that you are working with at least once in a while. Whilst the progression in tools to help us collaborate with others in spite of geographic dislocation has been dramatic in the past couple of decades, the trust that we need to build in one another to help us get to grips with the task at hand seems so much easier and quicker when you are in the same physical space.

It's not to say that meaningful social relationships cannot be fostered in an online world... it's just that there is a big difference between a social relationship and a social relationship with people you need to work with. Moreover, the need to discover common interests and shared ground can happen naturally in small talk that is so hard to replicate on digital platforms.

It's been a good few days, meeting my colleagues in New York and Detroit. Many ideas have been spurred as a result of the conversations that have come from different perspectives than those I usually hear in London.

There are two things that I associate with Detroit - music and motors. The home of Motown Records, the source of house music, and the location for the big three US auto manufacturers - Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.

The motor industry has been decimated by the economic turmoil of the past few years. It's a simple equation... In times of recession, people stop buying cars. But it seems that the US auto industry could be going the same way as that in the UK: whilst local firms struggle to keep up, foreign ones come in and set up in new locations to manufacture in new ways.

Apparently companies like Toyota and Hyundai are manufacturing in enormous volume in the US now, but they've set up in cities elsewhere from Detroit, and with non-unionised operations. The hulk of auto building in Detroit struggles to change direction to keep up.

It's a funny mix, though, because the City is full of the trappings of the wealth that were generated in times past. The Dearborn Inn Hotel, opposite what was once the Ford Airport and now the Ford test track, is country house opulence. Neat, tended lawns are everywhere. And yet at 9 am this morning, the roads appeared empty. A conversation with a colleague yesterday about his journey to work in the morning - about 30 minutes... but it used to take an hour.

Actually, it should probably be the SouthWest Airlinesization of short-haul air travel, as they are the people that invented it.

After many years of air travel being viewed as something of a luxury or prestige purchase, it seems that most flights under three hours now are a no-frills, budget experience where everything is a charged-for extra. Having just checked in for my flight to Detroit tomorrow morning, an additional $23 was charged for checking in a suitcase.

It seems to me to be a fairly unusual model that the airlines are adopting. In most markets, prices go down whilst the quality and specification of what you get goes up... think motor cars, think consumer electronics, think about actually most consumer goods. In the airline industry, the headline price is (sometimes) going down, but the spec has dropped through the floor. O'Leary at RyanAir is still pitching the concept of "Pay-per-Pee" on his flights...

Oh well. Such is the lot of the modern traveller.

An interesting insight into the market demographic of Delta passengers, though, comes from their terms and conditions for checking-in fragile or bulky items for the hold.

Fragile or bulky item examples given are a saddle, antlers, Hawaiian pineapples or military duffle bags. Pity the GI who's been on a hunting holiday in Honolulu.

The Tribeca district of New York is a relatively low-rise area of the island, and historic. Many of the buildings date back to the 19th Century (which is real history in the USA), and many of the streets are cobbled. This is a major issue if you want to get a new fibre optic connection installed.

Last autumn we requested a new internet connection from our ISP. It would require a new fibre optic cable to be laid, and the permit acquisition process began. Authority from New York City, authority from the last-mile provider, and authority from the landlord of our (predominantly residential) building were needed. Gaining the permits was left to the ISP, and by April, and a number of visits from engineers and contractors with tools but not the necessary paperwork, and we found ourselves looking for a new provider.

We're still awaiting the new line, nearly a year later. As I will happily tell anyone who will listen we got a new Internet connection provisioned in the supposedly far more bureaucratic city of Shanghai in less than eight weeks (although, to be fair, a number of the things you might want to access over that internet connection will bounce off of the Great Firewall).

Part of the challenge of getting the new line in appear to be because of the historic nature of the cobbles of Franklin Street. Although, bizarrely, those cobbles are now festooned with spray paint... the feral markings of the utility companies who mark out where to (and not to) dig. Our soon-to-be-former ISP failed to get the cancellation of the original order processed in time, and so contractors dug up cobbles all the way to within 20 feet of our office. Our hopefully-soon-to-be ISP are now delayed whilst they try to track down where the cobbles that were lifted and stored now reside. Replacing them will be extremely expensive...

Arrival in Manhattan via Newark was strangely underwhelming. I think it must be the comparison with recent trips to Hong Kong and Shanghai, but New York looks somewhat spacious, with big gaps between the skyscrapers. Or it's just the cumulative effect of a long journey and heavy rain on arrival that made it look so spread out?

Waiting in line seemed to be a feature of the journey out: three people in front of me at check in at Heathrow seemed unable to cope with the idea of a single bag weighing less than twenty-three kilos; the slow crawl through immigration at Newark (I thought that the chip passports that so many of us carry these days were supposed to carry biometric data, but the border control needs to collect another set, including photos and scans of every finger and thumb); and then the queues for the toll booths on the highway (where the car in front didn't have the $1.80 required, so all manner of bureaucratic form filling to let her pass).

But now settled at the hotel, and looking forward to a couple of days with colleagues in our Franklin Street office, to be followed by a few days in Detroit.

On Sunday I'm off to the land of the free and the home of the brave. Or New York city and then Detroit, to visit our offices in the USA.

I have visited New York a few times, and it's a great place to be (for a short period, at least). I've never been to a big US industrial city, and so I'm intrigued by what I will see in Motor City, as it's a place that has undoubtedly seen great hardship in recent years as the world automotive market has gone South.

Observations throughout... stay tuned.

Shanghai isn't as different a place as I was maybe expecting. There again, I've seen little other than the Airport and Pudong - a business district that has emerged from the fields in the past 10 years.

The buildings are tall, and somewhat "space age" in a Buck Rodgers kind of way. There's a definite look to Chinese high-rise architecture that is different from anywhere else in the world. But the buildings are also very spread out - as a colleague noted, Shanghai is to the space of LA that Hong Kong is to the crampedness of New York.

Internet browsing is also a bit of a hit-and-miss affair as well. The "Great firewall" appears to be a series of blocks on DNS services - Facebook no, Google (search) yes, Picasa no, Flckr yes. All of that can be avoided if you can find some way of tunnelling out - whilst Facebook might not be a big deal for building out our business in Shanghai, we are looking seriously at using Picasa for some of our content management, and not having access would be an issue.

BlackBerry also can provide a route out which bypasses the local filtering, but it also has been a bit hit and miss in terms of actually getting a service in the first place.

This morning is the last day of my trip - this afternoon we will fly back to Hong Kong, and then I get a flight (BA strike permitting) back to London just before midnight.

The trip has be ably assisted by:

the HP NetBook (hasn't let me down),
Google Apps (ditto),
TripIt (mostly useful),
the BlackBerry Curve with LinkedIn, FaceBook, Twitter and Google Maps (good once I was able to get data connections),
OpenOffice (hardly used at all),
my Android Hero (barely used - no way that I'm paying for roaming data)
and a half bag-full of various power adaptors (please, one day, let there be standardization...)

Until you actually get to spend some time working in a different environment, it's very difficult to get a handle on the subtle differences that exist between cultures - whether they be borne of nationality, industry or company.

There are striking differences between the ways in which people in our Sydney and Hong Kong offices operate, even though there are a reasonable number of expats in both locations, and that we work in a company with it's own very strong culture that comes, in large part, from the owner-managed nature of the business.

In Hong Kong, the office stays relatively quiet. In Sydney, people quite frequently converse from one side of the office to the other. In Hong Kong, the day starts relatively late, and goes on well into the evening. Sydney starts early and finishes closer to "on time". Hong Kong, lunch is an important event that people make time for. Sydney sees a sandwich grabbed at the desk.

When you are working remotely from your team, it's all too easy to not pick up on these subtleties, and that can form the basis of conflict without either side really realising what is going on. Whilst technology is undoubtedly making the world smaller, actually spending time with people and finding out how they tick is still so very important. Getting the time and budget to do so, though, becomes more and more of a challenge in so many organisations.

Shanghai tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how that, very new to the company, operation works.

The East Hotel in Tai Koo where I'm currently staying is only five months old, and shows a cool sophistication that puts many of its European counterparts to shame. It's also, without doubt, the most gadgety place I have ever stayed.

Some of it is a bit gimmicky - at reception you sign your name on a screen-enabled Wacom tablet (which had lost it's calibration when I was checking in, causing a bit of mucking around to recalibrate).

Some of it verges on the gimmicky - there is no guest information book in the room - just an iPod Touch (tethered on a long security cable). The room service menu is clickable - and you can place your order direct from the iPod.

Some of it, though, shows a real attention to detail that is admirable. The LCD TV screen has a patch panel next to the desk, and you can plug in an HDMI, RCA or VGA source. And not only that, but in a drawer next to the desk are all the cables that you might need to do that. In a cinch, the NetBook that I've been using on this trip was plugged into the 30-something inch display, and I've just video conferenced home to catch up with my wife and son.

The only criticism is that the network connection is a bit flakey... but it's not charged at £12/hour like the hotel in Sydney, so you win some, you lose some.

You've got to admire the refreshing honesty of the connection process to the East Hotel's wifi networks (shown above). Arrived safely in Hong Kong to a wonderfully hospitable welcome, and a beautiful (and only five-month-old) hotel.

A number of people that I have spoken to in the past few days have observed that doing business in Australia is much more dependent on an individual's network than back in the UK.

It can be probably accounted for by a combination of it being a much smaller population, combined with a more outgoing national psyche. It would be interesting to know how (if at all) that might impact on the use of social networking services. Does it make them less relevant than for us more reserved Brits, more, or used differently in any way?
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An interesting conversation this afternoon - to what extent are our increasingly instant communications media shrinking the time that we think about what it is that we do? And to what extent does the use of a communications tool mean that we've done something, or just that we've indicated we've done something.

Some time spent this afternoon with our new Digital head in Sydney. It's interesting to hear that clients' interest in social media is now becoming top of the agenda in many briefing sessions.

Over a decade ago, American marketing guru Seth Godin wrote a book called Permission Marketing, in which he argued that "interruption marketing" (traditional forms of advertising in print and broadcast media) would be superseded by new forms of marketing that would be invited by the target audience. It seems that social media/social networking is now starting to make that prediction a reality.

There's no getting away from it - Sydney is a stunningly located city. It is, however, a very, very long way away from home.

Our ability to communicate in the modern age is quite simply miraculous. So far today, I've been able to catch up with my Asia IT Manager (who is in Tokyo this week) via video chat, kept up to date with home by text and instant message (the slightly asynchronous media easier to manage with a six month-old to look after), reworked the annual staff IT Survey that we are going to be launching next month (using SurveyGizmo, and popped in to say hello in person to people in the office here. All (bar the text messages and the meet and greet) from a £200 netbook and the hotel broadband connection. That we just take all of this stuff in many ways for granted these days is an illustration of how easy it is all becoming.

First impressions of the office here is of incredible activity and growth. The Australian economy had a mild flirtation with the global recession, but then got back to providing the raw materials that China in particular so desperately needs to keep it's manufacturing engine running. That underlying strength in the economy feeds into all of the other markets (and for us, the drive for marketing activity).

The Australian operation is growing at a tremendous rate, and as a result there is a real opportunity to see how some of the new services that we have made available can help to bolster that growth. It's much easier to adopt new ways of working when there are new challenges as a result of business success.

Feedback so far from people about the Google services has been positive, but I'm going to be spending time with the team over the next few days talking about the services that we will be rolling out in the next few months, and how they can help them with the business opportunities that they have.

One of the advantages of flying into a civil war zone is that the plane was eerily empty. I shared an entire row with just one other passenger (she at one window, me at the other).

For all that modern technology has shrunk the world, flying east from Europe to Asia to Australasia still reminds you of how big the planet actually is... Thousands of miles, and two short nights in one 24 hour period.

This is my second visit to Bangkok. I spent a week here a couple of years ago, visiting the software development group that the then Reuters have here. I saw little in terms of the sights last time around - most of the time was spent stuck in a conference room - but met some wonderful people. I hope that my former colleagues are safe given all that is currently going on in their city...
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Through the madness of airport security, and into the madness of airside. It seems that the duty free shop has been learning from the sensory deprivation approach so refined by Ikea.

Air travel is one of the few places where (for the time being) you can really escape the always on, always connected modern world. Phones off, no wi-fi, no social networking, no contact. For the time being, at least.

Even as air operators start to provide limited services, it's likely to be at such a punitive rate for the time being that only the very rich will partake. Michael o'Leary has to make his money somehow if you are going to buy a ticket to fly for 99p.

Next stop - civil unrest in Thailand. The Foreign and Commonwealth office insist it's safe to visit Bangkok Airport as long as you are just in transit...
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On Saturday I'm heading off (volcanic dust clouds permitting) to visit three of our offices in the Asia Pacific region. It's the area of the world that we are seeing great growth, and it's exciting to be visiting some new places.

I'll be in Sydney next week, and then Hong Kong and Shanghai the week after. Sydney I visited for the first time last year, and I'm looking forward to a return visit. Hong Kong and Shanghai are both new to me, and I'm fascinated to see the contrast between the two cities, and also with London.

I'm also going to be testing out the geographic scale of some of the cloud solutions that we now have in place, as I'll be travelling with just a cheap NetBook, and my BlackBerry (oh, and a fortnight's worth of clean underwear...)

I'll try to post some observations here as I go. ..