Buenos Aires has become a tourist hotspot in the recent years.  Some say it is the Paris of South America, something the locals do not like to hear – and actually, something which is also not true at all.
Buenos Aires is a City you cannot compare with anything you know, because it is a mix of a lot of influences.  Of course there are European and US influences, but there’s also a flavor of the real South America! Truly amazing and fascinating.  The Portenos (how the people of Buenos Aires call themselves) are a very modern, open crowd – they’re among South America’s “early adopters” (this is also due to their strong ties to Europe).  Every Porteno I met in has been to Europe several times, and I believe knows more places there then I do.

And as first adopters who care about their tourists and are proud of their city, they’ve introduced a nice little idea.  In Buenos Aires you can “like” and “friend” nearly every major place of interest on Facebook (and also find a lot of information about the places, of course).

And that’s not all – at every one of these places there are signs advertising the Facebook URL. If I were Facebook, I would say “thank you/muchas gracias” for this “official” advertising (which comes free of charge, I suppose).

Here you can see some examples – try them out.

• http://www.facebook.com/plazadorrego
• http://www.facebook.com/plazadelarepublica

PS: By the way, in Buenos Aires all of the street signs are “sponsored” by companies like Nokia or major Argentinian mobile network operators like Claro (they put just the logos on the street signs, which I suppose is NOT for free).

There is a prejudice about the Chinese, that they will fake nearly anything.


I will start with a non-tech story a friend of mine from Shanghai told me: a colleague of his bought a Audi A6 in China for a really good price – a “lucky punch”, a bargain.  This made him happy.  A view months later there was a problem with the motor, and as the guy isn’t a great mechanic he took the car to the nearest Audi garage.  A day later the garage rang him up and asked him where he bought the car.  He told them he bought it in Shanghai, but not from an official Audi dealer.  The garage employee responded: “Hm… , well, OK, that maybe explains something, because actually your car is not a real Audi….”   Hard to believe?
I thought this was really priceless, that even German cars are now being faked (‘knocked off‘) in China.

Coming to another kind of fake:  five years ago I have been to one of the official tourist knock off markets in China that specialized in garments, handbags and watches.  I’ve since been told that this market was closed down due to the pressure from all the luxury brands on the Chinese (by the way, I have never seen a bigger Louis Vuitton store than in Shanghai) – so I really thought that the times of these markets were over.  Well, as it always happens in China: if something closes, it remains for this for some weeks and then it pops up in another side of the city…  and now, voilà, it’s not only cloths, shoes, and handbags – the new thing is, they even fake electronics nowadays.  Clearly, the iPhone is the #1 knock off you see everywhere.  And they even have a faked the software on it, the icons look pretty similar and it works more or less.   But if that’s  not enough, all forms of iPods of course, iPads (yes, 1 and 2) and Blackberry knock-offs are available too.   Sure, you’ll see all of our iconic Asian status symbols there!

But see yourself on the pictures (sorry I forgot to take one of the iPhone display showing the operating system).

I have been traveling for nearly seven weeks now, on a tight and tough schedule.

Started my journey in Thailand in Bangkok . Made my way to Cambodia (Sihanoukville, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap), Hong Kong, Shanghai, Borneo Island , Malaysia, and now I am writing from Boracay Island in the Philippines.  A lovely, maybe a little too commercialized spot (they even have a Starbucks on the waterfront), but with a stunning beach. (Just awarded the #2 best beach worldwide on Tripadvisor).

All in, I intentionally wanted to get away from the Interweb and being online all the time.  But it wasn’t meant to be – at least not while in Asia .

Welcome to the world of Wifi, smartphones and Facebook supreme!

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It’s almost time… In less than one week, I will become the “official” foreign correspondent of digitalmissive. As already announced, I’ll be finishing my time at the once-biggest social network Myspace at the end of March, and I’ll be sitting on a plane to Bangkok early on the very next day.  I’m taking this opportunity to go an extended trip around the world, so I have four months ahead of me, first in extremely developed 3G/VDSL/Dualband-LTE environments in Asia (Hong Kong or Shanghai), and then on to much less developed areas such as Peru, Ecuador and even Galapagos, where the currency is (still?) US Dollar, and you can hardly get mobile coverage in most parts of the country due to the great Andean mountains.  From one extreme to the other…

This trip should give me a long-deserved digital vacation and some extended time offline (after over 10 years of online-/mobile-/social network-madness), but of course I won’t be without some digital devices to play with. I’ll be taking a brand new Kindle 2 3G+Wifi with me, and will test, for example, if I can still get Whispernet (Amazon’s 3G Service, in general accessible without any monthly fee or wireless subscription) in the various parts of Asia and South America I’ll be heading to – so at least I expect to have the free 3G internet in some countries (already I’ve noticed that Whispernet makes the English language Wikipedia available in Germany, but not the German language Wikipedia page – but that’s another story…). I’ve also already tested the Kindle’s built-in browser (funny: this feature is labeled “experimental” in the Kindle OS).  Results? So far, I’ve found that the Kindle’s browsing capabilities and flash/javascript display is quite limited – not to mention the less than impressive look of a website on the E-Ink screen.  But the Kindle is optimized for reading e-books, right?

Another interesting part of my trip will be checking out the state of internet penetration in each of the countries I visit – not only by pure numbers, but also culturally and socially. And I’ve had a good start there, too: Last week I ‘friended’ my travel consultant for the Galapagos Islands, who is working from Quito, Ecuador.  At left is her and her seal friend – one of the nicer Facebook profile pictures I’ve seen