Thank you Tray for the photos (taken on an iPhone).  Yesterday’s luncheon hosted by AMCHAM in Hong Kong proved to be an eventful, successful, interesting, and slightly embarrassing gathering.  Matt is really a candid speaker who has pretty strong stances on open source platforms and software and is pretty anti-microsoft.  Then again, most developers who walk around with MACs or veto open source usually are.  He is passionate about his work, passionate about connecting people, passionate about technology and the types of projects that he’s involved in – are fascinating.  You don’t have to be a technology junkie or a coder or an engineer to embrace the tools he talks about, in fact, he makes mention of P2 – a tool that eliminates email.  No email?  You’re probably thinking that no organization in their right mind would eliminate email, but that’s what his organization Automattic is doing.  Go and read more on this (like google it or something), it really is truly fascinating work and sparks a new era in communication tools and best practices.

The slightly embarrassing part is during the networking session (and lunch) prior to the session.  As most networkers do, you sit around and talk about whatever and usually talk about why you’re there or how you heard of the event.  So my sister is sitting beside a woman who tells her she’s there because she wanted to know more about the blogging community because most recently, blogging has impacted her organization.  I don’t know exactly how the topic came up, but suddenly my sister points to me and says “This is her – Lisa Mommy.”  And I instantly knew that they were referring to me in my previous episodes with publicity.  See parts 1 & 2.  So I ask her what company she works for and she says “Dairy Farm” and because “Dairy Farm” happens to own the company I was referring to in my article, I knew that she was referring to my blog.  WOW.  Impact.  No matter how far away, how disconnected you think we are, it comes right back in full circle.  This women wasn’t mad or angry.  She was merely curious and I loved how we had connected on the level of being “mommies”.  So no harm done, but I was a bit baffled when I was referred to as “Lisa Mommy” because that’s what the papers had called me.

Anyways, the gyst of this post is how glad I was to have attended that luncheon, as well as had the opportunity to hear Matt speak and see him 5 feet from where I was sitting.  He is smart, to the point and speaks very openly about every and any topic on the face of the earth.  In fact, I was feeling super inspired by him and he has accomplished so much at his age that is it incredible. 

Here are a few recommended blogs by Matt – who subscribes to them.

One of his favourites – LOL cats
This one I’m going to add to my list of subscriptions – gigaOM
I’m already a fan of this site – lifehack.org