I have just come back from a week in Singapore. This was on invitation by one of our favourite clients, Gina Romero. For those of you who haven’t heard of Gina, she runs a business strategy consultancy called “Unconventional Busness Thinking” and we did the website for that. She also co-founded Athena Singapore with Claire Kidd, (and we did the website) and she is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to networking and teaching businesses how to make the most of it.

Gina also consulted on and project managed another project we worked on for a Blue Ocean Systems Singapore.

So, back to my week in Singapore. I mainly wanted to go as we have already had 3 great projects with Gina and I wanted to meet more of the businesses out there.

My itinerary included the following:

• On Monday, I attended a “Pecha Kucha” event at Asia Professional Speakers saw some great speeches and and met some great people.
• On Tuesday we met with Google to talk about bringing women entrepreneurs online through a special Google sponsored training scheme, in partnership with Athena Singapore (this new scheme was announced on the Friday)
• On Tuesday evening, I gave a talk called “How to Rock Online” at Gina’s Business Rocks event – and met more great people.
• On Thursday I had a day off which included a visit to Sentosa Island to experience the spa first hand.
• Friday morning I gave a talk on “Why you need to be blogging, and 9 tips to make the most of your blog” at Athena Singapore “Cappuccino Connections” – where I met more great people.
• Friday afternoon I ran a 2 hour workshop entitled Pimp My Website – attended by great people!

I found the people I met to be friendly, respectful, fun and interesting, and I am definitely going to go back for more trips. Singapore is now in my list of top 5 best cities in the world!

Here are 3 things I loved:

1. When you give a business card, credit card, money or receipt, you use both hands and sort of bow your head – it’s a sign of respect. This means you have to stop typing on your Blackberry for a little while, which is nice actually. I loved this.
2. People in business are friendly, enthusiastic and genuinely interested in talking to you – just like networking in London (yes, I have this experience most of the time). My hosts Gina Romero, Claire Kidd and Bobby Jimenez were absolute darlings.
3. There is a real interest need for Top Left Design advice, websites, blogs and social media training – WOO HOO!

There are lots of other things I loved (the food, how easy it is to get around, and how clean and civilized everything is) but I want to publish this blog TODAY so I will end here. If any of you have been to Singapore and want to add your thoughts, comments and experiences, that’s what the comments box below is for!