"Digitize Your Culture" ... Where in the world would you be if you were standing in a hotel lobby on the 53rd floor of a building looking up into a 33-story atrium? You would be at the Grand Hyatt in Shanghai. Wow.

Late catching your plane? Take Shanghai's maglev train (electromagnetic levitation) to the airport, a 19-mile trip that takes just 8 minutes. Floating half an inch off its guideways, you'll accelerate to nearly 200 mph in about 2 minutes on your way to a top speed of 267 mph. Holey, moley.

These are the kinds of breathtaking stories that three members of Realcomm's Asia Trip (5 cities in 10 days, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai) told me last week as they recovered from jet lag. A common refrain was that you have to experience Asia in order to understand the magnitude of Asia's demand for resources -- oil, concrete, steel -- that impact our economy.

"I went for a real estate education and came back with world awareness. It's like parachuting into the middle of an industrial revolution." That's Geoff Kasselman at Op2mize in Chicago.

"Digitize Your Culture." These three words summarized the trip for Dale Stern with Callison architects in Seattle. He saw them inscribed on a sign at Cyberport, Hong Kong's massive office/retail/hotel development, described as "home to a strategic cluster of about 100 IT companies."

As an investor, Steve Hugill with Highland Pacific in Newport Beach, CA, raved about Asia's building control centers and security arrangements (retinal scans, thumbprints). "You don't need 50 property managers for 50 projects."

All participants echoed the importance of local government policy pushing the private sector to leapfrog into the technological future. And everybody mentioned ties that bind our economy to Asia. As Hugill said, "I came back to America asking, what can I do to make this a better planet?"

Spread the Word... Many thanks to WorkplaceIQ and its CEO, Derek Anderson, for sponsoring this week's Dispatch. If you would like to tell Dispatch readers about your service, send e-mail or call me at 415-461-4703.

Gremlin Alert... For some (unexplained) weird reason, the link for last Thursday's Sponsor, Payclix, did not work. If today's WorkplaceIQ link does not work, I'll be very unhappy!

--Peter Pike