The Bureau of Shanghai World Expo Coordination Bureau yesterday signed an agreement with Sate Grid to guarantee electricity supply services at the Expo site.

State Grid, a Global Partner of Expo 2010, manages China’s electricity transmission and distribution networks.

The signing of the agreement marked the end of a three-year electricity infrastructure construction phase, the officials said. State Grid’s services inside the Expo site would start to shift from supporting constructions to support event operations.

Meet Fei Fei, the official mascot of the China Aviation Pavilion at World Expo 2010 Shanghai. A cooperation between AVIC and China Eastern Airlines, the pavilion will offer visitors the chance to sit in a cockpit and try to pilot a plane in a virtual-reality exhibition.

For more information please visit the official website (in Chinese).

Cisco will build a pavilion at the Shanghai Expo to allow visitors to experience high-technology network life, circa 2020. It is the 18th corporate pavilion for the big event.

Cisco’s pavilion, themed “Smart + Connected Life,” will showcase how to make transport, security, medication, utilities and government affairs easier by advanced network technology.

Do not let the scaffolding fool you for it covers what is going to be one of the most innovative places at Expo 2010: the State Grid Pavilion’s Magic Box. China’s electricity behemoth is exhibiting an enormous corporate pavilion on the puxi side of Expo. The Magic Box is a multimedia experience with projections on all six walls of a big cube that holds the visitors.  The Magic Box is located in the upper level, just above the main room after going up in the escalators.

The Magic Box will be only one of the many attractions of this pavilion. In its underground part it will show visitors high-tech electrical stations that besides being a display, they generate electricity to the whole Puxi side. Another relevant point is that this pavilion was designed by Zhao Xiaoyun, the senior designer for National Aquatics Centre – or the “water cube” – in Beijing.

Vanke (万科) is China’s largest real estate development company and they intend to flaunt it in 2010.

The Shenzhen-based subsidiary of China Resources, and listed company, is erecting a pavilion larger than most nations’ at World Expo 2010 Shanghai. The pavilion is expected to highlight the concept of environmental protection and sustainable development based in the hypothetical year 2049.

The Vanke Pavilion is on the Puxi side of Expo along with its neighbours, the Shipping Pavilion, China Eastern and the Urban Best Practices Area.

Meanwhile Chinese Internet users, or Netizens as they’re referred to, are giving illustrations of the Vanke Pavilion the PhotoShop treatment in a competition run by the company.

World Expo Blog reader havanaone placed a really nice comment about our blog and asked us to write about the IBM Egg from 1964’s world’s fair in New York; one of the most important and memorable past expos. Truthfully we’d never known about it but glad we do now.

This from Westland.net:

International Business Machine hired architect Eero Saarinen to design a huge and striking egg shaped pavilion that towered 90 feet above the fair and its surrounding grove of 45 rust-colored metal trees. Below in the grove were exhibit courts, a maze of walkways suspended above a reflecting pool, and a pentagon of little theaters where puppets performed.

But it was the huge ellipsoid shaped dome theater high above, covered with the letters IBM repeated 1000 times that was the pavilion’s attraction. The audience entered a steep grandstand known as the “People Wall.” After 500 people were seated, the entire wall, guided by tracks rose upwards and smoothly into the theater, while a narrator appeared, suspended before them on a small circular platform. The show, a 12 minute multi-media delight by noted designer Charles Eames, used 14 slide and movie projectors, special lighting effects, and stereophonic sound to demonstrate how the human mind (itself a computer) solved problems. The screens of various shapes and sizes surrounded the audience and information bombarded them from various directions. The screen, front and center, showed all a person’s brain interpreted information from its senses (represented by the peripheral screens) and acted upon them. To an audience that had never encountered anything like this presentation, it was mind-blowing. The displays in the grove below showed computer applications; translation of technical reports from Russian into English, and a computer’s ability to recognize hand written characters. There was also a Probability Machine (operated every 17 minutes that demonstrated the law of averages by dropping 1000 small balls through a maze of 450 pins. The balls, bouncing from pin to pin, accumulated below in 21 pockets. It showed at the end of the experiment that each pocket held approximately the same number of balls that it held the previous time.

For more information about previous world’s fair click here.

The China Eastern Airlines and China Aviation Authority pavilion under construction on the Puxi side of the site of World Expo 2010 Shanghai.

Last week I talked about how big and impressive the Shipping Pavilion is against its original artist’s rendering. Here you can see for yourself the massive structure which is taking shape on the Puxi side of World Expo 2010 Shanghai.