Archive for July, 2006

Online Gaming China 2006 conference

This week I went to the Online Gaming China 2006 conference in the Renaissance Pudong hotel in Shanghai. It was a small but high-level conference, with executives from mainly the US, Japan, Korea and China. The event gave a good overview of the current state of the online gaming market in China and its future trends. Gaming started in China around 10 years ago: the first PC game studio was opened in 1995, and the first foreign studio (Ubisoft) opened its doors a year later. At that time not...
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Fake roofs

A couple of days ago I took a picture from the building where the new Spill Group Asia office will be located (we plan to move in about 10 days). Suddenly I realized that I had taken a similar picture in March this year, and that the view was quite different then. What happened? Because the residential buildings were so old and dirty, the government painted all of them and put a (fake) red roof on top. See the result for yourself, look at the buildings on the left side of the picture (first...
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Crowded Tibet

I was doing some research on a trip to Tibet for friends that plan to travel there in August. But it seems that this is not the best time to go there. The reason: the newly-opened Qinghai-Tibet railway (the highest altitude trainride) encouraged a lot of Chinese to make the trip to Lhasa, and tickets are sold out long in advance. Not that my friends wanted to travel by train, but the problem with all these additional tourists is that also all hotels in the city are fully booked (occupancy rate...
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Continuing fast internet growth in China

Yesterday CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) presented its half-yearly report about internet usage in China. Again the amount of users has grown significantly, and according to this report China now counts 123 million internet users. This is an increase of 19.4% compared to last year. Last year the growth was 18.4%, so even the growth speed is still going up. China is the second country world-wide based on internet users (number 1 is the US with 147 million users).Because China's...
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Graffitivaganza

Saturday's Toodou party (to avoid confusion I stopped using the name Tudou -with u instead of oo- until the site officially changes its name) was a huge success. Several hundred people came to take a look at the new office, to enjoy the BBQ and to drink free beers. And of course to show their painting talents on the walls (and even on some of the floors...). Most people started on the ground floor that is not in use yet, but soon they moved on to the second floor that had been completely...
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Paint

Over the past couple of weeks the outside walls of the Spill Group Asia office building have been painted. No clue why that's taking so long, in China they normally build a whole building in this timeframe, but that's a different story.This morning I parked the car at the office, when one of the guards told me I should not park there because they would paint the wall right above my car. I thanked him for letting me know, and he directed me to a safer parking space.I did not think about it...
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TROS in China

Dutch public broadcaster TROS is planning to produce many programs in China over the next couple of months. In December there will be a China week on Dutch TV in which all these programs will air. Last night I was invited by Sierk Vojacek (whose company SVP is the local producer of these programs) to join them for dinner at M on the Bund.It was a nice evening, as is usual when going to this great restaurant. We had a big table on the balcony overlooking the river (we were in total 12 people),...
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Moving problems

This weekend we moved to a new apartment. The lease on our old apartment ran out, so that was a good reason to look for something new. In the former apartment we lived for 2 years, which is quite long for me. I just calculated that I moved 28 times in my life already (I am 33 years old), and this is my 7th apartment in China (in 6.5 years).The new place is a high-end apartment in Xujiahui, and you would expect that everything therefore would work flawlessly. Well, that was not the case. Some of...
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Tudou 'New Office Warming Party' Invitation

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Toodou becomes Tudou

As many of you know Toodou means potato in Chinese. However, in pinyin this is normally written as Tudou. We have always wanted the Tudou.com domain name. Quite a significant number of first-time visitors thought that our domain name was Tudou.com instead of Toodou.com. When we first launched the site we had to settle with Toodou.com because Tudou.com had long been taken by another website. However, that web site did not do as well as Toodou.com (they actually shut down their operations), and...
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Senseo

During my last trip to Holland, I bought a Senseo coffee machine for the Spill Group Asia office in Shanghai. Senseo machines make one or two cups of coffee, with a small layer of creamy foam on top. It basically gives people the possibility to make a cup of coffee at home, like they would get in a restaurant. It's easy and quick, but the product was not for sale in China, so I had to import one in my suitcase for the office.Because Senseo machines are priced quite low, they penetrated the...
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Jumping off a train for a phone!

The China Daily had a funny story today. A guy named Hu from Jiangxi province was riding a train when he dropped his mobile phone out of the window (it was not explained how this could happen by the way). Because the phone contained pictures of his girlfriend, he immediately asked a train attendant to make an emergency stop. Of course this was refused, and so the guy decided to jump out of the train to retrieve his phone. Although other passengers tried to stop him, he leaped out of the window...
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Beijing earthquake

The earthquake in Beijing yesterday probably reminded many people of the earthquake in Tanghshan (close to Beijing), this month exactly 30 years ago. While I was living in Beijing I never encoutered an earthquake, but several of my former colleagues told me about that time (because I was curious about it once, and asked them about it). They are now all in their mid-thirties, and so they were little kids at that time. Some lived on the streets for weeks (at least in their memories) after the...
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Toodou: new office & party

Toodou moved to a new office two weeks ago, because the old space had become too small already. The new building gives the company more than enough room to grow, with approximately 2500 m2 available to us. The building is located on the downtown side of the Suzhou Creek, about 300 meters upstream from the old office.The new place features among others a roof terrace, and that comes in handy for..... The Toodou New Office Party! This party will take place on July 15 and is open to friends,...
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Speeding ticket

We got a registered mail this week, and my wife had to go to the post office to pick it up. It turned out to be a speeding ticket, I got caught after picking up people from the airport about 2 weeks ago. I did not see the camera or the flash, but they had a good picture, I could even see one of them sitting in the back of the car. I drove 104 km/h on an 8-lane highway without any traffic, but apparently only 80 km/h was allowed. Bad luck.The speeding ticket itself is not a big deal (fines are...
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