Shanghaied Weblog

Arrival in Tanzania for Kilimanjaro climb

I am sitting in an internet cafe in the town of Moshi (Tanzania), about 40 km from the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. Internet is pretty bad here, but at least we found a place to go online. No way to use my own laptop though, and the word wifi does not seem to exist yet in Swahili!So far everything went pretty smooth. We arrived in Arusha last night after an uneventful flight, and took a small van to Moshi. Here we are staying at a basic (not even airconditioning) but clean hotel, even with its...

INSEAD 5-year reunion (and a business idea)

This weekend Grace and I went to France for her 5-year INSEAD MBA reunion. Time flies, it seems like a much shorter time ago that she spent a year on the INSEAD campuses in Fontainebleau and Singapore. But it's really 5 years, I did not even blog yet at that time (I made a first attempt during SARS, which happened while she was in France). I visited her many times during that year, so I knew quite a lot of her classmates. And of course many of them now work in Asia, so we regularly meet with...

Thanks for copying our design!

Because of the three-day mourning period all entertainment sites in China were asked to shut down from Monday until Wednesday. Gary woke us up with a phone call very early on Monday morning to inform us about the new rules (Tudou was probably among the first sites to be notified), and I called the Spill Group Asia technical and marketing people to discuss what to do. We did not receive a notice yet, and were therefore not sure if our sites game.com.cn and xiaoyouxi.com would also have to follow...

Dutch NRC newspaper on my iLiad e-book reader

Today I downloaded my first newspaper to an e-book reader (the Dutch NRC Handelsblad on the iLiad reader), and I am really happy with the result. As regular readers of this blog (or of my Twitter feed) know, I am a big fan of e-books. I believe that is the future of reading, as long as the producers manage to get people to try it and if the readers become cheaper. When I travel I can bring all my books with me and I can read my favorite newspaper sitting on a tropical beach - without having to...

Earthquake on Twitter

All the people and media that keep saying that Twitter is useless may have to think again. When I looked on Twitter around 2:30 PM this afternoon I noticed a tweet from Frank Yu saying "Earthquake in Beijing?". Despite the shaking building, he kept on Twittering and he even made fun of himself when he wrote: "i twittered as the building swayed...screw running out the door, MUST TWEET !"By that time several other friends in Beijing had started to Twitter about the earthquake, but in Shanghai it...

Renewing my Chinese visa

This morning I went to the visa bureau in Pudong to extend my Z-visa / residence permit. In the past years I never had to go here in person to get an extension, but because of tighter visa rules I now had to appear myself. Not a big deal I thought, because I had heard that this should take maximum one hour.Wrong. Because of the new visa rules many foreigners were trying their luck to get tourist and F-visa extensions, and there were huge queues. Several people were arguing loudly with the...

Shanghai Daily now available on e-ink reader

The Shanghai Daily is not the best newspaper in the world (understatement), but it is pretty advanced online. It has its own RSS feeds, several blogs and podcasts, and even an online PDF version. And now it will also be published in the Kindle E-Book reader format, the ugly-looking eBook launched by Amazon last year. For just USD 5.99 per month you can get your daily dose of local Shanghai stories and propaganda delivered on your Kindle. This is a good development, the more papers that get...

House for sale…

At the moment I am in Holland and among others I went to take a (last) look at the house where my grandparents used to live. My grandfather passed away a couple of years ago and now my grandmother became too old to live here alone and moved into a nursing home. That means the place will likely be sold soon...That's a pity because it's a fantastic place filled with memories from my childhood. I came here very often when I was a kid, playing in the big garden (3400 sqm) or swimming in the pool....

Moving into Spill Group Asia's new office

After two years in the Jiaotong University incubator center it was time to move on for Spill Group Asia. We moved into the incubator center in May 2006, at that time with just 7 employees. Two years later we have about 70 employees, and we needed to look for a bigger space. We found a good and affordable one in the Si Hang building, located next to the Suzhou Creek at the Xizhang Lu bridge. This is the building where Tudou used to have its office until about 2 years ago. A good building, close...