Archive for January, 2009

Happy Year of the Ox!

Happy New Year! At midnight last night the Chinese New Year started and it is now officially the Year of the Ox.This year I am in Beijing during the celebrations and as usual the fireworks were amazing. It was like being in a war zone, inside we could not even hear the sound of the TV anymore after 11 PM (even with our windows closed) and the whole sky was yellow and red because of the fireworks. The weather was perfect this year, a clear sky and enough wind to get rid of the fireworks smog....
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Apple store Beijing water emergency

The Apple store in Beijing, the only official Apple store in mainland China, had a water emergency yesterday. I am not sure exactly what happened (maybe someone here knows more about it?), but the ground floor was evacuated and everybody had to either leave the store or go to the second floor. And of course I took some pictures :) Within an hour they managed to clean everything and the store looked as if nothing had happened (see last...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Winter fun in Beijing

My family and me are in Beijing at the moment to celebrate Chinese New Year. Yesterday we made a walk around Houhai where I took some typical Chinese wintertime pictures. There are not just skaters on the ice, like in Holland, but people invented all other kinds of transportation.Several vendors where you can rent skates and other equipment"Driving" across the lake while talking on a mobile phoneAn ice bicyclePush ice kart - similar like the ones you used to find in Holland years agoAnd if...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Self storage in Shanghai

In the US it's very common to have self storage facilities where you can put stuff that you don't want to have laying around your house anymore. Considering that the average Chinese apartment is a whole lot smaller than the average US house, it makes sense that self storage might work in China as well. So far there had not been any serious attempts to set this up, but now Carson Block (a former US attorney at Jones Day Shanghai) and his wife have started Love Box Storage.Last night Carson gave...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Good fun is not always expensive

Yesterday I was reading some newspapers and magazines online when I came across an Associated Press article about the response of companies in China to the global downturn, especially with regards to bonuses and Chinese New Year parties. It was an interesting read, and I was surprised to see among others a comparison of Tudou.com (where I am a board member) and Daimler China (my former employer in China, before I became an entrepreneur) in the article. However, when I read what had been written...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Scott will get a little sister!

Today Grace and I went to the hospital for her regular pre-natal check-ups. Because our future baby is about 20 weeks old now, we also did an ultrasound to check among others the gender. And... it's a girl! Our little boy Scott will get a baby sister by the end of May (EDD May 30, 2009). We are very happy! My wife can now go on another baby item shopping spree, this time for pink-color clothes, bedsheets and whatever you can think of that we already have in blue.Normally we only do the 2D...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Outliers – The Story of Success

Last week I was reading some Amazon.com reviews of Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers, both the positive (the majority) and the negative ones (about 30% gave 3 stars or less). I like a bit of controversy, so started off with the negative ones. If they can convince me I often do not buy the book. Gladwell is known for writing entertainment covered with a scientific sauce, as you probably know if you read his two bestsellers Blink and The Tipping Point. If I would buy Outliers I would not...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

From baby to toddler

One of the things that has amazed me over the past 12 months is how quickly a helpless little baby changes into a toddler with his own personality. If I compare pictures of Scott from just a year ago with how he looks now I sometimes wonder how he could change so quickly.For that reason we put together a picture frame with one picture of Scott per month. Now suddenly the transformation of baby to toddler becomes more clear. In some months he hardly changed, but in others he is suddenly a lot...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

3G licenses issued in China, finally

Yesterday China finally issued its 3G licenses, not only for its home-grown TD-SCDMA network, but also for the European W-CDMA and for the US/Japanese/Korean CDMA2000 standard. China Mobile got the first one, China Unicom received the W-CDMA and China Telecom was awarded the CDMA2000 license.China Mobile, China's biggest mobile phone provider with over 400 million users, already set up its network a couple of months ago, but the performance was quite bad. They gave away lots of TD-SCDMA phones...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Shanghai – some things don't change over the years

I just started reading "400 million customers" by Carl Crow, a book that was originally published in 1937 but that has now been reprinted by Earnshaw Books. The most striking thing about the book is that so many things have not really changed over the past 70 years and that especially foreign business men keep on making the same mistakes in China.I like to read books about China's history, especially about the past 100 years or so, but I like film footage even more. So I was quite happy to find...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

What Would Google Do?

A few weeks ago I got my hands on a pre-galley copy of Jeff Jarvis upcoming book What Would Google Do? Judging from the title you might think this is just another book about Google, but it isn't. It's a book about seeing the world as Google sees it. What Jarvis did is translating Google's way of doing business into a set of rules to live and do business by.I loved the book, not only because it's a highly entertaining read filled with real life examples, but especially because I think it will...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Who says China does not produce high-quality trucks?

Only in China...Source: China Car...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Spil Games Asia launches Chinese web game channel

What's the best way to avoid the consequences of a possible recession? Keep on innovating your products and improving your services. So that's what we have been doing at Spil Games Asia over the past months. One result of this was launched this week: our Chinese web game channel at ol.game.com.cnWebgames are massive multiplayer online games that you do not need to download, but that you can play directly in a web browser. That means that you can immediately start playing the game on every...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

M1NT restaurant also open to non-members

If you have followed me on Twitter you'll have noticed that I already had a couple of excellent lunches and dinners at M1NT Shanghai over the past weeks. The club's restaurant is located on the penthouse floor of the Cross Tower, giving diners a spectacular view the city and the Pudong skyline.What many people may not know is that the restaurant is also open to non-members, so if you are looking for a special place for lunch or dinner keep this place in mind. M1NT now also has a special...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Annoying LCD advertising in Shanghai – but not long anymore!

Picture: Qifei 2.0 www.flickr.com/photos/qifei_20/2257829658/ (creative commons)Wherever you are in China you know you will get bombarded with advertising, but sometimes it gets a bit too much. The Bund in Shanghai, the waterfront on the Puxi site of town, is a good example of this. Just a few years ago it was a nice location to take some pictures of the Pudong skyline. But about 3 years ago two of the skyscrapers (first the Aurora tower and later the CitiBank tower) have both been converted in...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Slumdog Millionaire

I am in a review mood these days, probably because work has not resumed at full speed yet - even though today was a regular working day and I spent the whole day in the office. Last night I walked by one of the DVD shops on Hongmei Lu and noticed that they had Slumdog Millionaire. I read quite a lot about it on Twitter already, so I decided to buy it and watch it right away. It was an excellent choice!Just like most novels I read, I tend to forget about the movies I watch the next day already....
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

My favorite books of 2008

Yesterday I finished a pre-galley version of Jeff Jarvis' upcoming book What Would Google Do? and I twittered that it was the best book I'd read this year :-)But I also said that it would have ended in my top 3 of 2008 had I finished it a few days earlier. Then James Gwertzman asked me on Twitter what my top 3 for 2008 would be. A good question, and I had to narrow down a list of about 10 books, but I finally came up with these three (in random order):- The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Photo shoot for Scott's 1st birthday

Last week Scott had his first birthday and because of that we decided to take some professional pictures of him. We found a photo studio specialized in baby pictures on Hongmei Lu (Babypark, 5/F, 3211 Hongmei Lu, phone 021-6208 3786, above City Supermarket) and last Sunday we went there to do the photo shoot.The shoot itself was quite tiring: Scott did not exactly like to follow the photographer's directions and he had to use many tricks to get Scott to collaborate. It took us over two hours to...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

And then it's 2009

First of all a happy New Year to all my readers!2009 was off to a good start for me. I had an excellent sleep and got up around 10 AM this morning. When I came down the stairs into the living room Scott awaited me with a big smile and I was happy to hold him in my arms. My wife and I had a big breakfast together, which does not happen too often anymore, and after that we had some coffee with Dutch oliebollen. Scott got a bit sleepy, so I took him to bed and managed to get him asleep within 5...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>