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Impressions of the Shanghai Autoshow 2009

Until next Tuesday the Shanghai Autoshow takes place again, and of course I visited this year as well. I say of course, because I worked for 7 years in the automotive industry (for Daimler/Mercedes-Benz) and that is what brought me to China. I even used to write columns for Dutch car magazine Autovisie about the Chinese automotive industry (I stopped doing that about a year ago).

I was lucky to get trade visitors tickets to the show (thanks to BMW China), so I did not have to go during the extremely busy public days. I went with some people from Tudou, who had journalist passes. Tudou is an official media (I never realized that actually) and has its own teams at the Autoshow that produce original content for our car channel at http://auto.tudou.com/. If you want to see some footage of the show, that is a good place to go.

The exhibition has changed a lot over the years, from a small not-too-important auto show it is now among the most important in the world. It is huge: you need hours to just walk around the whole place to see all the models. Because I did not have that much time, I only went to the most important or interesting brands. For me those are mainly the Chinese brands: outside China people laugh about them (well, also still some people inside China do this) but they have come a long way and I think the next General Motors will come from China. The name of that company? Likely Chery, but also BYD and Geely stand a chance. One of these brands will first build out their business in China and then conquer the rest of the world.

Their quality may not be up too Western standards yet, but that will eventually come. Or maybe some people won’t care that much about extremely high standards when you can get a good car for maximum half the price of a Western model. Their designs are so much better than just 2-3 years ago, it amazes me how quickly these companies improve and innovate. Look at BYD for example, this company started in 2003 (yes, that’s less than 6 years ago – before that they made batteries) and is now already one of the top players in the electric vehicle segment. Their F6 model (a mid-size sedan) can be recharged up to 70% in just 10 minutes time!

Chinese car companies also like to copy designs, and Geely did once again an excellent job at that during this show. After copying Mercedes-Benz models for many years they now decided to go one step higher and copy a Rolls-Royce front. Decide for yourself if they did a good job. The car has one major innovation, however: the back seat consists of just one huge emperor-like seat! I don’t think that will sell well in Western markets, but I am sure many Chinese bosses outside the tier 1 cities would love to show off being driven around in this car.

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Buy a house and get a wife as part of the deal

The excellent Danwei blog today has one of these only-in-China stories: A Beijing real estate developer decided to boost its sales by encouraging buyers to date its sales girls. If a couple gets married they receive a RMB 60,000 wedding present. The deal for the girls is that they not only get an 8% commission but can also find a wealthy husband. But there is probably more to the story as Danwei points out:

A local Real Estate executive I spoke to pointed out that the girls on offer are not that attractive. His theory is that the developer is not making money on selling apartments and so it signed a deal with a matchmaking agency to marry these “unwanted” girls to rich husbands. In return, the developer will receive much more than RMB 60,000 for every girl they manage to “give away”. This way, the girls don’t lose face by putting themselves on sale, the husbands don’t lose face by going directly to an agency to look for a bride, and the developer makes a nice profit. In a country with too many apartments and not enough girls, this doesn’t sound like a bad idea.

Read the whole story here and check out some of the available sales girls here.

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Tudou Video Festival video's & pictures

My very pregnant wife handing out one of the awards

When I wrote my blog post yesterday about the 2009 Tudou Video Festival I did not include any video footage of the award ceremony yet. Today I looked for and found a couple of short festival video’s on Tudou. This one gives a short impression of the festival, this one was shot before the festival started and this one gives a 5 minute overview of the award ceremony, including some of the speeches.

If you want to see some pictures, I created a set of some of my own (and of a few of Tudou CTO Michael Zhao’s) pictures here. Some more festival pictures, taken by Flickr user Dexteryy, can be found here.

There were also tons of articles in the Chinese press, see among others here, here, here and here.

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Tudou Video Festival 2009 (?????)

This weekend the 2nd edition of the Tudou Video Festival took place in Shanghai. Compared to last year’s event, this year’s edition was a lot bigger and produced very professionally. Last year’s event in an old church high up in the mountains in Moganshan was great, but it still had a start-up feeling. The 2nd edition felt almost like the Oscars, something the presenter (Hu Yi Hu from Phoenix TV) also said.

Awards were handed out in 16 categories during the night. In total there had been 2000 video submissions and 5 million people voted online for the videos. During awards night an audience of 1000 people attended the ceremony, among others famous actors and presenters, government officials, business people, venture capitalists and film directors. The event was streamed live on Tudou as well and several TV camera’s recorded the whole evening. Winners not only received the Tudou Video Award, but also a BenQ 42″ plasma TV, a notebook computer and a desktop computer (thanks for sponsoring BenQ!).

I enjoyed the evening very much and was once again surprised by the high level of creativity. User generated content can compete with professionally produced content, that’s what this evening proved to me. Several of the selected directors will get the chance to work with the China Film Group. Who knows, maybe the next Zhang Yimou was among our winners last night!

If you want to see some of the winning films on Tudou, you can see all of them here. The categories are all in Chinese, but if you mouse over them you will see the English name in the link.

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Mr. & Mrs. Bund – Shanghai's latest top restaurant


In the location of the former Sens & Bund a new restaurant opened its doors last week: Mr. & Mrs. Bund. When I read that Paul Pairet is the chef I knew I had to try the place as soon as possible: Mr. Pairet is the former chef at Jade on 36, in my opinion one of the best restaurants in the world. I loved his new creations and amazing taste combinations there, so I was looking forward to try out his new place.

I was therefore happy that we managed to get a reservation last night, especially in one of the busiest weekends of the year – Formula One is in town. We arrived quite early, straight out of the office around 7:30 pm, and the place was still quite empty so we were seated at the window (as requested while making the reservation). The place filled up quickly and by 8:30 most tables in the front part were full with diners. A good mix of foreigners and Chinese, all looking forward to try this new restaurant.

Mr. & Mrs. Bund calls itself a Modern Eatery. And that’s a good description, it’s a mixture of traditional French with a modern global sauce and a big wink to make it not too serious. It already starts at the entrance where the door is now a painted wooden door, like the entrance of a regular restaurant in France. But when you enter you realize the place is not a regular restaurant, it’s huge: on the front and on the sides tables for dining and in the middle a big communal table. The back has a bar and behind the bar is the kitchen. The kitchen has windows, so you can follow exactly what the cooks are doing. The waiters and waitresses wear outfits that are semi-French: French looking but with some added touches to make them almost clownesque – e.g. all waiters seem to wear colorful Converse All-Stars! The atmosphere is very relaxed but still high-class.

The menu itself is probably the biggest I have ever seen. Not only the size, but especially the contents. There are literally hundreds of dishes on it, and everything can be served in different sizes, different ways of cooking and with different sauces. Almost overwhelming, especially when you are like me and would like to try out everything. Just like my favorite restaurant M1NT, Mr. & Mrs. Bund also use the Chinese way of serving food: everything is put in the middle and you can share the dishes. However, they ask you in advance, so if you prefer your own dish that’s also fine.

We started with champagne, their house champagne is excellent and when you ask for a second glass they will give you a new glass instead of filling it up again. Among others we tried foie gras (my standard dish in any restaurant, if it’s on the menu I normally order it), tomato and buffalo salad, huge asparagus (from Yunnan) with Hollandaise sauce, king prawns and Australian beef tenderloin with Bearnaise sauce. The food was in one word excellent. Not as extreme or avant-garde as Jade on 36 was (for some people that was too much, I loved it though), but more regular looking but with some of the same taste sensations. Because you can decide the size of your portions you can take several smaller portions to try more dishes.

The same is true for the wines: the restaurant has 32 wines available that are served in sizes from 4 cl upward, so you can try as many as you like. They have a special Enomatic wine serving machine for these wines, to ensure that they stay well also after opening. They have some excellent wines available per glass, even a 1994 Chateau Petrus (not cheap of course, starting at RMB 1616 for 4 cl of this heavenly red wine). So if you just want to try a few different top wines this is a good place to go. I did not even look at the wine list because of the per glass selection, so I cannot say anything about it here, but I assume there will be some excellent wines on there as well.

I was very impressed by this first visit and will certainly be back soon. The atmosphere is very relaxed, you feel at ease in the restaurant the moment you enter. The service is great, even though the place just opened a week ago. When the head waiter looked at our order he came to our table and advised us to take one salad less because their portions are quite big. I think that’s just excellent. Also when we left we forgot that we had coats, but the waiting staff reminded us at the door. Small things like this often make the difference between a good and an excellent restaurant. If you like high-end food is a nice atmosphere I can only recommend this place. Even the prices are very reasonable for this kind of top restaurant, including some good wines (but no Petrus!) we paid about RMB 1500 for our dinner experience.

Mr. & Mrs. Bund, 6/F, Bund 18 (close to Nanjing Road), reservations: 021-6323 9898 Open 7 days a week, dinner only

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Happy 4-year anniversary Tudou!

Today it is exactly 4 years ago that Tudou.com officially went live, at that time still under the name Toodou.com. See here for my original blog post from April 15, 2005. Lots has happened over the past 4 years but Tudou is still a fun, innovative and entrepreneurial company – and I am sure it will stay that way.

If you visit Tudou.com today you will find some fun “potato-related” video’s on the homepage, made by Tudou staff. Go to the homepage and click there on one of the 4 candles (or are they fireworks?).

Tudou 4 years old!

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Our future daughter

This morning my wife and I went to ParkwayHealth for a regular prenatal check-up. Because Grace is in her 33rd week now we did another 3D ultrasound. I had my Flip video in my pocket so I shot a short video of our future daughter – we call her Mei Mei for now, ‘little sister’, until she will get her real name after her birth in 5 weeks or so.

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Spil Games Asia on ICS

Last week Shanghai TV was in the Spil Games Asia office to shoot some footage for their weekly program Biz Time. This week’s main topic was that it’s more difficult for foreigners to find jobs in Shanghai because of the economic crisis. The program among others interviewed CEIBS’ Laurie Underwood (co-author of China Entrepreneur) and two foreign entrepreneurs. I said a few things about success factors in setting up a business in China and the program also showed part of our Shanghai office.

I almost forgot to watch it actually, but luckily my wife had put an alarm on her phone. The alarm text read “Marc program” and at first we both had no clue what that was supposed to mean. But suddenly I remembered the interview and just in time we switched on the TV!