Archive for April, 2009

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...
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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...
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Tudou Video Festival video's & pictures

My very pregnant wife handing out one of the awardsWhen 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...
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Tudou Video Festival 2009 (土豆映像节)

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...
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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,...
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Please keep cleaning!

This sign in the toilets in Spil Games Asia's office building makes me smile every time I see it. It is not meant as an inspiration for the cleaning ladies to keep on working hard, but it actually just asks you to keep the toilet...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Carrefour Spring Wine Fair

If you live in Shanghai and like to drink wine, go visit the Carrefour Spring Wine Fair! Carrefour organizes this event twice a year (in spring & autumn) in its basement and I normally buy quite some bottles there. Carrefour has a very decent collection of wines in its store, but the wine fair has a lot more wines and they are at least 20% cheaper. Many have 3-for-4 or 5-for-6 deals and on every single bottle you get an additional 20% discount upon check-out. As usual Carrefour delivers...
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Fake money trick

Scott's nanny just went out to buy new shoes at the evening market on Hongmei Lu. About 30 minutes later she came back, without shoes but obviously very unhappy about something. After she calmed down a bit she told us what had just happened. She found a nice pair of shoes and wanted to pay for it with a RMB 100 bill. The sales person took the bill but gave it back to her a few seconds later, telling her that it was fake. She looked at the bill and noticed it was a clean, unfolded bill. However,...
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Shanghai taxi TV screens to be phased out

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the fact that outdoor LCD advertising would be illegal, but that the environmental watchdog could not do anything about the LCD screens in taxis. Well, it seems new rules banning ads inside taxis have come into effect this week, according to today's Shanghai Daily. That does not mean that all screens will disappear overnight, but taxi operators have to remove them once contracts end.Not good news for TouchMedia that operates most of these screens in Shanghai...
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My latest gadget – the Flip Mino

I like to take videos, but either the quality is not good enough (when using my regular digital camera) or the camera is too big so that I don't take it with me (my normal HD video camera). So today I bought a Flip Mino on taobao.com, a high quality video camera just a bit bigger than my business card. I first planned to buy one during my last trip to the US, but at BestBuy it was sold out and I could not find one shop in downtown San Francisco nor on SFO airport that sold it. They all told me...
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iPhone or G1 (Google) phone?

I have been using Google's G1 phone for about a week now, after being a loyal iPhone user for over a year. Several people asked me which phone is better after suddenly seeing me with a white Android Gphone, so I decided to put some of my thoughts on my blog.To start off with, as regular readers of this blog will know I am a major fan of Apple products. I basically only use Apple computers and since 2003 I did not buy any other mp3 players than iPods. I think Apple currently has the best...
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Police cameras in Shanghai

All over Shanghai you can find traffic cameras hanging on light poles, bridges and traffic lights. If you break the traffic rules you are supposed to get a ticket if the police catches you, so most people watch out when they see a camera. So far most cabbies knew pretty well where all cameras are located (my driver is a former taxi driver and he has a good knowledge of them), but many others notice the cameras only when they see a flash or when they are in slow-moving traffic jam.It seems the...
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