Archive for July, 2009

Chinglish at Jinan Airport

This afternoon I was at the airport in Jinan and saw two interesting signs. I also learned a new English word: Bumf - according to the Chinese text it should mean paper, but I have no idea how they came up with this word.Update: As Danwei's Jeremy Goldkorn points out in the comments, bumf is actually an English word (slang) which comes from bum fodder. Thanks...
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How not to do business in China

There are a lot of books about how to do business in China, and most of the foreign entrepreneurs here read at least one or two of them before they started out. But it seems not everybody did so, or at least not everybody followed the basic advice in these books, which may lead to disastrous results. You may have seen yesterday's article in the Financial Times about the fate of a German business man in China already on other sites or on Twitter, but it's too good not to post it here as well.The...
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Quiet in the compound

Next week it's one year ago since we moved into our new house. It was the first time for us to live in a typical expat compound, but although I was skeptical at first I quite enjoy the convenience of living in a gated community and I also met a couple of new friends here (both expats and entrepreneurs). The interesting thing about an expat compound is that you don't really live in China. Not only does everything work most of the time (and if not a repair man shows up within minutes, 24 hours a...
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What's the problem with the Shanghai-Beijing flights these days?

Yesterday we had a Tudou board meeting, and two of our VC's had flown in from Beijing the day before. At least that was the plan, because both had about a 12 hour delay (meaning sitting in the plane on the tarmac for 12 hours, with the plane eventually running out of drinks for the passengers). Today I read on Twitter that David Feng had a 7 hour delay yesterday, flying from Shanghai to Beijing.What I heard from one person is that the pilot did not want to give a reason why they had such a long...
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Coming soon: M1NT Beijing

As many readers of this blog know I am a big fan and happy shareholder of M1NT Shanghai. The club is doing very well, and on weekend nights the place is completely packed. The success of both M1NT Shanghai and Hong Kong now leads to the opening of a M1NT in Beijing.The location was announced today, M1NT Beijing will open on the 3rd and 4th floors of the Dolce & Gabbana Building, in the same complex that also houses the Park Hyatt. The design will once again be extraordinary, with Andy Hall...
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Missing comments

A couple of days ago one of my staff told me that a friend of her was not happy because a comment that he or she had posted had not been allowed on my blog. I was a bit surprised because >95% of all comments are approved, and only in extreme cases I do not allow them on my blog. Normally the comments end up in my inbox and I approve them there, I could not remember that I recently did not allow a comment (except for spam comments).Today I was approving a comment when I by mistake clicked on the...
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Solar eclipse in Shanghai

Today a total solar eclipse was visible from Shanghai - or at least, it should have been visible because about 15 minutes before the eclipse it started to rain hard! A pity, especially for the many tourists that traveled to Shanghai from all over the world to watch the event.I had seen one total eclipse before in Stuttgart in August 1999, a few months before I moved from there to China. That time we were more lucky, because the clouds opened up just in time to watch the eclipse. Shanghai was...
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Turbulence

Over the years I have had my fair share of turbulence during flights. Probably the worst experience was on a domestic Indonesian flight between Mataram and Denpasar in the mid-1990's on an old Sempati plane. On that eventful short flight suddenly a flight attendant ran out of the cockpit to the back and not a second later the plane made a dive of what seemed to be at least several hundred meters. I thought my final hour had come, but the pilot got the plane under control again and without...
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Marcel & Siu Shan Ekkel's wedding in Phuket

This weekend I spent on the island of Phuket in Thailand, where Marcel Ekkel married his girlfriend Siu Shan. I have known Marcel for many years already, and he has become a good friend even though we don't see each other regularly (Marcel currently lives in Hong Kong). At first we met through the Internet, probably around 5-6 years ago. At that time Marcel was a moderator for some Yahoo Groups or mailing lists that I subscribed to (Do these things still exist? Amazing how quickly the Internet...
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Toll road congestion

Over the past years China has built a great system of expressways. They are a lot better than most highways in the US and Europe, and they run all over the country. However, because almost all of them are toll roads (the easiest and most fair way to earn the investment back) this leads to problems close to big cities. When I drive from Hangzhou to Shanghai, the drive itself is normally about 1.5 hours. However, I have to add at least 30 minutes if I drive on a Sunday afternoon because of the...
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Collapsed Shanghai tower could be a piece of art

For several weeks I was not able to download the NRC newspaper on my iLiad. This has nothing to do with the NRC, but everything with the iLiad: for some reason the wifi button stopped working after a few months already and now also the manual connection to wifi hardly ever works anymore. But on Saturday I tried it once again and suddenly I could connect to one of my home networks (but only one, I have no clue why the others could not connect).So I was finally able to download and read some...
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Talking and talking

The last week of June I spent in Holland for some meetings at Spil Games in Hilversum, but also to give a couple of talks. In China I give presentations regularly, but in Holland I just give a few per year: I normally do not travel overseas just for one event, except when I am already there for business meetings or the event is related to online games/new media and (at the very least) business class flights and hotels are paid.The last week of June fit pretty well, because there were two...
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A Chinese hospital can be more dangerous than H1N1

On Wednesday I read that a Chinese H1N1 patient had died while in hospital in Hangzhou. However, the strange thing was that her fever had already been gone for 7 days, so it was not very likely that H1N1 had killed her. At first I still suspected that doctors were just trying to hide the fact that H1N1 had now also been fatal for someone in China (she would have been the first Chinese swine fever casualty), but then I read that the female patient died while in the toilet, which made it even...
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Eye check in our office

Every year all Spil Games Asia and Zlong Games employees get a free health check. One part of that is an eye test, which is performed in our company. Because we had some visitors from Spil Games in Holland, they also could do the eye check (both passed, but one unintentionally tried to cheat because he was wearing contacts - which the doctors found out about right away of course :-).Interesting is that when I left Daimler in 2002 I needed to wear glasses while driving or while watching a movie....
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Job opening at Spil Games Asia: Game Studio Manager in Shanghai

Spil Games Asia has a job opening for a new manager of our game development studio in Shanghai. If you're interested in this position, here is the job description:SHANGHAI GAME DEVELOPMENT STUDIO MANAGERTasks and Responsibilities:For our Game Development Studio in Shanghai we are looking for a Manager. As the Game Development Studio Manager, you will be responsible for defining, developing, and launching new games (Flash and Shockwave) on our casual gaming portals. You will make sure that our...
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