Archive for December, 2009

Looking back at 2009

The year 2009 comes to an end, so it's time for my annual post looking back at the past 12 months. 2009 was once again a roller coaster, with ups and downs and moments of sadness but also of joy. A lot of those moments were captured in one of the 168 blog posts that I wrote here this year. The highlight of this year was the birth of our daughter Elaine on May 21. After the birth of Scott on December 27, 2007 we knew what to expect and we were not as nervous a before (at least I wasn't),...
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Dan Harris: Chinese Business Law trends for 2010

Today Dan Harris of the China Law Blog wrote an interesting guest post for Shanghaiist in which he describes the top 5 trends he sees in China business law for next year. The trends he focuses on are ones that mainly involve foreigners or foreign businesses. A short version of his top 5: 1. Visa rules will be further tightened 2. Continued trend to shut down illegal and unregistered foreign businesses 3. Tax collection efforts will increase, with more focus on transfer pricing 4....
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Krispy Kreme in Shanghai!

A couple of days ago Krispy Kreme opened its first restaurant in Shanghai on Wujiang Lu, opposite Marks & Spencers. It took them almost 1.5 years to open the first store, giving Dunkin' Donuts the opportunity to beat them in entering the Shanghai market first. Being a big donut fan (or doughnut as it's spelled in at Krispy Kreme's), I needed to try out their products of course. So today at lunch time I drove over to their store to try their donuts. And... they were great! Like in other...
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Spil Games first iPhone Game: Beauty Resort 2

So far Spil Games has mainly been active with casual online gaming portals, but last week our first iPhone game was launched in the App Store. The game is Beauty Resort 2, a spa-themed time management game that can also be played on our online portals (here for example) and that was very successful with a total of 25 million game plays for Beauty Resort 1 + 2 so far. In Beauty Resort 2 you are the manager of a spa that you need to build out into a beauty empire. You start off with a...
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Shanghai Christmas Market at Wending Lu

When I ordered lunch from Sherpa's last week I received an invitation for the Christmas market at Wending Lu. The invitation looked promising, so tonight we decided to check it out with Scott. However, it turned out to be a big disappointment.First of all there were hardly any people when we were there around 6:30 PM. There were a couple of Christmas houses at the entrance and inside the furniture mall, but there were no customers at all and they were too far spread out. The only people we saw...
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Merry Christmas from Spil Games & Tudou.com

It's Christmas Eve in China, so it seems the right time to wish everybody a Merry Christmas!This year Spil Games made a fun Christmas animation that I would like to share with you (click on the link below the picture)http://www.spilgames.com/presscenter/2009holiday_en.phpTudou designed several Christmas cards, the one I liked most is embedded...
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Christmas card from the Shanghai government

Most of the Christmas cards that I receive are digital ones. But one of the few real ones came from... a branch of the Shanghai government. Interestingly, it also contains a 'friendly' reminder of the obligations that employers of foreigners and foreigners themselves have. Big Brother is watching you? Or did everybody get a card like this?I almost threw away the envelope when I realized there was a number on the back. I read the text, and guess what? It's a lottery number! In a country where...
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Barefoot running

Last month I finished the Shanghai Half Marathon with an almost recovered sprained right ankle. During the race I had probably tried to protect my right foot too much, because the day after the race part of the sole of my left foot was suddenly hurting a lot. It got so bad that I could hardly walk for a few days. I had no idea what it was exactly, and decided to give it some rest. That did not work fast enough, so I started to look online for what my injury could be. It turned out that it might...
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Individuals banned from registering .cn domains

CNNIC, the China Internet Network Information Center, announced yesterday that individuals can no longer apply for a .cn website (.cn is the official Chinese Internet country code extension). The official reason is that many of these sites are used for pornographic content and people were often using fake names when registering. The .cn extension is very popular in China, with currently over 13 million websites using it. The direct effect is that a lot less people will use the .cn domain names...
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Paul's delivery service in Shanghai: please order 2 hours in advance

Paul's is by far the best French bakery in town, I regularly go there on weekends to buy croissants or a baguette. But I also order my lunch there every now and then. So far I used Sherpa's for that, until I found out that Paul has its own delivery service and only charges RMB 8 for a delivery (with a RMB 30 minimum order). Sherpa's normally delivered in about 30-45 minutes and I expected Paul to deliver even faster. But I was wrong.The first time I called Paul's delivery hotline was last...
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A day in the Internet

OnlineEducation.net created an interesting image that tries to put into perspective the size of activities on the Internet every day. Click on the picture for a bigger size. (via TheNextWeb.com)Created by...
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Bye Bye Farmville!

A couple of weeks ago I decided to give Farmville a try. Farmville is an online game developed by Zynga in which you have to manage and build out a farm. The game can be played on Facebook and on Farmville.com and is extremely popular, it's currently the #1 online game in the world. The game has over 65 million players worldwide, which makes it the biggest online game in history.When I started playing it, it was more for professional reasons than because I really wanted to play the game. I did...
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My grandmother's funeral

Yesterday my grandmother's funeral was held and I had flown to Holland the day before to attend it. My parents, two cousins and me arrived at the funeral home attached to the cemetery in Nieuwleusen around 9:15 AM. We first had a chat with the master of ceremonies, the same person who had also been in charge of my other grandmothers funeral about 6 months ago, about the details of the funeral. Between 10 AM and 10:30 there was time for condolences and then the guests were asked to sit down in...
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Buying a Christmas tree online in Shanghai

Because most Chinese don't celebrate Christmas, there are not that many places in town where you can buy Christmas trees. I still remember that about 3 years ago my wife and I spent a whole Saturday afternoon trying to find a decent Christmas tree and eventually ended up buying a fake one. But times are changing, and it seems you can now also get them online. A fellow Dutch entrepreneur, Nic Pannekeet, sells them through his company rosagallica.com. How does it work? Very simple, just send an...
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