Archive for January, 2010

Some more iPad thoughts

During this weekend I had some time to think about the Apple iPad a bit more. I still believe that the current product is not right for me yet and that I will have to wait for version 2.0 or 3.0 before buying one. But after talking to some other people I realize the iPad now already fills a niche. For example, this weekend my parents visited us in Shanghai and I talked to them about the iPad. I explained them the functions and its weaknesses, but for them these weaknesses are not such a big...
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Underwhelmed

Yesterday Steve Jobs launched the Apple tablet in San Francisco which he called the iPad. As usual Apple had only leaked a little bit of information about the tablet to keep people guessing about it, causing a huge free viral marketing campaign even before anybody knew for sure what the product would be like. Apple is the only company in the world that manages to do this, and they manage it time and time again. Of course I was very excited about the upcoming launch, especially when I heard...
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Cheating on the marathon

China's national college entrance exam, the gaokao, is very important for the future of the test takers because the result may determine the rest of their lives. If you perform well during the two day exam you may be able to get into a top university, if you mess up you'll end up at a lower school and your career chances will be greatly reduced. So if there are ways to increase your scores on this exam people will try to do so. One way to get earn some extra points is by showing excellent...
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Great ad for used BMW cars

This post has actually nothing to do with China, but a friend of mine forwarded this BMW ad and I found it so good that I decided to put it on my blog. The print ad itself is from Greece and is already 2 years old, but I had not seen it before. It actually caused quite a commotion among American women bloggers at that time, who were offended by it. I personally think they were taking the ad too serious and also didn't take into account the big cultural difference between the US and Greece....
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My old office is haunted by ghosts!

This afternoon one of my colleagues sent me a link to a CNNgo article about a house haunted by ghosts on Weihai Lu. I clicked on it and to my surprise the former office of China Bay appeared in the picture! Long time readers may know that I used to be a managing partner at China Bay (a consulting company) in the days before Tudou and Spil Games. We used to have our office on the ground floor of this beautiful old villa until we were kicked out by the government in 2006. And now that I think...
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Coolzey.cn, a good lunch delivery service in Shanghai

For the past couple of months I have been too busy to go out for lunch, so I normally order food. There is a place around the corner that quickly delivers sandwiches (O'deli, 335 Hanghe Lu, phone 6372 1576) for a reasonable price (RMB 22-33), but eating their sandwiches every day gets a bit boring. I am also a good client of delivery service Sherpa's (www.sherpa.com.cn, phone 6209 6209), but some of their places have a minimum order and the delivery fee can be relatively high if you just...
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Japanese game portal egames.jp live

This afternoon we launched a completely redesigned game portal for the Japanese market, egames.jp. Before we decided on the design of the site we did quite a lot of research on what makes a portal in Japan successful. Website design in Japan is very different from the US or Europe, but also from portal design in China. One main difference is that the site has a lot less games than our average portal, only 150 selected games in this case (as a comparison, our sites in China have thousands...
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Studying Chinese the digital way

On Twitter I mention every now and then that I am studying Chinese during lunch time or late at night. Because of that I sometimes get mails from people asking me advice on how to best study Chinese. I am no expert in that field, but maybe it helps some readers when I explain how I do it myself. My approach is quite digital, there are a lot of tools out there nowadays that make studying a lot more easy. Over the past years I had a lot of tutors and even spent a semester at Beijing Foreign...
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Flu

2010 did not start very well for me: I have been in bed since New Year's Day with the flu. On New Year's Eve we had a nice dinner at Noble Seafood but I felt pretty tired already. I thought it was because of a combination of too much work and not enough sleep, so I did not pay too much attention to it. The next day my whole body was aching and I just wanted to lie down, but because my parents were visiting and would leave the next day, I decided not to give in and spend time with them. But...
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New blog design live!

If you read this on my blog at www.marc.cn you will see that the design has changed completely, something that was long overdue. When I first started blogging in September 2004 I was on a Radio Userland platform, but I changed to Blogger and to my own domain in August 2005. Since then I did not make any big changes to the design. I am now using Wordpress, which has the big advantage that I can write blog posts and approve comments without using a VPN in China. One of the other advantages of...
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