Archive for February, 2010

Details of how Baidu was hacked

On January 12 this year China's leading search engine Baidu was hacked and showed the message "This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army". Nobody knew what happened, but domainnamewire.com now published...
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Google China starts hiring again

Despite serious threats to leave China, it now seems Google is not walking their talk: there are job postings on Google's Chinese site again, indicating that the search giant is not going to leave China anytime soon. As a heavy Google user I am of course happy about this, because I was worried to lose access to among others my Gmail account and my Google Reader RSS feed. The story is certainly not over yet, but either Google's negotiations with the government are going well (which would be...
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Meet up in San Francisco March 8-12?

From March 8-12 I will be in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference 2010. If you would like to meet me for a coffee at the Moscone Center, or somewhere around there for breakfast, lunch or dinner, let me know at marcvanderchijs (at) gmail (dot) com. I am especially interested to meet with online game companies (incl. social game companies) that are considering to set up their business in China, and in VC's looking at the China online game or Internet market. But of course I also...
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Worker safety in a Chinese factory

In my time as a consultant about 7-8 years ago I visited many factories along China's East coast. Always an interesting experience, especially compared to the clean and efficient factories that I was used to while working for Mercedes-Benz (where I worked until 2002). One of the things you always notice in Chinese factories is that workers do not seem to care about safety: their attitude is often one of 'why should I wear safety glasses or safety shoes, it's just a nuisance and I'm not...
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Last day of the CNY holiday

On Twitter my friends outside China are all happy that it's Friday and almost weekend, but here in China everybody is getting ready for one of the "only-in-China" 7-day working weeks that will start tomorrow. I don't mind too much actually, there are a lot of things I want to do the next days, but working 7 days in a row instead of 5 is not something many people look forward to. The Chinese press always talks about the one week off that everybody gets for Chinese New Year, but by...
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New RSS feed for readers in China

On the Tudou Intranet there is a feed of my blog, but it shows only the titles of the posts. If you click on the title you get the full text. What I did not realize is that because I started...
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Chinese New Year holiday

This week the whole of China closes down for a week and so Spil Games Asia also closed its doors for a few days (we will be back in the office on Saturday morning, because this weekend will be a working weekend in China). This year we decided not to go to Beijing nor to the beaches of South-East Asia but to stay at home. Main reason is because of the kids, traveling with two young kids is quite stressful. I actually enjoy spending a couple of days at home. I read some books (latest was...
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Cultural differences

Even after living in China for over 10 years I still spot unexpected cultural differences every now and then, especially since we have kids. There are of course a lot of issues related to how to educate your kids, but my wife and I pretty much have the same opinion on that, so that's not a big issue. But Scott also goes to kindergarten and we recently had an interesting discussion there. The Chinese teacher told us that Scott was leading the class to behave naughtily. She told us this so...
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Spil Games Asia Annual Dinner 2010

On Friday evening Spil Games Asia had its annual dinner for all employees, my 5th dinner with this company already. Like most companies in China we always organize a dinner in the last days before Chinese New Year, and during the dinner there are speeches, a lot of drinking, and people play games. In my speech I talked about the changes at Spil Games Asia over the past year, both the good things and the bad. Some key people left last year, but that allowed us to finally build a top...
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Scott & Elaine are more and more fun

Now that Scott is over 2 years old and Elaine is 8 months old it gets nice and nicer to interact with them. Scott really started talking now, he switches without any problems from Chinese to Dutch, and even occasionally says some thing in English. Chinese he learns at home from my wife and the nannies, Dutch from me and my parents when they are visiting, and English from the teachers and kids in school. Because his pronunciation is not yet perfect we sometimes have to guess what language he...
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Ho-Pin Tung makes it into Formula 1!

This morning when I opened my inbox the first message that I saw was a press release with the title: Ho-Pin Tung in Formula 1. Ho-Pin will be the 3rd driver for the Renault F1 team in the upcoming 2010 season! That's extremely good news for the talented Dutch-Chinese race car driver, something he fully deserves after working hard for this opportunity for many years. This means that he will be the reserve driver and will be fully integrated into the team and travel to all the races. He will...
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