Archive for April, 2010

Grammar mistake at Dutch Expo pavilion?

I just read a post on DeluxZilla about Chinglish signs at the Shanghai World Expo 2010. I was not...
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My kids love computers!

As you can see from the pictures my kids love computers just as much as I do. Elaine at 10 months (now 11 actually, she had her "birthday" yesterday) old already plays games on an old Sony laptop, and the first thing Scott says when I come home is "Papa, iPad, papa, iPad". For babies and toddlers computers are the most normal things in the world, and they have no fear for them at all. When I gave Scott my iPad for the first time it took him less than 2 minutes to figure out how to turn it...
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Spil Games opens the market at NYSE Euronext

Yesterday Peter Driessen, CEO and co-founder of Spil Games, was invited to open the stock market at the NYSE Euronext in Amsterdam. NYSE Euronext is the pan-European stock exchange that started in 2000 after the merger of the Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam exchanges. Opening the stock market by ringing the opening bell (or in this case using a gong) is an old stock exchange tradition. At...
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Spil Games and Hyves joining forces

Yesterday Spil Games and social network Hyves announced that they together launched a game platform on Hyves, www.hyves.nl/games. Hyves is Holland's biggest social network, with 10 million registered users (out of a total Dutch population of 16.5 million people). The social aspect of gaming is central in the new Hyves game platform, people can for example try to beat their friends high scores. The platform starts off with 300 games, and new content will be added constantly. The platform is...
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Day of National Morning on Chinese websites

Today is an official day of National Mourning in China for the people that died in the Qinghai earthquake, exactly one week ago. All public entertainment will be suspended today, so also all entertainment websites were requested to cease operations for 24 hours. Our Chinese sites game.com.cn and xiaoyouxi.cn changed their design to reflect that day of National Mourning. After the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 we did something similar, but at that time we had to stop our sites for 3...
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Flying to Amsterdam despite the ash cloud

Two weeks ago I booked a flight to Amsterdam for a short business trip. First I wanted to fly on Sunday already, but because we had the Tudou Festival on Saturday and I prefer to spend as much time in the Shanghai office as possible, I decided to fly on Tuesday. That turned out to be a lucky decision, because Sunday's flight was cancelled because of the ash cloud. But I still wasn't sure whether I could fly today. Yesterday I had been in touch with KLM on Twitter a few times, and they even...
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2010 Tudou Video Festival: And the winner is…

On Saturday the 2010 Tudou Video Festival was held in Beijing. A total of 1000 invited guests attended this year's festival in the northeastern suburbs of Beijing and watched the winners in 16 categories receive their awards. The prizes were handed out by famous Chinese directors and representatives of the sponsors of this year's festival. The quality of the winning films was once again amazing, there is so much talent in China. And that talent now has the chance of showing their works to the...
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KLM delays passengers for 10 days

As you are probably aware, a big cloud of volcanic ash is disrupting air traffic in big parts of Europe. Just now a former Spil Games Asia colleague (who now works at Spil Games in Hilversum) gave me a call. He is on holiday in China and planned to fly back to Amsterdam today. But because of the ash cloud there are no flights to Europe, so he had to rebook his ticket. And guess what: the earliest plane KLM can put him on will leave in 10 days time! He told me he first thought he misunderstood...
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Online video panel @ Tudou Video Festival

Yesterday the Tudou Video Festival kicked off with a panel about online video and about the main differences between video in China and the West. A panel consisting of Frank Yu (former Microsoft games exec & a.o. Gamasutra blogger), Gary Wang (Tudou CEO), Gang Lu (Kuukie.com, OpenWeb.Asia & Mobinode.com), and David Wolf (SiliconHutong blogger & CEO of Wolf Group Asia) discussed everything about online video: from content to censorship and from measurements to monetization. Christine...
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Lost in translation? Facebook not entering China

Over the past days many Chinese websites wrote about the rumor that Facebook was planning to set up an office in China. This would be hard to believe, after all they have been blocked here for a long time already and they have some very strong and very profitable local competitors. Yesterday the story changed a bit, instead of an office Facebook now planned to set up a game development studio in China to make social games. Certainly an interesting idea, but it now turns out that this is likely...
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Tombsweeping in Jiangsu

Last weekend it was Qingming Festival (Tombsweeping Festival) in China, the day that you visit the graves of your ancestors to pay your respect to them. Because nowadays many Chinese in big cities have cars this means huge traffic jams everywhere, so we decided to go a week later. Yesterday we made the trip to a small village in Eastern Jiangsu province, a few kilometers from the coast, to visit the grave of my wife's paternal grandmother. It was a big occasion, because it would have been her...
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Guy Kawasaki – The Art of the Start

If you run a start-up or plan to set one up, chances are that you have already seen this 2006 video of Guy Kawasaki talking about "The Art of the Start". I had seen it a couple of years ago, but this week a friend sent me the link again. I re-watched it while driving to the office this morning and still found it excellent, so I decided to post it here. In case you don't know Guy Kawasaki, he is among others a serial entrepreneur, former Apple evangelist (and Apple Fellow), a writer and a...
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No curfew in Shanghai – Shanghaiist spreading rumors

Shanghaiist is one of my favorite daily blogs about things happening in Shanghai and generally they are well informed. But today's article with the title "Shanghai police imposing foreigner curfew for expo" is total bullsh*t. I am sure this article will spread quickly all over the Internet and into traditional media, with journalists not doing any fact checking (as usual with China stories), so let me give you the facts as I think they are. First the context: Shanghaiist said that an...
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April 17: Tudou Video Festival 2010

In less than 2 weeks the Tudou Video Festival will takeplace once again and it will be bigger than ever. This year's edition will be held on April 17 in Beijing with an audience of 1000 invited guests. Amazing how the festival has grown over the past years. I still remember when we first discussed about this idea in late 2005, at that time the plan was to find a space somewhere around Yangshuo to hold an open air kind of Woodstock or Burning Man event. That never materialized, but 2 years...
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Google also censors its US search results

I am sure this is nothing new, but I had not seen it before. I was looking for the name of a bittorrent search engine so I did a quick Google search. To my surprise the message "In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org." popped up. Huh, censorship on Google in the US? If Google has such a big problem with...
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Shanghai gets 2 days off for World Expo 2010

It may be April Fools Day today, but I don't think this is a joke: Employees in Shanghai will likely be happy to hear that the Shanghai government decided to give everybody 2 days off during the start of the World Expo. Instead of getting just a 1-day holiday for Labor Day, the whole city now gets April 30-May 4 off as 'compensation for the understanding and support of the population during the preparation of the Expo' and 'in part to ease the traffic burden when the Expo starts'. I think the...
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