Archive for August, 2010

SPIL GAMES Champions HTML5 to Drive the Mobile Gaming Revolution

I believe that HTML5 will become the new standard for online games, especially for games that you play on a mobile device. No more need to download apps, but play them directly in your browser. And also no more wars between Apple and Flash, because HTML5 can be played in a browser on any device, even on an iPhone or iPad. Spil Games, which has grown into the world's largest online casual gaming company, believes HTML5 will be the future standard and has decided to put all its efforts behind...
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Baidu innovative game search results

Although I am not a big fan of Baidu's search results, I have to admit they are quite innovative. Their latest innovation is something I have not seen anywhere else so far: if you search for game related words such as ??? (mini game) you will first see 4 mini games before you see the links to the highest ranked mini game websites. And not only that, you can even play the games right there on the Baidu.com site, see for example Popcap's Plants vs. Zombies below. (If anybody from Popcap reads...
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Airline website the day after a plane crash

China is different from any other country, I have experienced and learned that many times over the past decade here. But even I would not expect pictures of the burning wreckage of a plane crash on the home page of the airline that crashed one of its planes just over a day after the accident. But that's exactly what happened: on Tuesday Henan Airlines flight VD8387 crashed during a night landing in foggy weather in Yichun (Heilongjiang), killing 42 passengers and injuring 54. And today the...
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20 GB additional storage for Gmail

In early 2006 my Gmail box was almost full. I tried to get additional storage but it was impossible despite Gmail's slogan of "Never delete another message anymore". In the end the only thing I could do was to delete thousands of emails to get sufficient new storage. At that time I wrote on my blog that I would not mind paying USD 100 per year to get unlimited storage. Well, it seems my prayers have been heard, because when I got a message yesterday that my Gmail account was once again full...
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Stretching does not prevent injuries

During my short summer holiday in Holland I started running a bit more. I love it but I need to make time for it, and time is always my biggest constraint it seems. Not only because of work, but also because of the kids. And with a wife who regularly works until the early hours it means I normally don't go to bed until 1 or 2 AM. So it's virtually impossible to run in the morning before taking Scott to school and going to work. But I set myself some goals and decided to start practicing...
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Expensive cars

In my last post I mentioned the expensive cars at Soong Ching Ling kindergarten. This morning when I took Scott to school I observed something else: almost every single expensive car belonged to a Chinese family and all the average Buick and Honda minivans were driven by non-Chinese families. Of course the main reason is that many foreigners are here on corporate expat assignments and top of the line BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus or Landrovers are not part of the package. When you're posted...
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Scott’s first day at Soong Ching Ling kindergarten

This morning Grace and I took Scott for the first time to his new school, the Soong Ching Ling kindergarten (Hongqiao Campus). Grace did a lot of research on schools and eventually decided that this was the best for Scott. I visited the campus once before and was surprised how big it was, over 10 hectares full of gardens, playgrounds and even a swimming pool in the middle of Hongqiao. This used to be the edge of town many years ago when the campus was built (1994), but nowadays so much...
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New course for the Shanghai Marathon

On December 5 the 2010 Shanghai Marathon will take place, and for the first time the route will go through both Puxi and Pudong. The start will be at Nanjing Road as usual and from there it will go along the Bund and the South Bund to the Fuxing Road Tunnel. After the tunnel the runners will pass the World Expo (at least what's left of it by then) and continue on along the Huangpu river. The half marathon will then go East in the direction of the Shanghai Oriental Sports Center (where the...
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The telemarketer counterscript

One of the annoyances of living in China is the flood of daily spam calls from telemarketers. Most are in Chinese and I just pretend that I don't understand a single word of the language ('hello? hello?') and hang up on them. The English language ones are mainly trying to 'help to manage your money' or they have some 'special offshore investment opportunities'. Also these ones I would normally hang up on without wasting any further time, angry that they interrupted my work: telemarketers got...
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Heat wave in Shanghai continues

Yesterday we landed in Shanghai around 12 PM and when I left the terminal I was still wearing the sweater that I usually wear during flights. Not a smart idea, the Shanghai heat literally hit me when the doors opened. It was extremely hot and humid and I immediately took it off. But it didn't help much: I only stayed outside for 2 minutes but I was already sweating before I got into the car. Today I read in the Shanghai Daily that the mercury broke another record yesterday, it was...
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KLM luggage policy

Update 18 Aug 2010: KLM contacted me after reading this post, see the end of the article I have a love / hate relationship with KLM. I am happy with the many upgrades that they give me and with the way their Twitter team works. But there are also a lot of things that KLM needs to improve and that I complain about on Twitter when I encounter them (some examples: a website in China that is often not working because it seems to be hosted outside the Great Firewall, continuous problems with...
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Vacation in Holland

The past week I spent in The Netherlands with my family for a short vacation (we'll be back in China this weekend). Work has been quite intense over the past couple of months and I felt I really needed to be away from the office for a while. I therefore decided to take it really easy this week and not travel all around the country like I normally do on holidays in my home country. Except for a day trip to Gent (Belgium) and a trip to the zoo in Arnhem we stayed at my parents place the whole...
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Tudou Closes US$50 Million Series E Funding

Tudou just announced that we closed a USD 50 million dollar round, led by Singapore's Temasek. Below the official press...
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Price inflation

A good example of how fast prices in Shanghai increase sometimes: in this shopping mall the parking fee went up by 75% on August 1. It may not be expensive by Western standards (the price for parking is about USD 1 per hour), but considering that this mall is far out in the suburbs of Shanghai it's certainly not cheap...
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Shanghai Expo – 9 AM Daily Opening Race

It's late on a Saturday night, or actually early on a Sunday morning, and I just realize that today the Shanghai Expo 2010 is exactly half way. Three months ago it opened, and initially not too many people visited it. During a Tudou board meeting in early May one of the VC's told me that there were not many visitors on the Expo terrain and that he could visit most pavilions without waiting. I thought the whole thing would be a disaster, but for some reason (unknown to me) suddenly the Expo...
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Water art

A couple of weeks ago I put a video on my blog of a sand artist who had made a tribute to the football World Cup. I thought that was quite spectacular, but this week I came across a form of art that's at least as special: water art. It's basically an artist putting some oil pigment on water and dispersing this to create a work of art. The artist is highly skilled and in this video he paints among others a desert on water and later on a Buddha. See it for yourself in the embedded video or...
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