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Great week in the Bay area!

Running in SF to get over my jet lag

I am writing this somewhere over the North Pacific, a couple of hundred kilometers south of Alaska on a Delta flight from San Francisco to Tokyo. I spent the past week in the Bay area for among others the Smartphone game summit and TechCrunch Disrupt. As during every trip to the Valley I was once again inspired by the entrepreneurs that I met and the whole entrepreneurial vibe that’s hanging around San Francisco. It seems like every second person I met either works for a start-up or is an investor (of course the nature of the conferences also helps).

TechCrunch Disrupt

It was a week in which I met a ton of new people and many of them I met through Twitter. I was tweeting a lot during parts of the TC Disrupt conference, and because of that I got in touch with others that saw my tweets. Twitter is invaluable during this kind of conferences, if you miss stuff on stage you can read it again (and with comments) in the back channel and especially during more controversial panels (e.g. super angels vs. VCs or the Women in Tech one that became a cat fight on stage) it was very entertaining as well. Difficult to imagine a conference without Twitter actually, it adds so much value to what’s happening on stage and you get to meet new cool people at the same time.

The conferences gave me a lot of inspiration, especially now that I am sitting on this long plane ride and I finally have some time to recap what I saw and heard. My main conclusion is that the future is mobile, not only in China but all over the world. Nothing new of course, but it’s interesting to see most tech people seem to have similar ideas. Touchscreens? Every device will have them 5 years from now. My kids now already don’t understand why my laptop doesn’t react to them touching the screen! Especially Eric Schmidt (CEO Google) was very inspiring to me, his vision of the mobile future is important because Google is (still) so powerful that it can show the way to get there.

Meeting / rest area

But start-ups can also help to get there, especially the disruptive ones that presented their ideas during the conference. The eventual winner Qwiki is not my favorite, even though they certainly are disruptive and their presentation was amazing. But for me search is still synonym to getting an instant text or image result, not a mix of audio, video and text that you have to listen to. Time is of the essence when searching, I don’t want to listen to a 20 second multimedia bombardment. I hope for them I am wrong, and in that case they’ll probably quickly end up as part of the Google family. Others like Gunzoo (a fabric video ‘wall’) I liked a lot more, but for China’s relatively low Internet speeds this is still too early. Now that I think about it, this also seems to be a good candidate for Google (YouTube).

The 2nd day of TC Disrupt started off with a big bang, when AOL CEO Tim Armstrong came on stage with Mike Arrington and they confirmed the rumors that AOL had bought TechCrunch. Great for Mike and his writing staff, they worked very hard to get where they are and they deserve a good pay off (I hope all their bloggers have decent stock options). TechCrunch achieved a lot in just over 5 years. The first time I heard about the blog is when Mike Arrington wrote about Tudou (at that time still Toodou) in the summer of 2005. Now that would be a big thing for a start-up, but then hardly anybody knew TechCrunch yet. Strangely the article seems to have disappeared, but I assume it should still be somewhere in the Internet archives.

Last part of MC Hammer show at #tcdisrupt in San Francisco

Next to listening to all the top speakers and panelists, we (Floris Jan Cuypers of Spil Games was also in SF) had a couple of meetings with gaming and other companies (a.o. we went to Facebook’s HQ, where you have to sign an NDA before even entering the building, just like at Google. I hope writing this doesn’t break their laws. FB is clearly not a start-up anymore…). We even got to see MC Hammer perform at the Google & SV Angels after party. Pretty cool, Hammertime still rocks and his dance moves are still there 2 decades later.

Another highlight was the visit to Singularity University at the NASA Ames Research Center. SU’s executive director Salim Ismail was also at TC Disrupt and he saw on Twitter that I was also at the conference. We had dinner a couple of months ago in SF so it was good to catch up again. He then invited Floris Jan and me to visit Singularity University. I should probably write a separate blog post about what Singularity is doing, because once again I was blown away by some of the stories I heard. They are literally changing the world with their ideas and projects. For some ideas on what they are working on, check out their Facebook page. Thanks for the invite Salim!

Visit to Singularity University at Nasa Ames Research Center

Another highlight of the week was the visit last weekend of one of the best wineries in Napa Valley, Jarvis Wines, where the owner and his wife gave us a private tour. I was very honored by this and plan to write a separate post on the visit over the next days. As I have probably mentioned on this blog in the past one of my goals is to one day have my own winery, so not only did I get to taste some of the best wines I ever had, but this was a very inspiring day as well.

Marc at the entrance of the Jarvis Wines cave

By coincidence last night Seraph Group had a limited partner meeting in Palo Alto, so I was able to join that as well for the first time. Met some of the other LPs and several portfolio companies presented to us. I had seen many company presentation during TC Disrupt over the past days, but actually the ones I saw at Seraph were better than the ones presenting at TC Disrupt. I especially liked Wakemate, that uses a soft bracelet to measure and analyze your sleep patterns and wakes you up at the right time (similar to Lark that was presenting at TC Disrupt). Wakemate will launch in October and I plan to order a kit and try it out for myself. Tasting Room is another portfolio company that I liked a lot. They basically sell small boxes with 6 * 50ml bottles of different wines that you can taste. The wines that you like you can order right away in normal bottles. Tasting Room works with many of the big US wineries but only ships in the US. They also have an iPhone app where you can make tasting notes and with more background on the wines. A very cool idea implemented by a very experienced team. I wonder when someone will copy the model outside the US, it seems like a no brainer for entrepreneurial teams with wine industry experience.

I look back at an excellent week in one of my favorite places in the world. And like I said before on this blog, I wouldn’t be surprised if one day I would end up here to do a new start-up

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SAI Digital 100 – Tudou ranks #15!!

Tudou logo ??LOGO????Every year the Silicon Alley Insider / Business Insider ranks the most valuable Internet start-ups. Tudou made the list for the 3rd year in a row, this year SAI put us at place 15 with a valuation of USD 1.5 billion. No comment on that valuation from me, SAI explains how they get to our valuation in their post. Like I said last year as well, the list is rather arbitrary (Spil Games is again missing from the list, they absolutely belong on here), but it’s nice to see how “outsiders” look at the company.

This year’s winner is of course Facebook, no surprises there. Online game company Zynga managed to get to #2, followed by Wikipedia, Skype, Craiglist and Twitter. Among Chinese companies Tudou is number 2, the first one is Taobao (the Ebay of China) at #12. Tudou competitor Youku made the list for the first time, they ended at #27 with a USD 500 million valuation.

Funny thing is that when I saw the post in my RSS feeds I was on a very short stop-over in Tokyo en route to San Francisco, and I just quickly glanced at the article without really reading it. I thought they had given Tudou the same USD 500 million valuation as last year and I also tweeted that and put a link on Facebook. When I landed in SF I received several comments and emails from people letting me know that I was 1 billion dollars off… 🙂

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Meet me in San Francisco

I just decided to go to the Smartphone Games Summit in San Francisco this Friday afternoon. Anybody in the mobile games industry that wants to meet and/or talk about Spil Games’ HTML5 strategy feel free to get in touch through marcvanderchijs (at) gmail (dot) com. I only registered for a free Expo ticket, so I probably can’t access the conference area.

TechCrunch LogoNext week Monday-Wednesday I will be at TechCrunch Disrupt (also in SF) together with Spil Games’ business development director, so if you’re there let me know and we can meet for a coffee during one of the breaks. I look very much forward to the TC conference, with top speakers like John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins), Michael Moritz (Sequoia), Mark Pincus (Zynga), Bing Gordon (EA founder), Reid Hoffman (a.o. LinkedIn & PayPal), Peter Thiel (a.o. Founders Fund), Marissa Mayer (Google) and super angel & Geeks on a Plane organizer Dave McClure.

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Sportive weekend

It’s Monday morning 6 AM and I am sitting in a hotel room in Eindhoven, looking back at a great weekend. Friday night was nothing special actually, I went to Tudou around 7 PM to pick up my wife, had a chat with Gary and then spent an hour in a traffic jam to get home. After the kids were in bed I worked a bit and packed my suitcase.

Hong Kong from the peak

Saturday morning I took a flight to Hong Kong for a trail run with Marcel Ekkel. He is back in HK after a working as an expat in Jakarta and it was nice to catch up again. We had planned to do a 34 km trail run (stage 1-6 of the Hong Kong trail), but because we started off a bit late we only managed to run/hike 21 km before it got dark . Enough for me to be honest, I am in relatively good shape again but not in top shape yet. And running a trail means most of the route is either uphill or downhill… It was very enjoyable, amazing how much nature there still is on Hong Kong Island, just a few kilometers from one of the busiest cities in the world.

Trail running in Hong Kong with Marcel Ekkel

After the run we went to a gym to shower and change clothes and then had a nice dinner with some beer and a bottle of Australian Chardonnay on a terrace at IFC overlooking Hong Kong harbor. At 9:30 I had to take the Airport Express back to HK Airport in order to catch a flight to Amsterdam at 11 PM. As usual that went quickly and I even had time for a glass of champagne and some French cheese in the Air France lounge. The flight I mainly spent asleep, or at least resting. I finished a book (Super Sad Love Story, great book!) but that’s about the only thing I did during the flight.

Running along the beach with my dad (Zandvoort-IJmuiden and back). Best way to get over jet lag.

My dad picked me up at 5:30 AM at Schiphol airport (thanks dad!) and we drove to the beach at Zandvoort straight away to go for a run. I was still tired from my run the day before and a bit jet lagged from the flight, but once I put on my running gear I felt great again. We ran from Zandvoort to IJmuiden and back over the beach and hardly saw anybody else. Seeing the sun rise over the dunes was a beautiful sight! The way back was not easy for me because of the head wind and because my upper leg muscles were still hurting from the Hong Kong run, but we managed of course.

Watching the final round of the KLM Dutch Open

We then drove to Hilversum for a cup of coffee at Peter Driessen’s house (Peter is Spil Games CEO) and to take a shower. He borrowed us 2 bikes so we could ride to the gold course to watch the final day of the KLM Dutch Open at the Hilversumsche Golf Club (thanks for the invite KLM!). We had a nice afternoon there, walking quite a distance on the course and enjoying good food and wine in the KLM Elite lounge.

Nilsson (#2 in final standings) putting

At night Peter and I drove to Eindhoven where we had dinner. After dinner I was too tired to go for drinks, so before 10 pm I was back in my hotel room, read a couple of mails and some RSS feeds before falling into a deep sleep. I had a great weekend! I’ll be in Holland for meetings the next few days and will be back in Shanghai on Friday night.

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Tudou launches real time HTML5 video transcoding

Tudou launches real time encoding of all videos for mobile platforms

After last week’s Spil Games’ announcement that the company launched HTML5 mobile game websites on all of its portals and is putting its full weight behind HTML5, this week it is Tudou’s turn to announce an important HTML5 development. If you want to watch one of Tudou’s over 40 million videos on a mobile device, the video will be automatically real time (!) transcoded, using HTML5 and HTTP live streaming. The technology is now in open beta for Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile and in closed beta for the iPhone and iPad.

Globally Tudou is the first video website rolling out real time video trans-coding access to its complete video library. YouTube, for example, announced some HTML5 support, but so far not for all of its videos. Tudou believes that HTML5 video rendering will become the next major protocol delivering video content across multiple platforms. Good to see that once again Tudou is leading innovation in the video space, not only in China but worldwide!

In the meantime, Tudou is gradually launching the Tudou Mobile Widget 2.0 across Symbian, Andriod, Windows Mobile, iPhone, iPad, Java and Bada platforms.