Archive for November, 2010

The cheating taxi driver

This evening I had a couple of beers at Bar Rouge with Spil Games colleagues from Holland and took a cab back home afterward. I let the driver stop outside my compound and gave him RMB 100 to pay the RMB 45 fare. A second later he had an old RMB 10 note in his hand and told me that I had given him only RMB 10. For a moment I thought I made a mistake and took another RMB 100 from my wallet. But then I realized that he was cheating me, because I had just spent my last RMB 10 in the cab to Bar...
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Great weekend

It's Sunday night just past 11 PM and I am sitting behind my laptop to read some emails and RSS feeds. I had a great weekend with my family, doing lots of things and with quite nice weather as well (up to 22 degrees yesterday). Friday night we stayed home and because my parents were visiting we decided to open two very good bottles of wine. We started with a bottle...
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Reading a story for Scott’s class

This month is book month at Soong Ching Ling kindergarten and parents could sign up to read a story in class. Of course I decided to participate and signed up for yesterday to tell the kids a story. I didn't really know what to expect with 2 and 3 year old kids, most of whom just started learning English 3 months ago. Would they be able to sit and listen quietly or start running around? It turned out that it was a great experience and I don't think I ever had a more captive audience! I...
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A Ferris Wheel next to my office

Yesterday I saw from my office window that a construction company was building a strange looking device just 200 meters from my office window. It looked like a ferris wheel but because it's in the middle of a residential area I assumed it was some sort of machine used in constructing a new road or a subway line. But when opening today's Shanghai Daily I learned that it will indeed be a ferris wheel. The newspaper writes that from the wheel you will have a bird's eye view over the Suzhou...
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How long does it take to build a 15-story hotel in China? 6 days!

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me, is how quickly China's cities change. Buildings seem to pop up out of nowhere, and if you don't visit a neighborhood for a few months it can look quite different. On average skyscrapers grow 1-2 stories per week, but sometimes it can go a lot quicker. See for example this time lapse video in which a 15-story hotel in Changsha gets build in just 6 days! Amazing. (source:...
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Trip to Jakarta

I spent the past 4 days in Jakarta on a business trip and got back early this morning. I had not been in Indonesia since last year June (see last year's blog post), and it was great to be back. Spil Games' Indonesian site games.co.id has grown tremendously over the past 1.5 years: it's now the #1 online game site in Indonesia with 8.5 monthly unique players, and over 30% come back every single day to play! The trip gave me a lot of new insights about the Indonesian Internet market and the...
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Running again & a promise to myself

If you follow me on DailyMile.com you probably noticed that I didn't run for the past 25 days. Not because of an injury but because I had a pretty bad cold that didn't go away. I got the cold in Korea and because I kept on working and traveling it got worse and worse. Last week in Holland I seriously thought about staying in bed one day, but I finally took some more Tylenol and dragged myself out of bed. Back in China things didn't really improve either but today I am suddenly feeling much...
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Air pollution in Shanghai much worse after Expo is over

When I drove to the office on Monday morning the whole city was covered in a brown blanket of smog, the sun could hardly get through. I tweeted about it saying "The Shanghai Expo is over and immediately the air pollution is worse than any day during the past 6 months". Shanghaiist even made it the tweet of the day (thanks Elaine Chow), so I decided to dive a bit deeper into this and see if I could find some data to back up my observation. A Twitter reply by @bpoasia helped me out, and I...
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UnitedStyles looking for testers

UnitedStyles.com is an online kids fashion store, where kids and their parents can choose and design kids clothes in 3D. This personal design is produced on demand and delivered anywhere in the world. UnitedStyles is not yet open to the public but is currently looking for people who would like to test the site and are welcome to place an order. The current collection is a selection of high quality hoodies and dresses for girls aged 3 to 12. If you are a parent with a daughter in that age...
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Zlong Games Played Over 100 Million Times In October

Zlong Games (Spil Games Asia's Shanghai game development studio) is doing very well, the October results just came out and the studio generated more than 100 million page views during this month! Congratulations to Leo Liu and his team for this great result, very nice to see how the company and its games developed over the past couple of years. Zlong produces mainly Flash and HTML5 casual games for Spil Games, both single- and multiplayer games. The company also makes social games, for...
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Tudou #1 in China iPhone & iPad app store

Within a week of Tudou officially releasing its iPhone and iPad application in the Apple App Store, the Tudou Video App has quickly ranked no. 1 among all Chinese free...
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