Archive for April, 2011

Only in China: Royal wedding dress copied 2 hours after wedding

A couple of weeks ago one of the investors in Lightinabox told me that the site was able to copy fashion within a few hours, and yesterday's Royal Wedding of Kate and William proved him right. Kate's dress was available online within 2 hours after she first showed it to the world. If you're interested in getting your hands on one you can order one here for just USD 399 (they ship worldwide). Somehow I have the feeling that the original dress was a bit more...
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Huge lines at Beijing Apple store for white iPhone4 launch

This morning I was in Sanlitun in Beijing for several meetings at Element Fresh. While walking there I saw a huge crowd of people at the Apple store. It turns out that they were there for the launch of the white version of the iPhone4. Crowds are normal at Apple product launches these days (even I waited in line to buy an iPad 2 a couple of weeks ago), but to wait in line for a white version of a product that has been available for about 9 months already is something even I have difficulty...
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Valutions For Online Game Companies Going Up Fast

Article cross posted on the Business Insider here For the past 5+ years I have been working...
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Booming billionaires in China

The paper version of...
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Take out sushi attracts no lunch crowds anymore

About once a week I pick up some sushi from the take-out place in the basement of the Raffles shopping mall on People's Square (the place is called Sushi Take-Out, right next to my other favorite Beard Papa's). Tasty sushi for a decent price, most pieces are RMB 2 to RMB 3 per piece. The box above cost me RMB 43, less than EUR 5. So far I never got sick, so despite the low price they seem to use good fish and have decent hygiene standards. The take out restaurant used to be packed at lunch...
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Never a boring moment on Shanghai’s roads

Hard to believe what I just saw on the highway while driving home tonight. There had been a small accident on the right lane of Yan'an Lu (a 6-lane elevated expressway) in the direction of Hongqiao airport. Three cars hit each other, but there were just some scratches and some glass on the ground from the headlights of the middle car. Nothing special, but of course traffic slowed down quickly and when we were close to the accident I heard the siren of an approaching police car. It sounded very...
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Home Alone

It's late Sunday night and I am sitting at home doing some mails on my laptop. Nothing unusual, except for the fact that I am the only one at home. I just realized that that hasn't happened since Scott was born in late 2007! I love it, there is nobody to disturb me while working and I can do whatever I want without disturbing others. I am streaming Spotify to the stereo for example, without the risk of waking up sleeping ayis or kids. But it also has a downside. Because there is always staff...
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Yangzhou Half Marathon 2011

When I was working at DaimlerChrysler Northeast Asia in my early days in China, the company had a bus factory (Yaxing-Benz) in Yangzhou, Jiangsu province. I went there regularly, but did not like the city at all. There was nothing to do in those days, the city literally pulled up the sidewalks at 8 pm and turned off all the lights. The factory was old and dirty and there was a lot of joint-venture politics going on that I don't even want to think of anymore. When at a certain point the German...
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Debut of Tudou’s 2nd drama series “Utopia Office”

After the hit success of the first Tudou "made-for-Internet" drama series in October 2010, Tudou launched its second "made-for-Internet" drama...
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Over 1 million views on my Flickr account

Today I was looking at the stats for my pictures on Flickr and I was surprised to see that I had just hit the 1 million view threshold: my pictures and picture sets have been viewed over 1 million times over the past years. On average about 500-600 pictures are being viewed per day at the moment on the site. I put my pictures on many places on the web and I always assumed that Flickr would be the place where most people would see them. But that's actually not the case: I just checked the...
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Only at the Shanghai Auto Show…

Since I left Mercedes-Benz back in 2002 I visited every Shanghai Auto Show, but this year I will miss it for the first time. I was in Beijing from Monday until Wednesday and this weekend I will be in Yangzhou to run the half marathon there. That combined with lots of work made it impossible to go to the show. Since I stopped writing columns for car magazines a long time ago already, there is no real business reason to visit anyway, but I still like the atmosphere at this show. It's so...
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With Scott at the Shanghai Formula One

This afternoon I took my family (my parents, Scott & Grace) to the free practice of the Formula One. For days Scott had been talking about it and when we picked him up from school during lunch time he was very excited. Within 45 minutes we arrived at the Shanghai Circuit and my driver found a parking space very close to the entrance of the race track (there were not many cars yet). We had Grandstand tickets, but because we were about an hour early we had enough time to check out some...
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Ferrari night at M1NT

Formula One is in town this weekend, so there are lots of racing related events. Tonight Ferrari organized a dinner (with among others their drivers Massa and Alonso) and party at M1NT. Grace and I went to the party which was (mainly) held on M1NT's rooftop terrace. The weather was great for an outdoor event tonight, spring has really arrived in Shanghai it seems. Ferrari actually put a real Formula One car on the wall in the M1NT night club. Not this year's model though, but 'just' a 2008...
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Chinese ice wine

I love to drink wine and try to drink only good wines - Life is too short to drink bad wines, right? Over the past decade I tried many different Chinese wines, but most of the time I was not very impressed with what I tasted. Sure, there were a few decent ones among the tens of locally produced varieties that I drank, but generally they were at least twice as expensive as a similar non-Chinese wines. I'd love to find a good Chinese red wine below RMB 100 that I could drink at night on...
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Kaixin001 launches first HTML5 mobile game – with Spil Games Asia

Spil Games has taken a leadership role in the HTML5 gaming space, not only globally (see for example the Game Jam together with Google or our HTML5 contest), but also in China. We have been involved in all HTML5 conferences that were organized in Shanghai and Beijing over the past couple of months and we have launched our mobile HTML5 game platform at youxi.cn. The good thing about HTML5 games is that you can play them on every mobile smartphone, so not only on Android (like with Flash games)...
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Using an iPhone again

For more than a year I have been using the Nexus One Android phone. That's probably a record for me, because I used to change phones every 6 months or so. It shows I really liked the phone and especially the Android operating system. Before the N1 that I had been switching from iPhone to Android and back (first an iPhone 1, then the G1 (the first Android phone on the market), then back to an iPhone for 6 months and when the Nexus One came out I switched back to Android). I felt the Android OS...
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Weekend at my parents place in Holland

I was in Holland over the past couple of days for business meetings. My original plan was to just stay from Wednesday to Friday, because I had been away from home way too much (because of that this blog is almost becoming a travelogue). But when I saw that I could save EUR 800 by staying 2 days longer I decided to spend the weekend at my parents place. I had a nice couple of days with them and now I am sitting at Amsterdam Schiphol airport waiting for my flight back home. On Friday my dad...
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