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The world’s best selling beer? Snow Beer from China

Snow Beer - the world's best selling beer

Back in 2003 when I was working with Sierk Vojacek in TV and video productions we produced a TV commercial for a local beer brand I had never heard of: Snow Beer. I am not sure anymore whether it was part of the payment, but after the shooting we ended up with quite some bottles of beer. I remember I didn’t particular like it, the color was very light and the beer didn’t have much taste, but on a hot summer day it was drinkable.

Over the years I saw Snow Beer more and more, especially outside the big Chinese cities. Likely because it’s dirt cheap, but maybe also because the light beer is more suitable to the Chinese taste than my favorite Tsingtao. What I did not realize, however, is that Snow Beer is not only the biggest beer in China, but actually is the best selling beer in the world! The beer is only sold in China, but it still managed to grow twice as big by volume as the global number 2 Bud Light. Quite amazing for a company that is only 15 years old!

Snow Beer - the world's best selling beerThe last time I remember drinking Snow Beer was during a Spil Games outing a few years ago, but then I had to drink so much of it (toasting and drinking ad fundum with colleagues) that I don’t really remember how it tasted. So I may give it a try again this weekend. A big bottle costs about EUR 0.30 (cheaper than bottled mineral water!), so it’s not a big waste if it still has hardly any taste. Cheers!

 

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Excellent China Eastern experience

I just had an excellent experience with China Eastern in New York, their service in their New York office is really good. Interestingly, it actually all started pretty bad.

Because we didn’t know exactly when we would fly back to Shanghai after the Tudou IPO we didn’t book a ticket yet. So this morning we called China Eastern to see if there were any business class seats available on their direct New York-Shanghai flight tomorrow that we can book with miles (I collected almost a million KLM miles and because China Eastern is part of Skyteam now, I can use them for this airline as well). That was possible, but we had to come to their office, in walking distance from our hotel.

When we arrived at their office the Chinese receptionist was extremely bitchy. I am not sure what her problem was, but she refused to speak English with me (“I am talking to your wife, so I speak Chinese”). Then she said we could not book award tickets with KLM miles (“If you are the owner of Skyteam you can, but you certainly can’t”), and told me to call KLM. So that’s what I did, and after a 15 minute call with KLM in Amsterdam it finally turned out they could not find any empty seats. Then the receptionist told me “Oh, I had already seen that in the system”. So I could have saved 15 minutes on the phone with KLM if she had just told me that… At that point I had had it with her and told her I was going to speak to the General Manager.

Grace and I walked through the office into the office of the GM and closed the door behind us. She was surprised of course, but after we told her what had just happened she apologized and said she would help us to try to solve it. She was extremely helpful and got her sales manager involved to sort out the problem. There were indeed no seats available in the system, but they changed that for us.

Problem was that the KLM and China Eastern computer systems are not compatible, so I still had to call KLM. I did so, but there they could still not see the seats in their system. Then China Eastern told me to ask KLM to put us on the waiting list for award tickets, but KLM’s system was not able to do that. The person in Amsterdam I talked to even got his manager involved, but they couldn’t figure out how to do it. They were very friendly, but finally they told me to let China Eastern call Air France in Paris to solve it. The sales manager did so, but Air France told them to call the US office. So that’s what the China Eastern person did, but then the USA office told him to call the KLM number in Holland again… And so of course we were stuck again at where we were an hour earlier (yes, this took a full hour).

But the China Eastern staff did not mind and kept on trying to find a solution. They even put our names in the system with a locator code so KLM could book the award tickets against them, but even this KLM could not do in their systems. Then we tried to book an open award ticket, but that also did not work. I have to say that KLM really tried, but it seems Skyteam’s computer systems are not fully aligned. After another 30 minutes Grace suddenly had an idea that we should have thought of earlier: book an award ticket on a date that was still available and then let China Eastern change it to tomorrow. And that finally worked, it still took me another 20 minutes on the phone with KLM, but eventually they managed to do it. Then China Eastern’s sales manager changed the reservation in his system, and we were done!

I have to say that I am really impressed by how willing China Eastern was to help. This was in their New York office on 5th Avenue (with a view of the Empire State Building!), so not a travel agent or so, and 2 people spent 2 hours helping us out. Maybe it was because they wanted to make up for the arrogant receptionist? I don’t know, but they did everything they could to solve it. We were allowed to sit in the GM’s office the whole 2 hours, were served drinks and had some nice chats with the Chinese staff while on hold on the phone. This changed my impression of China Eastern very much, and I am almost looking forward to tomorrow’s long flight – almost 15 hours non-stop flying time…

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Tudou.com IPO on NASDAQ

Tudou listing ceremony on NASDAQ

Today Tudou.com was listed on the NASDAQ, almost 7 years after Gary and I founded the company! No time to write a post, so just a couple of random pictures that I took today.

Grace and me with NASDAQ listing certificateGrace and Marc with the NASDAQ listing certificate

Dream it, Do it, NASDAQI love the slogan: Dream it, Do it, NASDAQ

Tudou listed under TUDONASDAQ welcomes Tudou on Times Square!

The Tudou team on Times SquareClosing ceremony, can you spot me?

Tudou logos all over Times Square!More Tudou logos on Times Square

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My blog is suddenly very slow

Since a few weeks the speed of my blog is a lot slower than it used to be. If you’re on a fast Internet connection you may not really notice it, but I now even got an email from a reader complaining about it.

Because I did not change any settings in WordPress and my hosting provider has not changed I had no idea what the problem was. But then UnitedStyles CTO Joop Dorresteijn noticed that the pictures cause the long loading time. It turns out that during my holiday I probably changed some settings in Flickr (where I host my pictures), and each time I now use a Flickr picture on my blog it does not load the 640 pixel version but the original high resolution picture – meaning normally 2-3 MB per picture. I will reverse the settings in my Flickr account, so from now pictures should be smaller again.

There is no quick fix to change the source file of the pictures in older blog posts, but maybe I will spend some time this weekend to manually change the links for the last couple of posts (there will be typhoon anyway, so I can’t go out).

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Stormy days ahead: super typhoon Muifa will hit Shanghai this weekend

Super typhoon Muifa on its way to Shanghai

Every year a couple of typhoons pass by Shanghai, but the last big one that exactly hit Shanghai was on the weekend of August 6-7, 2005. Exactly 6 years later another super typhoon will hit Shanghai on the same weekend, also on 6-7 August. Current predictions are that typhoon Muifa will blow into Shanghai from the East China Sea and make landfall here late Saturday night, with wind speeds of up to 130 mp/h (210 km/h). Its path can still change, but has been pretty stable for the past 24 hours.

That means a weekend full of rain and wind, with just 15 minutes of complete silence when the core of the storm is over Shanghai. I saw on my blog that the last big typhoon brought up to 300 mm of rain in 2 days. Today’s rainstorm was a lot less heavy than Muifa, but that already transformed some roads into canals. I took the picture below from my car window on Hongxu Lu, the water was so deep that most cars did not dare to drive through it!

Hongxu Road looks like a river from my car - and the typhoon is not even here yet #heavyrain #shanghai