Archive for October, 2011

Elaine’s story on front page of today’s China Daily

Interesting to see how social media can push a simple story into mainstream news: after blogging (here post #1 and post #2) and tweeting about what happened to Elaine's picture, the China Daily picked up the story. A journalist did some further research this week and to my big surprise the story appeared on today's front page of the China Daily! The full article in China's leading nationwide English paper is...
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Elaine’s picture removed from Halloween products – the Chinese way!

Two weeks ago Grace was shocked when she found that a big Chinese manufacturer had used Elaine's picture on the packaging of one of its Halloween costumes. We discussed what to do and decided to contact the company and ask them to change the packaging, otherwise we would start a court case. The company at first tried to brush Grace off by asking for proof that Elaine was our daughter. But when she explained who she is and sent them a link to her verified Weibo account (where the case had...
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JP Morgan Corporate Challenge 2011 in Shanghai

Last night the inaugural JP Morgan Corporate Challenge race took place in Shanghai, a 5.6 km race along the bank of the Huangpu river in Xuhui district. Spil Games Asia is a sportive company, so we participated with a team of 10 people in the run. The event was a bit bigger than I had imagined, in total over 3000 runners showed up at the start! I am in pretty good shape right now because of the New York Marathon that I will run in 2 weeks, but I did not train for fast shorter distances, so...
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Lost and found: my keynote for the opening of Academic Year 2009-2010

In September 2009 I had the opportunity to give the keynote speech for the opening of the Academic Year at my Alma Mater Maastricht University. At the beginning of this speech I talk about the fact that I still remembered the keynote during the opening of the Academic Year 18 years earlier when I started my studies (given by prime minister Ruud Lubbers), but the the text was not available anywhere online. I then said that I expected that if someone would try to find the text of my speech 18...
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Mary Meeker’s latest slides: global, mobile & audio

KPCB Internet Trends 2011 Yesterday KPCB partner Mary Meeker once again gave one of her famous talks at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. I always look forward to her slides, she has access to amazing data and manages to find great angles to explain her vision of the future. Just reading her slides inspires me to think about where the world - and especially my own businesses - are heading. I embed her presentation above, in case you can't open it you can also find the presentation...
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Overview of China social media equivalents

Ogilvy China updated its infographic showing China's social media equivalents - or copycats, as Western media loves to call them. Of course many of these started out as copycats, but most evolved into much more than the original Western website, either by adding additional functionalities or by localization of functions. Interesting is that they now partially merged the SNS and microblogging categories. Services like Sina Weibo are so much more than Twitter is, that they come close to...
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Run along the Mao River outside Shanghai

This morning my dad and I drove over to the Mao River, between Tianmashan and Dianshan Lake, about 35 minutes from my home in Shanghai. After running for two weekends around Sheshan and Tianmashan we were looking for a place to run with less traffic and people. On Google Maps I found a small road next to a river close to Sun Island, and it turned out to be a good place to run. Getting up was a bit difficult, even though I did not drink too much at Christine Lu's Affinity party at CVRVE...
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Soong Ching Ling Kindergarten Open Day

On Friday the kids had their annual Open Day at Soong Ching Ling Kindergarten, where the parents can spend some time with the children in their class rooms. Last year it was fun to see Scott in this regular school environment, so this year I of course blocked the morning in my calendar so I could join. As usual there were lots of moms and grandparents at the open day, but hardly any fathers. In Scott's class with about 20 kids I think there were only one or two other fathers. I think it's...
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Social network Hyves in English is…..

Hyves has been the dominant social network in Holland since it started, but Facebook is catching up quickly (or maybe they are already bigger now, not sure). The guys at Google Translate seem to know that as well, because if you translate Hyves (with capital H) from Dutch to English you get......
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Happy Birthday Marc! – From Google

Today is my birthday. Every year I wonder what media will be used most to congratulate me. A few years ago it used to be the phone, then it was email (remember the e-greeting cards?) or SMS, then Twitter and this year it's almost only Facebook. Interesting to observe this shift. It also reflects the social media I use most for communications - well, not completely true, email is still #1, but nowadays I am more on Facebook than on Twitter. Let's see if that's still the case next year or...
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Elaine’s picture used without permission on Chinese halloween costumes

This morning my wife was shopping at Carrefour and she was looking at some of the Halloween costumes on sale for our kids. She noticed a picture of a girl that looks a lot like Elaine, so she took better look. Then she got a shock because she realized it was a picture of Elaine! Turns out that a Chinese company had used an older picture of Elaine, badly photoshopped it with their halloween custome and put it on the packaging material of their products. Of course we never gave...
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RIP

When I woke up this morning in my hotel room in Amsterdam the first thing I saw on Twitter was that Steve Jobs had passed away. Although I knew he was very sick, the news was still a shock to me. I only met Steve Jobs once, so I don't know really know him, but I read most of the books and many of the articles written about him. My feeling is that he was not an easy person to have around, but that everybody respected him and listened to him because he was such a visionary. He has been a...
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Alibaba and Yahoo: some thoughts

(Quickly writing this in the lounge before boarding a plane, hope not too many grammar/spelling mistakes) This morning I did a radio interview with Dutch station Business News Radio (BNR). The topic was the interest that Alibaba has shown in taking over Yahoo. When I first read about Jack Ma's speech at Stanford last week where he mentioned this, I was a bit surprised. But like I mentioned during the program, now I think it is actually quite logical. Here some of my thoughts on this...
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Day trip to Chongming Island

In all the years that I have lived in Shanghai I had never been to Chongming Island. Especially since the tunnel and mega bridge from Pudong to the island had been finished in late 2009 there was no excuse anymore not to go there, so this weekend we decided to drive over. I got up at 8 AM to buy some food and drinks for a picnic on the island and just after 9 we left our house. Despite it being a Sunday morning it was quite busy on the outer ring road and it took us almost 1.5 hours just to...
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