Archive for November, 2011

The end of cheap China

 Although the book is not out yet, I already look forward to reading Shaun Rein's upcoming publication The End of Cheap China. Shaun is a fellow Shanghai entrepreneur as founder and MD of the China Market Research Group. Next to that he is also a well-know columnist for among others CNBC, Forbes, and BusinessWeek. Although I don't always agree with his opinion, I enjoy reading his columns and I think this book will also be a very interested read. In "The End of Cheap China" Shaun argues...
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Don’t try this at home

When I first saw this video I thought it was fake. But the more I think about it, the more I believe this could really happen when you have 2 young kids. Maybe I should give Scott and Elaine a big bag of flour as well and see what the result is? The original video is...
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A business trip with a bad start and a bad ending

Sunday night around midnight I arrived home after an exhausting business trip that took me to Russia, Cyprus and Amsterdam. The start of the trip was not the best one you can have, first missing my flight and then an adventurous stay in a Moscow hotel room. I was not too happy with Moscow airport and the way they treat their customers there, but after flying back through Moscow on Sunday my dislike of the place turned to hating it. What happened? Well, actually during the stop over most...
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Occupy Amsterdam…

Last Thursday night I walked by the Occupy Amsterdam camp on the Beursplein in Amsterdam. It was very similar to the Occupy Wall Street camp that I visited 2 weeks earlier (before the people were kicked out), just a bit smaller and a bit less crowded. I had some sympathy for the ideas of the people at Occupy Wall Street, but I totally don't understand the occupants in Amsterdam. Holland is so completely different from the US, with an excellent social system for everyone (health care,...
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Short trip to Cyprus

After a stop-over in Moscow that lasted 24 hours longer than planned I am now on the island of Cyprus. I had planned to be here a day longer, but luckily I could rearrange my meetings here after yesterday's adventure. The Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Cyprus went smoothly and I was very happy that I even got my suitcase back! Cyprus reminds me a bit of Turkey, but that's not something you should tell the people here (Cyprus was partly occupied by Turkey in 1974 and that was never...
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Locked up in a Russian hotel prison – because of my iPhone…

If someone would tell me a story like this, I probably would not believe it. But what follows really happened to me today. I landed early this morning in Moscow on an overnight flight from Shanghai. I had a lay-over of a couple of hours for a flight to Larnaca, so I sat in the lounge and wrote some emails and worked on a blog post about online games for the Business Insider. My flight would be boarding at 11:15, so at 10:50 I decided to pack my stuff and walk to the gate. When I left...
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New York Marathon 2011

This morning my dad, my sister and I ran the New York Marathon, it was an incredible experience.   Because my dad and sister were staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and I was staying at Times Square, I first had to jog over there in the very early hours of the morning. The bus left at 5:45 from their hotel, so I left my hotel at 5 AM to make sure I would be on time. It was dark and almost freezing in the city, and the only people you saw were runners on their way to buses to the...
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A visit to Occupy Wall Street

This morning after watching Groupon do its IPO on the NASDAQ (and being flabbergasted by the crazy valuation - but that's a different story), my dad and I decided to check out the people who are against the excesses happening in the financial world. After reading online about the Occupy Wall Street movement over the past 6 weeks I had a bit of sympathy for some of their points of view, but most of their demands and ideas are quite different from mine. I am not sure if I am part of the 99%...
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Last run before the New York Marathon

This morning my dad, my sister and I did our last run before the New York marathon, that will take place in 2 days (start Sunday morning at 9:40 AM). We all flew in on Wednesday night, Grace and I from China, my dad and sister from Europe. Yesterday we started the day by getting our start number at the marathon fair, we decided to go there the moment it opened to beat the crowds. Probably a good idea, we only had to wait 20 minutes or so, it went very quickly. Then I spent a couple of...
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Paid wifi in hotels…

It's not the first time I rant about this on my blog, but I hate it when hotels charge you extra for wifi. I normally avoid hotels that charge for wifi, but it seems all the top hotels in New York still do so. When in Europe I only stay in hotels that offer free wifi, I even call up the hotel in advance to check on this. Same in San Francisco or actually in most places that I travel to. The 3 or 4 star hotels generally provide wifi for free nowadays, especially in Asia or in the US, but less so...
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Spil Games announces investment from North Bridge Growth Equity

Spil Games to expand resources and accelerate global business plan through significant capital investment. 2 November, 2011 — Hilversum, the Netherlands — Spil Games (www.spilgames.com), the global leader in online gaming with 140 million monthly unique visitors, announced today that North Bridge Growth Equity ( www.northbridge.com ), a U.S.-based growth equity firm that invests in technology-driven companies demonstrating dynamic growth, has made a minority investment in the company. The...
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UnitedStyles road to the finals of TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing

I am writing this post from a plane between Beijing and Shanghai, after spending 2 busy days at TechCrunch Disrupt in Beijing. In terms of speakers and content it was one of the best conferences I ever attended, in my opinion much better than the regular TC Disrupt conferences in San Francisco and New York (there you see the same speakers every year, with several of them merely there because they are famous instead of having tech insights). What made the conference even better was that...
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