This morning I arrived back in Shanghai after a long and tiring flight. Traveling with young kids is always a hassle, but this was worse than expected. It started in the afternoon when Scott was so excited that he did not want to sleep. So he was very tired before the flight already. In the KLM business lounge at Schiphol airport he did not want to listen (typical when he is tired) and kept on running around. Elaine copies a lot of his behavior these days, so she also started running. Luckily we arrived at the airport quite late, so we only had about 30 minutes in the lounge before the flight started boarding.

Boarding, and especially the security check, is also trouble with two young kids. Scott for example refused to go through the scanner and I eventually had to push him through. Then he ran away when he was on the other side, but I still had to go through the scanner myself. Anyway, long story short, we eventually managed to board and I was happy to sit down in the plane. I didn’t feel completely well (bit of a cold), so took a Tylenol, but that didn’t really help. Scott was telling me ‘ik ben een beetje moe’ several times (‘I am a bit tired’), so I told him to go to sleep. But he didn’t want to do that before we were in the air, so he was getting more and more tired and more and more bored. Try to explain to a boy who just turned 3 why he can’t use his iPad before departure, or why the TV screen in the seat only starts working after take-off. Impossible.

We left the gate with a 15 minute delay and taxied to the runway. Just when we arrived there the captain came onto the intercom and told us that they found a problem with an engine and had to go back to the gate. Scott was very disappointed because he was ready for take-off, but I had to explain him that the plane needed to be repaired first. Back at the gate technical people came on board and after 15 minutes they found the problem and the solution. It would take about 1.5 hours to repair, but at least we would not have to get off the plane. By that time Scott was so tired that he fell asleep in his seat.

After less than an hour the repairs were finished already, so we left the gate again. Scott woke up and was very excited, telling me many times that the plane had been fixed – in 3 languages! I was happy we would finally depart and luckily there were no other problems. But now Scott was awake and he refused to go to sleep again. For the next 3 hours he kept on trying to climb out to walk around the plane, and he managed to get away a few times. I was pretty tired and wanted to sleep, but he prevented that. Finally after the dinner had been served and the cabin lights went off he decided to go back to sleep. And then it was Elaine’s turn to keep us awake, she refused to sleep and only wanted to watch TV or walk around…

It was a long night and I didn’t get more than a few 5-minute intervals of sleep. So when we arrived around lunch time in Shanghai I was exhausted and I had a head ache. The driver picked us up and when we got home the only thing I wanted to do was to take a hot shower and go to bed. But that’s the worst thing you can do (the sleeping part, not the shower), because then you really get a jet lag. So I put myself behind my laptop and spent several hours on emails and RSS feeds. I dozed off a few times, but now I am finally feeling a bit more awake (it’s past 6 PM). I plan to go to bed early tonight (10 PM or so), and hopefully I will not have a real jet lag anymore tomorrow. Happy to be back in Shanghai, but the traveling makes you forget about the holiday very quickly.

My holiday in Holland is almost over, tomorrow we will fly back to China. But today I could still participate in the Dutch TV program Buitenhof to talk about doing business in China. This show is one of the best talk shows in The Netherlands (in terms of high quality guests and discussions), so of course I accepted the invitation.

The driver for the program picked up my dad and me (he joined me) at 9:30 at my parents place with a luxurious VW Phaeton to drive us to the studio in Amsterdam. Because Elaine had had a bad night with lots of crying I hadn’t slept much and I was happy to be able to close my eyes for an hour on the way to the studio. We arrived there at 11 and I realized it was the exact same studio as where I did the Pauw & Witteman show (the other high quality Dutch talk show) about 2 years ago. Just a different decor.

The other guests had already arrived. Bettine Vriesekoop, a former successful Dutch table tennis player and later journalist in China for Dutch paper NRC, Prof. Kristofer Schipper, a retired sinology professor now living in Fuzhou, and Jurjen Groot, lawywer for CMS in Shanghai. I had a chat with them and the show’s producers before going into the powder room to get some make-up. Then we filmed some shots in the bar for the (live) teaser of the program before the show started at 12:10 PM.

The show was live, which I prefer over a taped show (live shows can’t be edited). The program started with an interview with Prof. Schipper about his life as a Taoist master, a sinology professor and now as the founder of the first library in China specialized in Western art, literature and culture. To be honest, he had an interesting story but I could not really relate to him. The China he described in the show was not the China I live in, but the China of a long time ago. For me this part went too slow and lasted way too long, and when I later checked Twitter it turned out that many people felt the same.

After a 5 minute spoken column by Naema Tahir, the discussion part of the program between Bettine, Jurjen and me started. We only had about 20 minutes, way too short for a good discussion. The first question I got was about censorship, so the typical Western negative tone was set. After the pre-discussion with the producers of the program I had the feeling this program would have a more positive tone, with a focus on entrepreneurship and how to do business in or with China, but that was not really the case.

The length of the discussion was also not enough to go deeper into certain subjects. A pity, because now a lot of interesting aspects that were discussed with the producer were left out (e.g. about the the take-over of Dutch companies like Draka by Chinese companies, about why China is so successful, about the fact that China is probably one of the most capitalist countries in the world etc.). Would have loved to talk about these subjects for a while, but it was not possible.

Anyway, I enjoyed being part of the show, but it could have been a lot better. After the show we had a good lunch with the presenter, the guests and the production staff, where I also raised some of these points with the people of the Buitenhof production. Some of the guests also agreed that the discussions were not deep enough and that there was not enough time for all topics. A missed chance to explain what China is really about and why Europe should watch out for what’s happening in China.

Interesting is that when I got home people and I went through the back channel on Twitter most people seemed to have the same impressions as I had. I am not sure if Buitenhof checks the tweets about its weekly

It’s New Year’s Eve and I am sitting next to the fire place at my parents’ home. This year we decided to spend the Christmas holidays in Europe, after spending the last 3 Christmases in China. Not leaving China during the Christmas season means no holiday feeling at all, because there are no Christmas holidays and I normally just keep on working. At least being away from Shanghai for 2 weeks or so gives you a partial holiday feeling: because work continues I still spent too much time on my mail or on the phone (my wife as well). I also spent some time at the Spil Games office in Hilversum, but most of the time I was at my parents’ place with my family. We did a lot of things over the past 2 weeks, and because of the nice winter weather we were even able to enjoy some outdoor winter sports.

The weekend we arrived I had a big Christmas dinner in Maastricht with a student club that I belonged to (or actually belong to: once you manage to get in membership is for life). Good to catch up with my friends, some of whom I had not seen for years. During the dinner it started snowing heavily and we were lucky to catch a taxi back around 1 AM. The party itself continued much longer but I was too jetlagged to really enjoy it (the night before we had spent on a plane with the kids, meaning hardly any sleep…).

The good thing was that we got up quite early the next morning (7 AM), despite many drinks and so could leave Maastricht before new snow storms would hit the south of Holland. The roads were pretty bad though (even the highways were often covered in snow), but we still managed to get back to Ommen in a reasonable time.

On Monday I had meetings in Amsterdam and Hilversum and spent half the day in traffic jams because of the snow. Not the nicest thing in the world, but it gave me time to think through a lot of things and listen to Dutch radio for hours.

The day after, we left early for a trip to the Sauerland region in Germany to do some skiing and sledging. This is only a 3 hour drive from my parents’ place (despite the snow), so you could drive over for just one day, but because of the kids we decided to stay overnight.

We had a lot of fun, the snow was excellent and it was not too cold. My dad and I went skiing and the kids mainly played in the snow. Scott loved to ride a sledge downhill, but Elaine was still a bit too young to enjoy it. The nice thing was that there were hardly any people, it looks like that in the days before Christmas people don’t really go on holidays or on an outing there.

The day after skiing I bought some new skates (my skates are still in China, where I used them sometimes on Houhai in Beijing) and tried them out right away at the ice skating track in the woods in Ommen. It’s a 400 meter oval surrounded by trees, not far from my parents’ place. The ice was great and also here there were hardly any people! I skated for the first time in years, but luckily I was still able to get around the track without too much trouble. But the muscle and back ache afterward was quite bad, I realized that while skating you use some muscles that you otherwise never use… But a glass of champagne at home after the skating trip compensated the pain of course.

Christmas Eve we spent at my uncle Victor’s place in Joure. He cooked an excellent meal for us, and our kids played with his kids most of the afternoon and early evening. Interesting thing is that their favorite toys were the iPad and the iPhone, at one point they were playing Angry Birds simultaneously on 3 devices! One thing we noticed in Joure is that there was not much snow there, and that the ice looked much better than the snow covered lakes around my parents place.

So the next morning we decided to drive in a northerly direction again to go skating there. We ended up on the Belterwijde close to Giethoorn where we (= my dad, my sister and me) skated for about 15 kilometers over the lakes and canals.

The ice was very nice with hardly any snow on it and because of Christmas Day not many other skaters. Entrepreneurial people put up stands with hot chocolate, tea and soup at some places around the main lake, so we could warm up after a bit of skating. A very enjoyable afternoon!

Christmas Day we drove to my sister’s house, a very nicely renovated old farm house. We had coffee there and talked a bit before taking the car to Oud-Zevenaar for a big Christmas lunch at Vlees en Vis.

I had not been to this restaurant yet and was pleasantly surprised. An excellent 5 course lunch with a bottle of champagne to get started and different wines with every course. Luckily my mom offered not to join every course’s wine and drive back home afterward.

If you are in the Arnhem/Zevenaar area the Vlees en Vis restaurant is an excellent choice, with a cuisine that matches some of the best restaurants in Holland and an excellent wine menu. A very friendly waiter/sommelier as well, and a cook who even created a special 5-course menu for our kids. I’ll be back!

Monday I went back to Spil Games in Hilversum for a couple of meetings, but left the office before 5 PM to be back in time at home for Scott’s birthday. He turned 3 years old that day, and got lots of presents once again (during Christmas he also got a ton of presents already). My sister also dropped by for the festivities, because she has her birthday on the same day as Scott. So we had some nice drinks and dinner together to celebrate.

Tuesday I had to follow up on my promise to my wife to go shopping with her. We decided to go to Hardenberg, the city where I spent part of my high school years. I hadn’t been there in years and it had changed completely. A bit like Shanghai, you don’t go there for a few years and you can hardly recognize it anymore. After shopping we had lunch in a small brasserie and then drove back to Ommen for some additional shopping. When we got home I decided to go skating with my dad, walking around shopping streets made me tired and I felt I needed to do something more active. We went to the outdoor track in Ommen for a few kilometers of skating. Because the track closes at 5 pm to clean the ice and we arrived at 4:15 we had the track for ourselves as most people went home early.

After the ice skating my dad and I still went for a snow bike ride through the woods. It was extremely tiring, but it’s the best way to see the beauty of nature in the middle of winter. Back at home we decided to have dinner in an Italian restaurant. My favorite in this region (Bacco in Marle) turned out to be closed, so we ended up at another one in Ommen. Not bad either, but certainly not as good as Bacco.

Wednesday most of the snow on the roads and bike paths had disappeared, so for the first time this holiday I went running with my dad. It felt great to be running in the cold air again, but we had to watch out not to slip. It wasn’t very easy, but I felt good after I did the 5.5 km run in about 25 minutes. At home an uncle of mine came by to visit and it was good to catch up. Race car driver Ho-Pin Tung also called to see if he could come by, so we had a full house in afternoon. Of course we opened some nice bottles of wine again (I lost count how much I drank this holiday, and that’s probably better. Luckily my dad’s wine cellar is big enough!).

Thursday we drove to Antwerp to meet with some friends who just moved into an amazing house in the city center for a kind of housewarming visit. We started with coffee and a very nice raspberry cake followed by

After 5 years it’s time for a change. I am not talking about my 5-year marriage, but about my business activities. 5 years ago I set up Spil Games Asia (at that time called Spill Group Asia), starting out as a 1-person company in January 2006 and now in December 2010 with over 100 employees in our Shanghai office.

Today it was announced to the Spil Games crew worldwide that I decided to step down as CEO on February 1 next year. I took that decision already a long time ago, but it took quite some time to find a good successor and to work on the transition. But I am happy to announce that Chen Qi, our current COO, will take over my functions in just over 6 weeks from now. I will stay with Spil Games in a global advisory role, but will have more time for my family and for other business activities that I am involved in.

I had a great time at Spil Games Asia over the years, but like every start-up it’s been a roller coaster from time to time. Quickly adopting to fierce competition, encountering sudden regulatory changes and managing staff that may have different objectives than the company was sometimes challenging, but these things also make running a business in China one of the

Our game studio makes a lot of flash games and I try to play most of them. So when I came across “The most difficult flash game in the world” on Twitter today I could not resist to try it out. I have to admit that I can’t finish many of the games that we make at Spil Games, so I didn’t expect a good result.

The game starts with a screen telling you that “You are QWOP, our small nation’s sole representative at the Olympic Games. Ideally you will run 100 meters but our training program was underfunded”. Well, that’s an understatement, because at first it’s almost impossible to get QWOP to even walk a meter. I tried a couple of times but each time I fell down. So I tried to figure out a strategy by trying a combination of keys – and eventually managed to figure out the best order to let QWOP ‘”run”.

It’s actually not that hard, and I managed to finish the 100 meters (in about 8 minutes though…), including a hurdle at the 50 meter mark and a jump right before the end. A cool game if you want to waste 10 minutes of your life. But the most difficult flash game in the world? Not really.

Play the free game here: http://foddy.net/Athletics.html
Or just one of the many FAIL QWOP videos here: http://thehairpin.com/2010/12/the-qwop-viral-video/

United Styles (www.unitedstyles.com) is an exciting new online kids fashion store where kids and parents can design kids clothes in 3D. We are looking for a commercial / sales manager in our Shanghai head office, preferably a mother who wants to use her commercial and management capabilities to grow our business.

Main responsibilities:

• Responsible for growing the sales of our web shop (sales worldwide with initial focus on Europe)
• Manage day to day operations of the kids brand
• Manage the flow of creating garments and themes with designers and merchandisers and getting them in the store
• Get feedback from consumers and execute ideas that come from them

Requirements:

• Commercial thinker and manager
• Experience in e-commerce sales is preferred
• Can relate to fashion trends in Europe, but fashion-industry background not a must have
• Speaks good English and at least basic Chinese

Our offer:
We are a start-up company with a young team. If you want to be part of our journey, there are many ways of accommodating to your wishes and career plans.

Interested? Feel free to send us an email with your resume, or contact me for more information.

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 Rouge and I remember thinking to get some change in the bar for my taxi ride home (which I then of course forgot about in the bar).

So I looked at him and told him angrily he was trying to cheat me. He said no, I made a mistake and showed me he did not have any RMB 100 notes in his wallet. I repeated it again and then he said, ah, sorry I made a mistake. He then tried to give me RMB 25 back instead of RMB 55, which made me really angry. So he then apologized again and gave me RMB 55 back. I asked for a receipt, but he refused. Then I got really angry and tried to write down his taxi number, but he ripped the card out of its holder so I could not see his number.

That was too much for me and I told him I was going to call the cops. He started pleading me not to do this, offering me several hundred RMB (suddenly he had RMB 100 notes!) if I would let him go. This confirmed to me that he had probably played this trick before and may have gotten a warning and would lose his taxi license if he would be caught again.

I told him I did not care about money, but that it’s about ethics (well, at least I tried to explain that to him in Chinese, not sure if he understood what I meant), and that I hated him for trying to cheat his customers. I was very angry now and sort of felt that he deserved to lose his license, this kind of cab drivers give the others a bad reputation. On the other hand the punishment would be a bit too harsh, but at least I wanted to teach him a lesson. So instead of the cops I called my wife who turned out to be at home. The driver was almost crying when he saw me calling, probably assuming I was calling the police. In a way I felt bad for him, even though he was the one trying to cheat me.

My wife came out and the driver apologized to her many times and told her that his receipt printer was broken so he could not give me a receipt. She then said she would call his company to check if his printer was really not working after which he also offered her money not to do this and pleaded her to please be generous.

My wife argued with him for a while but was smarter than me and eventually let it go, telling him that he should never try this trick again. So I went out and tried to take a picture of his license plate. When he saw that he jumped out, standing in front of his plate and pleading me not to do this. So I just took a picture of him instead in front of his car. I had planned to put the picture above this post, but it’s probably better I leave it like this. He got his punishment and I don’t think he will easily try this trick again.

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 of

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 only read for 10 minutes, because the attention span of young kids is not that long. I chose a story about a mother duck that had laid several small eggs and one big one, and she went to visit all different animals to check if the big egg was theirs. So on each page I could ask the question if the egg belonged to a cat, a monkey, a bear etc. After two animals the kids realized the answer was always no, so they all started screaming “No!” to my question. So cute to see them so involved in the story.

I really enjoyed it. “The best things in life are for free” may be a cliche, but this kind of experience is just priceless. Scott was very happy and proud to see his dad in his class room, and I later heard that he told both our driver and his nanny that I had read a story in his class. And he even told my parents what the story was about. Glad I had the opportunity to do this!

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 Creek. Really? Maybe if all buildings along the Suzhou Creek would be demolished first, but otherwise I don’t think you’ll be able to see anything except for concrete buildings. The ferris wheel will only be 42 meters high, which is only a bit taller than our 7-story office building and similar to some of the other buildings along the creek.

According to the paper the attraction was built by a new shopping mall that’s opening next to my office. Using the ferris wheel will be free (expect long waiting lines), so if you want to peek into my office bring a pair of binoculars and enjoy the ferris wheel ride. The planned opening is in about 4 weeks, on December 18, and likely the wheel will be torn down in 3 or 4 months time (land is too valuable to ‘waste’ in downtown Shanghai). The ferris wheel will be open from 10 AM to 10 PM and is located on the corner of Xizang Lu and Qufu Lu.

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: TheNextWeb.com)

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 game market in particular. I won’t mention too many of the insights here (the competition also reads blogs), but most are quite straightforward and the main one is that this is just the beginning for the Indonesian Internet. There are tremendous opportunities for players that follow the right strategy and I think I now know for sure what that strategy is.

I arrived on Thursday evening on a delayed Garuda flight. The delay was partly Garuda’s fault, because the airplane we were supposed to take had technical problems and they had to use a smaller one. The smaller plane (a brand new B737-800) could however not make it to Jakarta in one time and had to make a refueling stop in Singapore which caused a 1.5 hour delay. But because a Quantas A380 had just made an emergency landing after one of its engines exploded right after take off, one of the runways was blocked and we had to stay much longer than planned at the gate. I actually read about the Quantas accident online when we were waiting at the gate and when we finally took off I managed to get a good look at the A380 that was still parked on taxi lane next to the main runway.

Upon arrival in Jakarta things went relatively smoothly, except for the fact that my cab driver refused to put on his meter when my suitcase was already in the trunk and we were on the road already. This was of course totally my own fault, and after so many years in Asia I can’t believe I made this mistake. I had actually planned to take a Silver Bird Mercedes taxis but found their price too expensive, so I just walked out looking for the Blue Bird stand. I didn’t see it, but many other taxis were waiting, and I just took one of those, totally forgetting to tell him to use the meter before getting in. I still managed to negotiated a Rp. 150,000 rate which was about the same as my trip back to the airport so I didn’t do too bad (as a comparison, Silver Bird charges Rp. 440,000).

Because of major traffic jams I did not get to the hotel until 8 PM, meaning I would miss the StartupLokal event that I had planned to go to. A pity, but instead I went for dinner and drinks with TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacey. We were looking for a nice outdoor restaurant and through a friend I got the address of a good restaurant. But of course the taxi driver couldn’t find it (or pretended he couldn’t find it), so we eventually told him to stop and looked for a restaurant ourselves. It turned out we were lucky, because we ended up at a very nice Bali-style restaurant, Payon (see link for some pictures of the place). We had a fun evening with good Indonesian food and of course some cold Bir Bintangs, talking about Sarah’s Indonesian and Singaporean experiences so far and of course discussing the latest happenings in the Chinese Internet market.

The next morning at 8 AM the conference that I was attending started. I was a few minutes late because it was supposed to be in the Grand Ballroom of the Kempinski, which turned out to be a 15 minute walk all through the (huge) Grand Indonesia shopping mall. The mall was still closed and its air conditioning turned off, so I had to climb 5 floors of escalators in the hot environment to get to the elevator that took me to the Ballroom. Of course I later found out there was a much easier way, but the Kempinski staff neglected to tell me that when I asked them. Actually, being late was not a big deal because the conference also started late, about 30 minutes or so. Jam karet as the Indonesians say. I still remember it from my time working in Jakarta in 1996, and it’s not a big deal for anybody. I had a coffee and talked to several people, it was actually a great networking opportunity.

The conference was very interesting, I learned a lot about the Indonesian Internet industry and got to know a lot of the Indonesian Internet start-ups and their founders/CEOs. There are some really cool companies in Indonesia, but most are purely focused on the local market. I talked a lot about Spil Games and our site games.co.id and was surprised how many people know the site nowadays. During my last visit that was still very different, things can change quickly. Not only the conference was good, also the food was excellent: an Indonesian buffet prepared by Kempinski. I love Indonesian food and managed to eat a lot of it during the past days.

After the conference I had a meeting in my hotel and then joined Sarah Lacey and the people from Indomog.com in their car to the FX Mall for the finalist pitches of the SparxUp Awards 2010. Because of traffic jams it took us almost an hour to get there (it’s only about 3 kilometers)… The pitches were all in Bahasa Indonesia so I mainly spent time at the Expo where I could try demos or live versions of all the start-ups. Some interesting companies to invest in if I would have lived in Indonesia (I only invest in China right now because there may added value is biggest). After the pitches I had dinner and drinks with games.co.id sales rep Romeo Reijman, I had never met him so far so it was very good to be able to meet him in person and hear his vision on the Indonesian game market.

Saturday was a mix of meetings with entrepreneurs and game developers, mainly at my hotel: traveling in Jakarta is such a hassle because of the traffic jams, even on weekends, that it’s hardly possible to set up several meetings in different locations in one day. Saturday night I attended the Awards night of the SparxUp Awards 2010 and gave a talk about games.co.id. Once again I met a lot of interesting people, it was exactly the right event to go to for me. After the Awards night I was invited to the Oktoberfest in Paulaner Jakarta and had a fun night there with Yanik Cantieni and his girlfriend. Yanik is a long time friend (I have known him since 1996 when he was my successor in a SAP implementation project in Jakarta) and the CFO of Mercedes-Benz Indonesia. However, he told me they will move to Switzerland later this month where he will become CFO. Career wise probably a good move, but life in Jakarta seems more interesting than Zurich…

On Sunday I worked on my emails for quite some time and among others met up with some friends. I had lunch at Poste with Marnix Beugel and Corine Tap, who I knew from the old days in Beijing (around 2001-2002 I think) before they moved to Indonesia. Nice to catch up after all these years, and interesting to see that we have quite some friends in common. After that I met a friend from my fraternity for a drink, Thomas Schok. He is still studying so I had never met him in person, but it was cool to meet up anyway. He is a medical student and is doing an assignment at a local hospital in Jakarta (low end). Pretty intense stories about children dying etc., I am not sure if I could handle that.

Monday I again had planned some meetings in my hotel until after lunch with operators and game developers. After that I took a few hours off, sitting at the pool writing down my thoughts about the past days and doing some emails (I love a good wifi connection at the pool!). I went for a 6 km run in the gym around 5 PM before packing my suitcase and heading for the airport. Again I avoided the Silver Bird taxi and saved USD 40 by just walking 100 meters with my suitcase until the closest Blue Bird stop. Of course the taxi ride was long once again because of traffic jams but I was working on emails, so it didn’ bother me much. But I can’t imagine what traffic will be like when it rains (or when Obama comes to town, like he does today). Anyway, I had a very good trip to Indonesia and I hope to be back sooner rather than later.

If you’re active in the Indonesian game or mobile industry and want to get in touch, drop me an email at marcvanderchijs (at) gmail (dot) com

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 better. It probably has to do with the tropical weather (I am in Jakarta right now), that is always a good medicine for a cold. That in combination with one good night of sleep (almost 9 hours last night, I was exhausted) means I feel like reborn today.

For the past weeks I totally didn’t feel like running, but today I looked forward to putting on my FiveFingers again. My hotel has a 420 meter jogging track all around it, it’s pretty cool how they made it. It’s on the 5th floor of the hotel and runs through its tropical rooftop gardens, along the swimming pools and rooftop bars and restaurants and then on a small path all around the back, side and front of the hotel.

I did 10 laps for a total of about 4200 meters and it was quite difficult. I am totally out of shape, and the not-completely-clean air plus tropical heat didn’t help much either. But I am glad I am running again. In less than one month I plan to participate in the Shanghai half marathon, I am not sure if I will be back in shape by then, but I’ll try.

My cold also taught me something else, and that is that I need to start working a bit less. Continuous 60-80 hour weeks plus lots of traveling are no problem when you’re in your twenties, but I now realize that at 38 years your body doesn’t recover as quickly anymore. No complaints, I love the work I’m doing and love to go to the limit every day, but I should watch out not to go over it. Feeling sick for more than a week is not healthy I guess. And my family deserves also more time, I miss my kids very often (and worse, they miss me).

So even though it’s not time for New Year’s resolutions yet I decided that I am not doing any more investments this year and will say no to all speaking gigs and other ‘opportunities’ until the end of the year (well, I still have one talk that I need to give in the FX Mall in Jakarta tonight, but that’s the last one). Let’s see if I can hold this promise to myself…

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 now have the data that show that the pollution indeed shot up to unhealthy levels right after the Expo closed its gates. I made a screen shot, check out the original data here: http://datacenter.mep.gov.cn/TestRunQian/air_dairy_en.jsp (change the city and dates manually or if that does not work in the URL).

Will we see the blue skies days again in the near future? I seriously doubt it, this was the clearest summer I had in the past decade here. For this reason I might really start missing the Expo…

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 group we would love to have you as a tester. After you have tested the site we will approach you with some questions (by email or phone, whatever you prefer) and as a ‘thank you’ you will get a EUR 10 discount on any item that you order during the test period plus free shipping.

If you are interested to join this test please send and email to dirk@unitedstyles.com and he will provide you with the special link and password to enter the site (the site is not live yet for other people).

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 external social networks but also for Spil Games own network of online game websites.

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 apps.

I am sitting in a plane back to China after an intensive week in Holland. I left China Sunday night around midnight on the overnight KLM flight. I wasn’t feeling completely well (I am having a minor case of the flu for almost 2 weeks already), so I had 3 glasses of champagne and 2 Tylenol and that combination helped me to get over 7 hours of sleep. The plane landed at 5 AM and after waiting for the suitcases for 25 minutes (noticing once again that it takes much longer for your suitcases to arrive at Schiphol than in China or most other Asian airports) I was on my way to Rotterdam by 5:30 AM.

A brand new Jaguar XJ with a driver picked me up from the airport and took me to the Bilderberg Parkhotel, where I had 2.5 hours to freshen up and do a bit of work. I made some phone calls, wrote several emails, and had 4 cups of coffee before leaving for the Erasmus University / Rotterdam School of Management at 9 AM sharp (again by Jaguar of course).

In the morning I gave a talk at the yearly Entrepreneurial Seminar, together with several other Dutch entrepreneurs. My talk focused on characteristics of successful entrepreneurs, and I tried to make the speech more interesting by giving lots of real life examples that I have seen in companies that I am part of or invested in. I recognized a lot in the talks of the other entrepreneurs as well, the main characteristics for all of us was that you need to fail at least once, should be willing to take big risks, be extremely competitive and work at least twice as hard as others. Our stories did not necessarily convince the students that they should become entrepreneurs as well, in an article about the conference Dutch newspaper De Pers wrote that only one student was confident enough to choose the start-up life. Well, I also started in a corporate career before I realized that was not really my thing.

In the afternoon I gave a two hour lecture/workshop about doing business in China for Masters students. I really enjoyed this, it was a very lively session with tons of questions from the students. They all had to pay an entrance fee to get in, meaning that they were likely much more motivated to actively participate than during a regular lecture. Despite the fact that I was a bit tired after the flight and still didn’t feel well I think it went quite well and I realized that this kind of lecture is something I enjoy doing very much. Maybe I should seriously consider teaching university students in a future life, it gives me more energy than it costs.

At night I drove back to Amsterdam with a friend from my university days, Jasper Bugter. I realized we had not seen each others since my wedding 5 years ago, so we had lots to catch up on. We picked up his wife Tamalene at their house in Amstelveen and then headed into the city. At a special beer cafe we tried several different bock beers (typical beers for this time of year) and had a great night. Around 11 I headed back to my hotel and fell asleep right away.

On Tuesday I had a breakfast meeting in my hotel before taking a train to Hilversum to Spil Games. There the first thing I did was to walk around the whole office and talk to as many people as possible. I realize that despite being in the Dutch office several times per year I don’t really get to talk to most people, aside from saying hi when walking by their desks. I also went out for a cup of coffee with executive searcher Frank van der Linden (and had my second right in a Jaguar in as many days), not because I am looking for a new job but just to catch up. It turned out that we have some mutual acquaintances (not unusual considering his huge network) and I also heard some stories about how my dad was when he was still a manager: my dad recruited Frank for his 1st internship back in 1984.

On Tuesday night I had dinner with a friend who has been in the fashion business for the past 13 years or so (both online and offline). Always good to catch up, especially because of my involvement in UnitedStyles.com. At night I had beers with a group of friends from my fraternity, which was cool as well. But because I still was not feeling too well and I had to get up early I didn’t stay too late. Probably good, because I woke up at 5 AM and the whole of Wednesday was a strategy meetings with the Spil Games management team in our office in Eindhoven. We do this a few times per year now, and every meeting gives all of us new insights and helps us to make sure we do the right things. The online casual games market is changing very quickly, but I think Spil Games is able to change with the market and even anticipate the changes. After a nice dinner in Eindhoven we got back to Amsterdam after 11 pm, where I worked on my emails for an hour and then went to bed.

Thursday morning I had breakfast with trend watcher Vincent Everts to catch up on what we’re both doing, and he used the opportunity to do a video interview with me as well (or here if you don’t have a VPN in China – note: interview is in Dutch). After that Vincent drove me to Spil Games, where he talked to some of the other managers and eventually even stayed for lunch. The afternoon I mainly spent working on a presentation but I didn’t make much progress: the office is an open office, meaning that everybody walks by the whole time and many drop by for a short chat. I enjoy that of course, but it doesn’t increase work efficiency. I don’t think I could work in an open office environment anymore. At night I had dinner with a business friend at Restaurant Lute in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel. It was my first time in this restaurant and the food and wines were excellent. And the location is quite convenient, the person I had dinner with had landed at 7:30 PM at Schiphol airport and was in the restaurant less than 20 minutes later!

Friday morning I worked in my hotel room for several hours, which was much better than in the office. No distractions except for the beeps of new emails coming in (so I turned off my email for a while). I was in the office by 11:00, so I would be in time to meet with Ho-Ping Tung for lunch at Spil Games. As regular readers of this blog probably know Ho-Pin Tung is a Dutch-Chinese race car driver, and he is currently the 3rd driver (reserve driver) for the Renault Formula One team. We normally see each other at least once a year, either in China or in Holland (Ho-Pin travels a lot more than I do). Always good to catch up with him and hear his stories about life as a race car driver. After lunch I took half a day off to meet with my sister as well. Ho-Pin drove me to her office and on the way there he showed me some of his driving skills in his fast Renault Megane RS. Very cool Ho-Pin, I was quite impressed (and I probably should have shot a video for this blog).

I spent Friday night and Saturday morning at my sisters new place. She just moved to a new house, a beautiful renovated farm. Much nicer than my house actually (but also a lot smaller of course). We went to see The Social Network, the movie about Facebook. I just missed it when it premiered in San Francisco last month (it came out on the day I flew back to China), but now I finally got a chance to see it. I loved it, it does not give a true view of Facebook’s start and Mark Zuckerberg’s personality, but it was a great start-up story anyway. Very inspirational and with some similarities to the things I have seen over the past years. If you are an Internet entrepreneur or want to be one, you have to see it!

Saturday afternoon Sonja and I did some shopping in Germany, mainly for me to buy Seelachs (I have not found this anywhere in the world but in Germany, I love it). We had a walk on the hills of Hoch-Elten as well, and after that she put me on the train to Schiphol Airport. That was about 12 hours ago and now I am already somewhere above Western China having breakfast. I had a good week in Holland but I am happy to be back in Shanghai with my family in a couple of hours.

This is pretty cool, an ad for Tudou’s original drama series That Love Comes was shown on Times Square in New York. Not that we are suddenly trying to target US users, but it was a nice gesture from PR Newswire.

And it seems that That Love Comes is not just seen as an entertainment series, because it’s now also used in a university course: The University of Mary Washington uses the series for an extra credit project as “an opportunity to explore and analyze China today through the window of cultural production”. I like the idea!

I had been to the World Expo a couple of times already over the past 6 months, but it was always business related so I didn’t get to see many pavilions yet. I had planned to take a day off from work to go here for a while already, but somehow never managed to do so. And because the Expo will close in less than 2 weeks I decided to bite the bullet despite being flooded with work & travel, and invite my wife and parents-in-law for a VIP visit to the Expo.

It seems that it’s getting more and more busy at the Expo before the gates will close for the last time next week Sunday. Last Saturday over 1 million people visited the Expo, despite the fact that the official maximum is 600,000 people. Today around 3 pm we saw that about 570,000 people had entered the Expo grounds so far, which explains why it was so extremely busy everywhere. Waiting lines for popular pavilions were 3-4 hours and some had waiting lines of 7 hours or more (Saudi-Arabia was rumored to have had a 12 hour wait last weekend!). Who in his right mind would line up for 7 hours or more just to visit a pavilion? Well, I for sure would not, so I had arranged a special tour. This means that you don’t have to wait at pavilions so you can see a lot more in a few hours than normally. It becomes more and more difficult to arrange this now that the Expo is almost coming to a close, I guess too many people found out about the trick and a lot of pavilions got tired of all the so-called VIPs.

The only line we could not avoid was at the entrance, but because we did not come very early (I first did my mails and RSS feeds at home and worked on a presentation) we got in within 30 minutes. I brought my Kindle, so I didn’t really notice it actually. The first pavilion we visited was that of The Netherlands, the one that I had been most times already. I very much like the architecture (it’s one of my favorites in that respect) but find they could have shown more about ‘real’ life in The Netherlands, instead of focusing on art, culture and new technologies. Other pavilions like Belgium and Germany did a much better job at that.

After The Netherlands we walked over to Belgium that shares its pavilion with the EU. I liked this one a lot, some very nice audiovisual presentations that give you a good feel for what Europe (and Belgium) is all about. I guess this Expo is different from most others, because most pavilions focus mainly on Chinese visitors (potential future tourists) and were trying to brand their country. In my opinion Belgium did a great job, for example by giving every visitor a free chocolate bonbon. Next was Denmark, where a huge line of several hours would have stopped me from visiting, but also here we could just walk in. The Danish pavilion features a bike path inside and you can bike through the pavilion. Downside is that you have to wait another hour in line for that, but still people did so. At the Danish pavilion I saw the Little Mermaid for the first time (I realized I had never been to Copenhagen, except to change flights at the airport), the Danes had flown in the original sculpture!

Next was lunch, we had made a reservation at the Belgian pavilion. This place has some excellent food, once again fantastic branding for Belgium. I had among others fresh salmon, cheese croquettes and a salad, and combined that with Belgian fries with a Chimay beer. One of the better lunches this year! After lunch we watched a short Expo parade with some marching bands and floats, before heading to the German pavilion. Germany is pretty strict in who they let in at the VIP entrance (except when you are a German national and bring your passport) and the waiting lines there are huge as well. But also here we had no problems and could enter right away. I liked the pavilion very much, a great combination of culture, technology and real life. Plus some good shows that kept people inside the pavilion for a long time. Very well done, it’s just a pity that most people had to wait in line so long. A nice touch was that Grace and mine former employer Daimler Northeast Asia also had its own presence at the German pavilion (they showed a Mercedes-Benz passenger car), so of course we took a picture there.

France was next on the list. I didn’t hear too many good stories about this pavilion and now I understand why. The pavilion itself is not bad, but you have to wait several hours to get in and it’s not worth the wait if you have already been there before. The wall projections of scenes from France are okay, but compared to other pavilions not very special. I liked the pieces of art from the Musee D’Orsay, however, but it was too crowded and noisy to really appreciate them. The last part was paid for by Louis Vuitton, they built a whole brand experience for Chinese customers. Very smart marketing! We wanted to buy a baguette afterward, but the lines to get into the bakery and souvenir shop scared us away…

We ended the tour at the Israel pavilion, which was a bit of a deception. It was just an audio-visual show in Chinese (with subtitles on panels next to the people) about how great Israel is and what kind of technologies come from Israel (“During the London Olympics you will watch the sports in Beijing through a new satellite from Israel!”). After the show the doors to the rest of the pavilion open and then you realize there is no other part, and you’re back on the street again. Glad I did not have to wait in line there!

My parents in law decided to stay, watch some shows and maybe visit some other pavilions, but Grace and I had too much work to do so we decided to head back. We had both been on the phone several times during the day and my phone’s battery was almost empty from continuously checking and answering emails, so I wanted to get back to my laptop. We took a walk along the Huangpu river waterfront (the only quiet place at the Expo) and took a ferry to Puxi (the corporate pavilions and the city pavilions are on that side). At exit 1 there are always a lot of taxis, so we hopped on one and were home 30 minutes later. I had a great time today despite the crowds. The Expo caused a lot of trouble for people in Shanghai and I am happy that it will be over in 10 days, but on the other hand I may miss it a bit as well.

A full set of pictures of today’s visit you can find here on Flickr.