This weekend my wife had an INSEAD girlfriend get-together in Hong Kong and I decided to join her. Normally when she goes shopping (the main activity during this kind of women-weekends) I can enjoy a coffee and a good book in one of Hong Kong’s many cafes or go for a run in the hills, and so that’s what I did.

We left Shanghai on Friday morning and arrived in Hong Kong just after lunch. As usual China air traffic control caused the flight to be delayed, the third time in a week that planes I took were delayed (Monday 2.5 hours flying to Beijing, Wednesday 3 hours and Friday just over an hour). Upon arrival we went to our hotel straight away. We had decided to try out the brand new Upper House, a luxury boutique hotel high above Pacific Place. I expected a normal 5-star hotel but what we got was much better.

The experience starts upon arrival, there is no check-in but 2 hotel staff (very stylish ladies) accompany you to your room where they check you in with a signature on a mobile device. They also explain the room to you, because it has a lot of interesting features and is quite high-tech. The room itself was huge, I think about the size of 2 rooms in the JW Marriott (the hotel that occupies the floors below the 38th floor in the building). When you enter you come into a big bedroom, that also has a couch in front of the windows (with a great view of the mountains, the city and Victoria Harbour). Close to the entrance is a working and kitchen area, with among others a well-stuffed mini-bar and wine fridge. The mini bar contents are for free, you can drink as much as you like – except for the bottles of wine, that were very decently priced. Each room also has its own Illy X7 espresso machine and jars full of among others cookies, M&M’s, and roasted almonds (eat as much as you like!).

The room is quite high tech. There is no standard hotel directory, but you get an iPod Touch with all the information you might need on it. Pretty cool. The hotel also has a sound system, with speakers in every room, and with a connector for your own iPod, iPhone or computer. It worked great, so we had good music during our two-day stay here. Another interesting feature is the TV in the bathtub room: if you press the remote control, part of the mirror turns into a TV. I had never seen this before, but I would not mind having this in my own bathroom in the future.

The bathroom was quite something as well. It was huge, with a separate area for a rainforest shower and for a very big bathtub, both with a view over downtown Hong Kong and the mountains on the South side (our room was on the 43rd floor). The washing basins were in a different area of the bathroom, just as the toilet. Everything was very luxurious and no detail was overlooked. Even the phone in the toilet was a Jacob Jensen! The room also has a dressing room / walk-in closet, so you don’t have to put your suitcases in the bedroom like in most other hotels, and with enough space to hang clothes for at least a week.

I have to admit that I was impressed. I have stayed in quite some high-end hotels, but of the city hotels that I have stayed in this was probably the best that I ever spent a night at. I don’t want to compare it to tropical resorts, because you should not compare apples with oranges, but for a city hotel I don’t think you can get it much better. Of course this kind of hotel does not come cheap, but for me it was absolutely worth it. On a business trip I would not stay here, for work I normally try to stay in more budget oriented hotels (my standard HK hotel costs about 25% of the price of this hotel per night), but for private trips I don’t mind spending a bit more for a luxurious experience. At the moment the hotel has specials because they just opened, so if you want to try it out now is a good time. By the way, Upper House has a sister hotel in Beijing, Opposite House, that (at least judging from the outside and the entrance) looks just as special. I had dinner there last Monday and spent an hour working in their lobby, and was also quite impressed.

The trip itself was a lot of fun. On Friday afternoon my wife and I walked around Central, doing some shopping (I bought a large number of books at Dymocks!) and enjoying drinks in one of the many cafes. At night we had dinner at M at the Fringe, the Hong Kong version of Shanghai’s M on the Bund. M at the Fringe will close in late December, so it was the last time we could have dinner here (probably more about the M chain of restaurants soon in another blog post). After dinner we spent some time in Lan Kwai Fong before getting a good night’s sleep. Saturday morning I started by making some espressos and reading the South China Morning Post on the couch. A relaxed start of the day. Later we took the ferry to Discovery Bay for brunch with friends who live there.

In the afternoon my wife went shopping with her girlfriends, and I went back to the hotel to work a few hours. After that I went for a run on Bowen Road. As most runners who have ever stayed in downtown Hong Kong probably know, Bowen Road is one of the best places to run. The road starts above Admiralty, about a kilometer up (follow the foot path past next to the Peak Tram up until the 2nd bridge). From there you can run for about 4 kilometers on a flat surface overlooking the city. There is no traffic for most of the road, just a lot of other runners and hikers.

Half way Bowen Road you can take a right to go up into the mountains. I had planned to do that, but missed the turn and eventually ended up at the end of Bowen Road. From there I ran up a bit further until the trail that I was following suddenly stopped. So I decided to take it easy and slowly run back. I thought I had run about 10 km, but when I later mapped the route on DailyMile.com it turned out to be 13.5 km. Not a bad training, especially considering the hills and the hard surface (I normally run on a treadmill). After a hot bath at the hotel I felt reborn!

At night I headed to Causeway Bay for a dinner with friends at Agnes B. – Le Pain Grillee. A very nice
and cozy French restaurant on 111, Leighton Road. We had some excellent food and wines there; I’d recommend the restaurant to others. After dinner we walked around a bit before ending the night in the hotel room reading a picture book about the history of Hong Kong while having some drinks from the minibar (and listening to a Buddha Bar CD on the sound system).

On Sunday I again started the day with the SCMP and an espresso, before heading for a Dim Sum brunch at Zen with friends. After lunch we decided to take an earlier flight back to Shanghai, because we both missed our kids. So we went over to IFC to check in and managed to get the last seats on the 3 PM Dragonair shuttle back home. I look back at a fantastic weekend: good food and wine, interesting  talks with my wife and with friends, lots of new books and clothes, and even a good work-out session in the hills. I wish I would have time to do this more often.

Except for an occasional cigar I am not a smoker. But I can imagine that it’s frustrating that you have to hand in your lighter each time you board a plane. If you’re a smoker and land at Shanghai Honqiao Airport you are lucky: At the exit of the terminal you can choose another one from the lighters they confiscated there from departing passengers.

I noticed that many people took a lighter from the pile, I had to wait about a minute in order to take a picture without any passengers in it. I think this is a great idea, otherwise the airport would probably throw the lighters away or auction them off.

A couple of days ago I read an excellent piece on Venturebeat in which serial entrepreneur Scott Olson talks about how easy companies can loose (and win) customers. When I read the article I recognized a lot of what he said, so I decided to use it as the basis for a blog post as well.

Scott’s point is that companies often loose clients because of minor annoyances. He gives an example of a bureaucratic procedure to deposit a check at his bank that ticks him off, a procedure other banks do not have. It would be a simple thing to change, but often companies don’t realize that their customers are not happy.

I have the same with many companies that I am a client of. I especially hate it when they try to charge me for something that used to be free or that is free at many of their competitors. One example is wifi in hotels, unless there is no other solution I refuse to stay in hotels that charge me for wireless Internet. I changed the standard hotel I used to stay at in Amsterdam a few years ago because of this. I now normally stay in a hotel that is a bit more expensive but has free (and fast) wifi. A lot of hotels have missed my stay there just because they decided to charge USD 10-20 for wifi. I always check it out online before I book, and I know a couple of other business friends that have exactly the same attitude towards this.

When other companies make mistakes, this is a great way for their competition to come in and gain market share. As Scott Olsen put it in his article:

Want to steal your competition’s customers? Identify areas where they may be irritating their customers and ensure your company handles those smoother.

For example, Does the competition charge to pilot their product or service? Find a way not to. Does your competition have complicated, line item pricing? Find a way to simplify your own pricing. (This is an ongoing effort in the telecommunications industry.) For customer support, does your competition subject customers to a maze of automated phone tree responses? Get a person on the line with a command of the English language.

Some companies do not seem to understand the opportunities that this gives them. An example is KLM, since November 1 they charge their customers an additional EUR 50 per suitcase if you bring more than 1 suitcase on flights to and from the USA. A great way to make your customers unhappy before their trip has even started, when they during check-in have to pay EUR 50 (or more) extra. And you know what their argumentation is? Because many other airlines also do this. What’s the management thinking?

This would be a great way to differentiate yourself from the competition, show their passengers that KLM does not charge this and you might win some of them. How much money would KLM make from this? Most business travelers have only 1 suitcase or only travel with hand luggage, tourists normally travel together and likely won’t have more than 1 suitcase per person either. So let’s say an additional 50 suitcases per flight @ EUR 50 per suitcase, makes EUR 2500 more revenues per flight. Does that outweigh the number of unhappy customers? In the short term maybe, but in the long run I don’t believe it.

There are always easy opportunities to do a better job than the competition, but only a few seem to to something about it. For example, I used to use Twitpic for uploading pictures to Twitter. But I got tired of always having to email the pictures (it only takes about 30 sec. but it’s annoying). Also their iPhone app is useless, check the comments here. Then I saw a tweet about how well Mobypicture‘s app works on the iPhone and I downloaded the free app. It works flawless and very fast, and I can upload my pictures not just to Twitter but also to many other services such as Flickr and Facebook. I started using it last week and I don’t think I’ll ever use Twitpic again. Making an app is not very difficult, but it can make a huge difference for customers. Mobypicture did it right. As Scott Olson put it, don’t follow the competition, but excel where your competitors suck.

On Friday Mike Walsh visited me at the Spil Games Asia office to catch up and to do another video interview (wanted to put link here to a documentary he made last year for which he also interviewed me, but cannot find it right now) . Mike is a key note speaker on the digital future and CEO of innovation research agency Tomorrow, and he seems to travel constantly all over the world (he arrived Friday in Shanghai and I just saw on his picture feed that he is now in New York already). And now he is also an author: his book Futuretainment will be published officially tomorrow (according to Amazon.com) and he gave me a copy during our meeting.

This weekend I read the book and I have to say that I really enjoyed it. The book is extremely well designed by Vince Frost of Frost*Design, with illustrations and full page pictures on every page throughout the book. The book is about the end of traditional media and how changing consumer behavior is forcing business models to change. Mike cut the book into 23 chapters discussing small parts of the media revolution that’s happening around us. As an illustration, some of the titles of the chapters are Network, Ubiquity, Crowd, Social, Viral, Lifecast, Tag, Platform and Disrupt. Each chapter consists of short articles that explain the changes using lots of real life examples. These examples make it an interesting read, also for people who are less involved in new and social media than I am.

The book starts off talking about the fact that people’s relationship with technology is changing and that because of this entertainment will never be the same. The book is about what will happen next. It focuses partly on trends and user behavior in Asia to predict what will eventually happen in the rest of the world. The current young generation knows no life without Internet, so they expect to be in control of their entertainment. They don’t understand why a TV programming schedule would be useful: linear programming is over, you watch something when you want, not when others decide that for you. The world is changing because of this. While the industry was trying to come up with better photo and video cameras, the younger generation started taking pictures and shooting films with low resolution phone cameras. It turned out that high quality is not necessary anymore. They also do not want to just watch a clip, but want to be able to change it themselves (mediajacking is what Mike calls it).

Another part of the book is about viral distribution, how this works and how you can (or cannot) influence it. How do you find new content? Through your online connections: Who you know is what you know. Friendships change, a friend is no longer a noun but a verb: you don’t make a friend, but you friend someone. It also touches on why people are willing to spend so much money on virtual items online: The more we live, work and play online, the more important it will be that we invest in the way we represent ourselves online. Lifecasting is the subject of a chapter, the trend to broadcast your life to the world, either through Twitter or by posting your pictures or even live video online.

One thing many traditional broadcasters do not seem to grasp is that it’s not about the content anymore. What really counts is the context, the stuff that surrounds it: reviews, recommendations and ratings. Those are the things that make people watch content, not big marketing campaigns anymore. The book ends with scenarios for the future of TV, movies, music and games. I agree with most of Mike’s future visions for these sectors, he really thought them through. Marcel Fenez (PWC’s global partner for Media and Entertainment) just did an in-depth interview with me about the future of TV, and I am glad to see that the things I told him are in line with Mike’s conclusions. Mike actually takes it one step further than I had in mind, saying that broadcast channels will be designed to drive traffic to a website instead of the other way around. An interesting thought.

I’d recommend the book to anyone active in traditional media who wants to understand better what is hitting the industry and where it may lead to. But it’s also a good read for people in New Media, they will still find a lot of new insights in it and get more background on how media and user behavior evolved. And it’s a good book for the general public that wants to understand what shift is happening because of the Internet. You don’t need any previous Internet knowledge to understand it. The book is easy to read and has lots of good real life examples. And the great design andh pictures throughout the book make it an en even more enjoyable read.

Tomorrow TEDxBeijing will take place at CNEX. This is the second TEDx event in China, after TEDxShanghai that took place at M1NT in June this year.

Never heard of TEDx? You probably have heard of TED (if not, check out their Wikipedia page), TEDx is an independently organized TED event. As the TEDxBeijing website describes it:

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx.

TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is call TEDxBeijing, where x = independently organized TED event. At our TEDxBeijing event, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group.

I won’t be able to attend TEDxBeijing in person tomorrow (I wish each day would have 48 hours…), but Tudou.com is once again the publishing sponsor and will live stream the event starting at 1:30 PM China time (6:30 AM Central European Time) at http://www.tudou.com/home/tedxbeijing. The program is expected to be finished by 7:15 PM.

All talks will be available online at Tudou after the event as well. And if you’re interested in the TEDxShanghai talks, you can watch them all here: http://www.tudou.com/home/tedxshanghai

Because of severe drought in Southern China (the worst in decades), drinking water levels in Macau have fallen to dangerously low levels. The gambling enclave just south of Hong Kong could run out of water in a matter of weeks. Salinity levels in the water are going up already, and when they get too high the government may start a bottled water program for its inhabitants.

With the Macau Grand Prix coming up in 10 days and the Macau Marathon in early December, this is not a good prospect for the city with more gaming revenues than Las Vegas. People who pay hundreds of US dollars in order to loose thousands of dollars more in the casinos won’t accept that they can’t take a normal shower afterward. The economy in Macau is almost completely dependent on gambling revenues, so I’d assume that the Chinese government won’t let that happen and will come up with a temporary solution.

Next Monday I was planning to fly to Beijing in the late afternoon for a 2 day trip. However, it now turns out that President Obama will be in Shanghai on Monday and plans to fly to Beijing on Monday late afternoon for a dinner with Hu Jintao. Knowing China a little bit that likely means road closures in both Shanghai and Beijing around the time that Obama plans to travel, and delayed or cancelled flights on the Shanghai-Beijing route.

Obama (or Oba-Mao as some people started calling him here) will stay in Beijing on Tuesday and Wednesday, exactly the days that I also plan to be there. Because it seems to be more of a sightseeing trip than a political trip (he only has two meetings, for the rest he wants to see Beijing’s tourist spots and even the Great Wall), I am afraid there will be traffic control on many roads, leading to even more traffic jams than usual.

My plan was to fly back from Beijing on Wednesday night, and guess what? That’s exactly when Obama plans to fly as well. Not sure yet what I will do now. In order to avoid delays caused by the President’s visit, I will probably I take an early morning flight to Beijing on Tuesday and I might take the first flight back to Shanghai on Thursday morning. Now I just hope that the Chinese government is not planning to create as much snow fall next week as they did both last week and this week…

After the first part of this post yesterday with three book descriptions (actually five, because the first was a trilogy), today four other English language books – plus a few Dutch titles that I read but won’t review.


The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
In a list of best novels read in 2009 this will likely be number one. What a marvelous book! I bought it as an ebook in August this year after reading some positive book reviews for the book. Then to my surprise I noticed that I already owned the book in a paper version (albeit in Dutch, not in the English ebook version). I apparently had bought it a while ago (the book was published 5 years ago already) and had forgotten about it. That happens to me regularly with DVD’s, where I buy them twice because I forgot I already purchased them earlier, but with books this was the first time. Not smart, but the book was so good that I don’t mind having it twice. The Shadow of the Wind plays in post-war Barcelona, where a young boy finds a rare book called The Shadow of the Wind, that he likes very much. He tries to learn more about the author and finds that he has been killed during the civil war and that all of his books seem to have been destroyed. As the book continues the boy (growing into a man during the course of the book) finds out that the author may not have been killed but traveled to Paris. The more he digs into the writer’s life the more he realizes there are incredible parallels to his own life. The book is partly a mystery and thriller, partly a historical novel and partly a romance novel. That, combined with Zafon’s excellent storytelling skills made this into a must-read book for me. A pity I only read the book now and not a few years ago already. The good thing is that I can now already start reading in Zafon’s next book The Angel’s Game, a book that has partly the same characters as The Shadow of the Wind.

Beach Road – James Patterson
Two weeks ago I was looking for a quick read and because James Patterson normally does not disappoint me and the white beach picture on the cover page looked very attractive to me, I decided to buy it. That was a mistake. The book itself is mainly about a lawyer that defends a black basketball player who is accused of killing 3 white guys with a gun. Each chapter is written from the view point of a different person, which makes the book kind of difficult to read. But that’s not the main problem I have with it. After reading about 80% of the book the story line suddenly changes completely. The reader learns something that turns the story around completely, but which is so highly unlikely that I wished that I would had never bought the book. I like a book with a twist in a storyline, but what Patterson did here is just totally unbelievable. A waste of time, and probably the last time that I buy a book from James Patterson without checking some reviews first.

Dan Brown – The Lost Symbol
I had been looking forward to this book for quite some time, and the moment it became available I immediately got it as an ebook. It was an easy read, it only took me a few days to finish it. But after finishing it and thinking it through, I felt a bit disappointed. Sure, the story was fun to read and it had a lot of interesting facts about the Freemasons and hidden symbols in Washington D.C. But I felt it was almost a copy of The Da Vinci Code in a different setting. Following clues and solving puzzles while chasing a killer. That is not necessarily a big problem, but in this case it is, because I felt that The Da Vinci Code was a much better book. The Lost Symbol was hyped quite a bit before it was published, and for me it did not live up to its hype. Especially the end I found particularly weak, the solution to the puzzle was a disappointment and the author could have skipped the last 20 pages or so. A pity, but I guess after a huge hit like The Da Vinci Code it is very difficult to come up with something better, the expectations had been just too high. Not a bad book, but a far cry from The Da Vinci Code.

Haruki Murakami – What I talk about when I talk about running 
Until five weeks ago I was running almost daily to train for the Shanghai half marathon. Until I suddenly sprained my ankle in early October and had to stop running completely (I just started again 2 days ago). As a compensation I decided to read a book about running – well, actually my colleague Richard gave me the book to read – and that was a good choice. Of course it made me miss running even more, but it was nice to read what another runner thinks about while running, or what his motivation is to run a marathon or join in a 100 km ultrarace. For me running has several purposes. The main is that I want to stay in good shape so that I can always run 10-15 km without any problems. I also do it to stay sane; sometimes work is quite stressful and running after work makes me feel much better. It also makes me more productive: when I come home tired after a long day, a 30 min run on the treadmill makes me feel completely fit again. Same thing in the morning, after an early morning run my day is normally much more productive. It turns out the writer has partly the same reasons, and it’s interesting to read his thoughts about running and during his runs. He shows a side of himself that most people probably don’t know about. The book is a bit like a blog, in the sense that the writer shares personal stories and feelings, and for a runner like me these are very recognizable. However, I think that if you’re not a runner you won’t enjoy the book very much, except maybe when you are a big fan of the writer. So for non-runners I would not recommend the book, but if you’re crazy about endurance sports like me you might enjoy the read as well.

I also read a couple of Dutch books that I won’t review here because most of my readers cannot read Dutch. Among others De eeuw van mijn vader (My father’s century) by Geert Mak that I liked very much, and several books by Adriaan van Dis (among others Een Barbaar in China, Familieziek and De Wandelaar). See also my blog post about Adriaan van Dis for some more background on the writer and his novels.

If you have any book suggestions for me, let me know. Happy reading!