The Shanghai Daily reported today that the ticket sales for this weekend’s F1 race are not as good as last year. The promotor for the race thinks that about 110,000 people will attend the main race, compared to 150,000 last year.

I am not sure whether announcing this is a smart move. The reason is that in China you are normally able to get cheap tickets right before an event starts if it is not sold out. Scalpers for example sell tickets given to people who do not use them (a regular practice in China is to give tickets to events as a gift to customers). Last year everyone anticipated a sold out event, and because of that all tickets were bought in advance. However, many of my friends are now waiting for tickets from scalpers to become available.

Another reason for the lower sales are the increased prices for the tickets. The F1 organization probably thought that because of a sold-out event last year they could raise prices. But because it is not a novelty anymore, many people are not willing to pay prices of sometimes several thousand yuan for a ticket. The fact that this is the last race of the season, and Alonso has been crowned champion already, also does not help.

At least some things will be improved in comparison to last year. Shuttle buses are for free this year for example. But more important, they are able to drive around the perimeter of the stands. Last year I had to walk for at least 45 minutes to get to my stand, which was on the exact other side of the track. I don’t mind, but not everybody likes to walk so far.

What most likely will still be the same is the long wait for buses to get back to the city, and the traffic jams after the race is over. Last year I was lucky to have an invitiation for the after-party at the Volkswagen test track (close to the F1 circuit), so I avoided this. But friends told me it took them hours to get on a bus and get back to downtown Shanghai.

Just checked my hotmail account, and what happens: I get a message that I have not logged on for 90 days so all my mails are deleted. However, this is not true, the last time I checked was indeed a while ago (probably just before my marriage, today exactly 1 month ago), but not 90 days. The strangest thing is that hotmail is suddenly in Dutch instead of English, although I did not change any settings. I hardly ever used hotmail anymore, because it is slow in China and much better web based mail-services have emerged. But I saved several emails from the past 9 years in there, and they are all gone now. Great…

Thanks Microsoft, this is how you loose a customer.

Yahoo started its own podcasting site a few hours ago (http://podcasts.yahoo.com). Although this will be a competitor for Toodou.com, I am actually glad to see this, because more people will become familiar with podcasting. In the end Toodou will benefit from this. Furthermore, Yahoo focuses only on audio, and Toodou is doing both audio and video (video is bigger than audio, it’s about 60:40 right now). Toodou also takes it a step further by building a community around it where you can rate and comment on the podcasts.

I tried out the new site and it works pretty good. Podcasts are searchable by tags (like Toodou), and you can add additional tags as a user. When you subscribe to your first podcast you need to download a small file that will automatically put your podcasts in your preferred program. I use iTunes for my audio podcasts, and it worked perfect. The search for podcasts also worked very well, and you get to choose between series or episodes. I noticed and downloaded an interesting podcast series for people who want to learn Chinese (search on ‘chinese’), chinesepod.com. Very basic, but fun to listen to if you want to learn to speak Mandarin Chinese (and for free). This is the kind of program that will make podcasting big!

I realize it is a Sunday night now, but for me it feels like the middle of the week. Not a jetlag but a National Holiday-lag. Why? This weekend was a working weekend in China. Each of the 3 official holidays (Spring Festival, May 1, and October 1) give Chinese 5 days off in a row. But in order to compensate that people have to work either the weekend before or after the vacation. This time it was the weekend after the holiday, so I spent the weekend in my office. Got lots of work done, as not many emails or phone calls came in, I suspect that most people took an additional two days off. The good thing is that I caught up with all my emails and other things that were waiting for me after my honeymoon. Also managed to upload all pictures from my wedding to www.flickr.com/groups/chinawedding (many people sent me there pictures, thanks!), and my honeymoon pictures to www.flickr.com/photos/chijs.

This is the view from our new office. On the forefront the Suzhou Creek, which has been cleaned up a lot during the past years. In the back the new Radisson hotel and the Marriot hotel, both on People’s Square are visible.

This is what the office looks like right now. It is still a big mess, with many years of dust and dirt on the floor. But Chinese workers can do wonders in a few weeks, and hopefully the warehouse will soon be a good place to work hard and to relax.

Toodou.com keeps on growing, and our current office is getting too small. In the next weeks we plan to hire about 10 extra staff, and therefore we will move our office to an old warehouse on the Suzhou Creek. The location is great, close to the subway and about a 10 minute walk to People’s Square.

The building is called Si Hang (Four banks, as it used to be a warehouse for 4 banks). I learned that it the building is famous for a battle that was fought here during the Battle of Shanghai in 1937 (the Chinese army fighting the Japanese invaders). There is even a museum in the building (on the 7th floor) about the battle. Should you ever plan to visit the museum, feel free to come by. Our office will open by mid- to late November and is at the far end of the 5th floor.

After a few days without Skype and being able to read my own blog, things seem to be OK now. Skype started working again on Thursday, and last night I saw my posts coming into my RSS reader. I was talking to some people outside Shanghai, and they had no problem with Skype, but they were also not able to read my blog. Strange. Maybe the government decided to shut some sites down just for the National Holiday? Or, more likely, there was a problem with Shanghai Telecom and nobody was able to repair it due to the National Holiday. Anyway, things work again and that’s what counts.