Spil Games company outing on Vlieland

I spent the past couple of days on the Dutch island of Vlieland for a Spil Games company outing. I hadn’t been to this island in about 20 years and it was nice to come back here. The place had not changed much over the past 2 decades, something which is hard to imagine when you are used to the fast pace of life and constant changes in China. It’s a beautiful island with long white sandy beaches, high sandy dunes and even some forests on the island.

Because cars are not allowed here, it is a very quiet place. The tourists that vacation here normally come here for the silence and the slow pace of life. Although I prefer life in the fast lane over a place where not much happens, I liked being on this island. It’s literally like being in a different world – but luckily a world where they have wifi!

The Spil Games team traveled by private ferry from Harlingen to the island, which took us about 2 hours over the Waddenzee. The weather was nice and we had a couple of beers during the ride over the sea. About half way 2 yellow rescue boats appeared on the horizon and quickly approached our ferry. It turned out they were there to make our ride more exciting: we could board the open speed boats and go for a fast ride over the waves. Pretty cool, especially after a couple of beers. Not everybody dared to go on the fast boats, so some of us, including myself, did the ride twice. Very cool and totally unexpected to do something like this.

Upon arrival on Vlieland my kids and dad where waiting in the harbor greet me. They had taken an earlier ferry and were staying in a hotel at the other side of the island. Nice to see them here! The whole Spil Games crew got bikes and we rode them to our hotel, the Seeduyn beach resort in the north of the island. I got a great room with beach & sea view and felt right at home. After putting my gadgets and passport in the safe we went down to the beach terrace for beers and for a short talk by Gregory about the program for the 3 days. After that we had a big dinner followed by drinks while watching the sunset.

I was a bit tired, because I hadn’t slept much the night before (Elaine got up very early because of jet lag), and went to bed around 11:30 PM. Most of the Spil Games crew decided to go to Vlieland’s village and have a couple more beers there. The next morning I heard that many hadn’t gone to bed until 4, and some had only hit the sack at 5:30! I saw some of the pictures and realized I had missed a great party. You can’t have it all…

Anyway, I got up at 6 AM and seemed to be the only one awake in the hotel and maybe even on the whole island. I decided to go for a run. I had seen a map of the island the night before and found a nice route to run. I thought it would be about 10-12 km, a good distance to start the day. I started running along the beach, and after my GPS watch told me that I had run about 6 km I realized the route must be a bit longer than I had initially thought. I could either turn around or continue, and I chose the latter.

Close to where the Vliehors (a military area) began I took a path through the dunes to the other side of the island and from there I ran along the coast to the only village on the island. I passed by the hotel where my family was staying, but also there nobody seemed awake yet, so I crossed the island again back to the Spil Games hotel. When I was getting closer to the finish I noticed I would run about 20 km, so I decided to run another kilometer through the dunes and on the beach to make it a half marathon (21.1 km). The time wasn’t great (1 hr. 57 min), but considering the fact that a big part of it was on the beach and in the dunes it was not that bad either.

After a big breakfast surrounded by tired and slightly hung over colleagues we had to choose whether we wanted a sports or a nature program. I had done enough sports already so went for the nature program. That was a good choice because we did some very cool things, especially in the morning. We took the Vliehorst Express, a modified truck with open air seats, over the beach to the Vliehors military base. There some F16 fighter planes were doing exercises that we could watch. The planes came in from over the North Sea, dived down over the island, fired at some tanks and then took off again over the sea. A fantastic sight from very nearby. After we got clearance from the tower we were allowed to drive over the Vliehors to the most western part of the island.

The fighter planes were still coming in and two of them changed their course when they saw us and flew straight over our heads. Top Gun 2011! Very exciting to see these planes fly maybe 30-40 meters above you at full speed. I don’t think you will ever have this kind of opportunity in China – or in many other countries for that matter, Holland is quite liberal in every respect.

At the other end of the Vliehors we stopped to look at some seals that were swimming there. Some of them were really observing us, but none of them dared to come ashore. We were at the very end of the island, just a short distance from the island of Texel. It seemed like you could almost swim there, but the currents would likely take you out to sea, so not a very smart idea to try out. Next was a visit to the Strandjuttersmuseum, a small museum with items from stranded ships and other things that washed ashore over the years. Some pretty amazing things, but also some things I’d rather not see (e.g. the eyeballs of a sailor man – the rest of the body was buried)…

After a lunch at the hotel with my parents, wife and kids (they rode their bikes over to my hotel) it was time for a hike with a guide. Not as exciting as the morning program, but still quite interesting to hear stories about the island and its people. Around 3:30 pm the weather changed from sunny to rainy and windy, so we went back to the hotel. I then went for a swim in the cold (18 degrees Celsius) North Sea with 2 colleagueas. We were the only ones who dared to enter the sea it seemed. It was refreshing, but I was glad to take a hot shower afterward!

After that there were two hours of management presentations, in which the Q2 results were discussed and some of Spil Games exciting plans for the future were revealed. For the first time also some non MT members were invited to tell something about their jobs (this time 3 people presented about how we do online marketing with SEO, SEA and game distribution). A good idea I think, Spil Games has gotten so big that many

“Google Streetview” for China: www.city8.com

Google Streetview does not exist in China, and considering the problems that company has here I don’t expect it will come anytime soon either. A pity because it’s very useful when you travel to a new place and want to check what the surroundings look like.

A few weeks ago Joop Dorresteijn pinged me about a service he had found that does something similar for cities in China: city8.com. You select the city you want to look at and then you get a streetview-like interface. It works pretty well, but because it’s hosted inside the Great Firewall it is quite slow outside China or when using a VPN.

I tried it out for Shanghai and Beijing and like the functionality and the quality of the pictures. Not only the city center has been covered, but also the suburbs. Even some of the expat compounds are part of the database (ours did not let the camera car in though, so I can’t see my own house), so you can check out most addresses in the city. Just type in the address in Chinese in the search bar and you get to the location right away. You can then move around with the cursor just like in Google Streetview.

The service is now available for 41 cities in mainland China, not only cities on the East (incl. holiday destinations like Haikou and Sanya on Hainan) coast but also in the Western parts of the country (e.g. Chengdu and Chongqing).

How to easily delete many pictures from your iPhone

Image Capture (native OSX app) can be used to delete multiple=

This afternoon I got the iTunes message that my iPhone’s memory was full, so I looked at what filled up the memory. Next to lots of music (that I did not want to delete), pictures turned out to be a major reason. I had imported these pictures to iPhoto before but did not delete them from my phone at that time.

With an Android phone it’s easy to select several pictures at once and delete them all, but the iPhone is a bit behind in this regard. Deleting hundreds of pictures one by one is not an option for me so I started to play around with some of OSX’s programs. iPhoto is great, but you can only delete pictures after you upload them, and because I had most of the pictures in there already that was not very useful.

Then I stumbled upon Image Capture (Location: Applications > Image Capture.app, a native app in OSX) and this turned out to do the trick. Connect your iPhone, launch Image Capture, select the pictures you want to delete and press the red delete button at the bottom of the screen. No need to upload the pictures first. If you want to delete most of your pictures best is to choose ‘edit > select all’ and then deselect only the pictures you want to keep. Within 5 minutes the task was finished!

I tweeted about it and immediately got some retweets and DM’s from people who were happy with this solution so I decided to post it here as well. It seems I am not the only one with this problem. Maybe it’s time for Apple to update its iPhone operating system to allow picture batch operations?

Google+ first impressions

Also published on the Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-first-impressions-2011-7

After playing around with Google+, the new social network that Google launched this week, for a few days I really start to like what I am seeing. I am still a bit skeptical, but Google is doing some things better than Facebook is. It actually reminds me a lot of Sina Weibo, the Chinese Twitter clone that will soon surpass Twitter – and may even be a threat to Twitter.

First of all I like that Google+ allows you to follow everybody like on Twitter. As many people know I don’t really believe in privacy and so everybody can follow me on every SNS. The problem with Facebook, however, is that people can only see my updates if I follow them back. But many people that send me friend requests there I don’t know at all, so in order for them to see my updates automatically I need to accept their friend requests. Of course you can then hide them from your time line, but it still feels a bit weird to add many people as friends that you have never met. On Twitter, and now on Google+, people can follow you without you following them back. I think that’s a feature that Facebook should introduce as well.

Another thing that Google+ does much better is the group functionality. Facebook also has Groups, but Google went a step further. Each time you add a contact you can immediately add them to certain groups, called circles. You can also make new circles for them (I made circles for all companies that I am involved in for example), so if you want to share certain things only with a smaller group that’s possible. I think this solves a big privacy issue that Facebook is facing.

When I added a colleague on Facebook a while ago she told me she felt a bit weird about it because I could see all her party pictures. I could understand that (not that it makes a difference to me, I don’t judge people by what they do outside work hours. I actually love to party myself as well, but that’s a different story.), but with Google+ she would not have that issue because there she could just add me to a circle that she does not share her party pictures with. Doing this with Facebook Groups is theoretically possible, but not many people use the functionality because it’s not a main feature of the site like within Google+.

Will many people use circles? Maybe not, it’s more of a geeky thing, especially for people with thousands of followers on Facebook or Twitter. For me it’s quite useful and I may actually follow more people back than on Twitter if I can filter some of their updates through circles or (even better) if they filter what they send me. I understand that you can also follow certain circles, didn’t try that out yet, but that’s another great feature – copied straight from Twitter Lists of course. Talking about copying, a lot of the features that I see in Google+ seem to come from Sina Weibo, I would not be surprised if the Google China people analyzed the success of Weibo and made a list of all their killer features.

I am surprised how busy Google+ already is. The first day Google only let people with a large social graph on there, which was very smart: they are the ones that post most on Facebook and Twitter and would ensure that Google+ would be full of activity right away. They could then invite others, but for some reason Google suddenly stopped that (I can’t invite new people anymore). There was a trick that you could add new people by sending them a Google+ post by email, but I understand even that function does not work anymore.

But despite that, many of my geeky and entrepreneurial friends are already on the service and are actively sharing information. So far I only have 35 contacts, but that’s mainly because I did not spend a lot of time following people, and partly also because it takes a bit more time because you have to decide which circle you want to add them to.

Will Google+ be a success? Hard to say after just a few days where mainly the geeks are active, but I take back my initial judgment that I did not believe a new SNS could beat Facebook or Twitter. The problem is that I already spend too much time updating and reading Twitter and Facebook. I don’t want to add a third one to that list to be very honest. So maybe one of them will have to go to be replaced by Google+.

That would probably be Twitter for me: I don’t see enough innovation there, especially when I compare it to Weibo. But I have about 3500 followers on Twitter, and it’s an interesting audience to discuss things with. To build up 3500 followers on Google+ will take a lot of time, so until then I won’t abandon Twitter. But if Twitter does not innovate more quickly I may eventually drop them and move to Google+. I’ll wait a few months, before giving a final judgment on this. But for now I give Google a chance – and actually even a good chance. They thought SNS through and came up with a great solution and excellent functionality. I look forward to what will happen with this initiative!