The last week of June I spent in Holland for some meetings at Spil Games in Hilversum, but also to give a couple of talks. In China I give presentations regularly, but in Holland I just give a few per year: I normally do not travel overseas just for one event, except when I am already there for business meetings or the event is related to online games/new media and (at the very least) business class flights and hotels are paid.

The last week of June fit pretty well, because there were two interesting conferences that I could speak at and another event that I had been asked for a couple of times also fell exactly in this week. On Monday I gave a talk at the Industrieele Groote Club in Amsterdam about Internet Entrepreneurship in China. An interesting audience of about 50 business people in a Club’s beautiful old building overlooking Dam Square in the middle of Amsterdam. I had 75 minutes for my talk, which was easy to fill especially because of the constant flow of good questions. I enjoyed the talk and also the discussions during the dinner afterward and in the bar at the end of the evening.

CRTV, a Chinese radio and TV station in Holland, shot some footage during my presentation and also interviewed me after the talk. I am not sure if it’s already been broadcasted or whether it’s available on the Internet, but I noticed they also have a page on Tudou and if they upload it there I’ll put a link here.

On Tuesday I attended the Mediapark Jaarcongres, a yearly conference at the Mediapark in Hilversum – the place where many broadcasters in Holland are located. The conference itself was interesting, because of the fact that it showed me how traditional the media in Holland still is. Somehow I always thought media in Holland would be far ahead in embracing New Media, but this day taught me that is not the case. They even censored the Twitter projection screen when too many new media people were making fun of the old-fashioned thinking of the traditional media people on stage (the official reason was that people were using curse words, but afterward some Twitterers did a search and could not find that or those tweet(s)). At this conference I was interviewed on stage about running Spil Games in Asia (see this picture). The interview was OK, but I felt the interviewer had no idea about my background. Anyway, it was an interesting day and I met a lot of people.

Interestingly, when my interview was over CRTV was there again and they did another TV interview with me. I assume it was a coincidence? And to top it off, after the conference I drove with a friend in his Mini Cooper convertible to dinner, when a Google Streetview camera car passed by. With a bit of luck we will find the picture with us driving with the top down in Google Streetview soon!

Wednesday was a full day of management meetings at Spil Games followed by an excellent sushi dinner in Abcoude, thanks Willem! By the way, note that Abcoude is probably the only place in the world with abcde in that order in its name.

On Thursday I spoke at the Nationale Marketingdag 2009 (National Marketing Day) about success factors for a casual gaming site in China. A standard presentation for me, but probably the first time I had to do it in Dutch. I realize that when I talk about Internet and games I prefer to speak in English, I really have to look for the correct Dutch words sometimes. After my presentation I was interviewed by Ronnie Overgoor for Blueshots.tv (plus several other sites), mainly about entrepreneurship and Spil Games Asia. I have embedded the video below.

If you would like me to speak at an event or give a talk for a delegation that visits China, you can of course contact me directly, but the easiest is to get in touch with the China Speakers Bureau. They can arrange everything for you (and for me).

Picture: Punkmedia.nl (creative commons)
www.punkmedia.nl