The last time I visited a real circus was probably when I was in primary school. At that time there were still a couple of local circuses traveling around The Netherlands, but I think most of them stopped operating many years ago already. I have seen other top circuses such as the DPRK State Circus in Pyongyang (amazing acts, but you can only see them if you manage to do a trip to North-Korea), some circuses in Shanghai and of course the Cirque Du Soleil. But they are different from what I call a ‘real circus’: a traveling group of entertainers with clowns, animals and of course a big tent, that stays in each town for just a few days.

After reading Water For Elephants a couple of months ago, a book that describes the life of people in a traveling circus in the US in the 1930s, I was looking forward to seeing a real circus again. So when I saw a circus tent being set up next to the Vecht river in Ommen I decided to go there. For some reason the local government in Ommen did not allow the circus to advertise in town (something I totally disagree with, this is a great event for kids and their parents and for the many tourists in Ommen that pay lots of tourist tax every day, and the government should support this – but I digress), so it was difficult to find out when the shows would take place.

So yesterday I just drove my car to the tent of Circus Sydney, asked the people there and immediately reserved tickets for the show this afternoon. The best tickets of course, when you only go to a real circus once every 20-30 years you might as well get the best seats! So this afternoon we woke up the kids a bit earlier than usual from their afternoon nap and we drove over to the circus to see the show.

Circus Sydney seems to be an Australian circus that is now traveling around Europe. They are not very big (about 20 entertainers in total during today’s show), but the show is fun, especially with kids. They have a clown that fills the intermezzos, acrobats, dancers, and of course several animals (horses, dogs, llamas, camels).

Because we were on the front seat we had an excellent view, but sometimes we were a bit too close to all the actions for our kids. At a certain point Scott was so scared of the horses that were a mere 50 centimeters away from him that he decided to move to the second row, where Elaine was already sitting. Later he came back, but he held onto me and my dad tightly when the camels or other animals came too close.

During his first act the clown needed an assistant and he asked me to join him in the ring. Always fun to do, so of course I participated. Scott was very happy to see me in the ring with the clown!

I liked the show. You can’t compare it to the big shows like you see in China or in North-Korea, or to big budget shows like Cirque Du Soleil, but it has a very friendly, family-like feeling. Some small things went wrong during the show, but that makes it actually more interesting to me. I enjoyed watching the 2 hour performance (incl. a 15 min break), and the kids also loved it. If you’re in Ommen over the next 3 days or if you see Circus Sydney (owned by Alexander Scholl) somewhere in your area, make sure you visit. Especially if you have kids it’s a wonderful afternoon or evening out.

Enovate, a Chinese research company focused on the Chinese youth, published an interesting infographic about the usage of mobile devices. Although I am not sure how scientifically valid their findings are, the results are worth sharing.
Some of their findings include:
– 18-22 year old people spend more time on their mobile phones than on a computer. The 23-30 year old group still uses the computer a bit more (35% vs. 31%) but when you also take tablets into account (14%), mobile also wins by far in that category.
– People would rather give up their computer than their phone
– Daily must-have content includes news, video and SNS

Conclusion: The future is mobile – now already in China, but soon also in the rest of the world!

A few kilometers from my parents house is a farm that sells its own cheese. My parents and I drove over to buy several kinds of cheese and took the kids with us. Right at the moment we were there the cows were herded back into their stables so they could be milked. Scott and Elaine had the time of their lives watching the huge animals fighting to go through the narrow door.

Scott was not afraid at all, but when we later walked through the stable Elaine held me very tight and only peeked occasionally at the big animals. Nice for them to see real cows, you don’t see them in Shanghai.

Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley’s former star analyst who is now a partner at VC firm Kleiner Perkins, created a report called USA Inc. back in February this year. The report explains the financial problems in the US and then compares the country to a company (USA Inc.) and how this corporation would solve its problems.

Because since then the fiscal problems in the US have grown a lot worse and the country could theoretically go bankrupt in a few weeks, she now created a 90-slide presentation with the main points of her report. It’s well worth the read, it takes about 10 minutes if you go through the main points quickly.

After reading the presentation you’ll better understand where the biggest problems come from in the US and how they can, and should, be solved. The US needs a turnaround strategy for which big spending cuts will be necessary soon (start with low hanging fruit like Medicare), however painful they may be. After that the country should look at growing its revenue base, through taxes and economic growth.

As usual her presentation contains tons of information, but it’s delivered in an informal and easy-to-understand way. I enjoyed going through the slides a few times over the past days. If you are interested, the full presentation including notes can be found here: http://www.kpcb.com/usainc/pdf.php

The past 7 days I took my family to the south of France for a relaxed holiday in a villa in St. Paul de Vence. I had the idea a few weeks ago while I was working late at night in Shanghai and immediately searched for (and booked) a nice place not far from the Mediterranean coast. The house was quite big (4 bed rooms & 4 bath rooms), so that next to my wife and kids I was also able to bring my parents along and even my sister flew in for a couple of days.

St. Paul de Vence is a medieval fortified village, built on a hill overlooking the countryside and the coast. The beautiful place is quite touristic, but I guess that’s not unusual in the middle of the high tourist season. Even some Chinese tour groups have now included a visit to the place in their Europe-in-one-week itineraries – but most won’t meet them, because they only arrive at 8 AM when the average Western tourist is still sound asleep.

Because of the kids we could not make long tours, but we normally spent the morning sightseeing and relaxed in the afternoon when the kids had their afternoon naps. At night we sometimes prepared our own dinner and other days we went out for dinner in Nice, Cannes or one of the other places in the area.

The south of France is a great area, both in summer and in winter. From St. Paul de Vence you can be on the beach in 15 minutes in summer and on the ski slopes in 40 minutes in winter (the big resorts like Isola 2000 are about 1 hour further away). The climate is quite good as well, with lots of sunny days and warm (but not too hot) temperatures in summer.

We flew to Nice-Cote d’Azur airport, which is the 2nd busiest airport in France, and was also just 15 minutes from St. Paul de Vence. There we rented a car – a Opel Zafira, the only minivan that was still available and that fitted my family and luggage. Not the best car and with a relatively light engine, but okay for a couple of days. However, a convertible is definitively better suited for the southern French climate!

Among others we visited Monaco with the kids. The city state was only a 45 minute drive from our house, so you could theoretically drive there just for lunch. I always love Monaco, it’s one of the very few cities in the world where it’s normal to have a traffic jam in which at least half the cars are valued over USD 200,000. The boats are even better, especially the super yachts moored with their backsides to J.F. Kennedy Avenue (the road along the harbor front, famous for its chicanes during the Formula One races). I love to watch them, although I don’t think I would want to have one of them, even if I would be able to afford one. But if you happen to have a mega yacht you can show it off to the public for a mooring fee of less than USD 1000 per night (Monace is relatively ‘cheap’ in this regard), without tips of course – and without taking into account the cost of all the staff to take care of the boat…

Cannes and Nice are also nice places, but I prefer Monaco myself. We went to Nice twice with the kids and once to Cannes. I like both cities, but Cannes has the advantage of sandy beaches. I can’t understand how people can lay on the pebbles on the beaches in Nice for hours on just a thin towel… Although the high prices of beach chairs (EUR 20) and umbrellas (EUR 10) along the Boulevard des Anglais may explain some of this of course.

My favorite place during the trip was Tourettes-sur-Loup, another medieval village, a bit higher in the mountains. Despite being just a 10 minute drive from St. Paul de Vence there was hardly anybody there. I was very surprised that we had the walled city almost to ourselves. I guess that’s partly what made me like it so much, it was an unexpected gem that seemed (still) to be off the off the tourist track.

When we were not sightseeing we spent time at the pool, in the garden or on one of the terraces. The kids loved the pool, on most days the first thing they wanted to do in the morning was to jump into the it! They swim a lot in China too, but here they liked it a lot more it seemed.

I read a few books and magazines, but not as many as I hoped. I also talked a lot with my parents and enjoyed many good bottles of wine with my dad. It seems the local wines taste so much better there than at home. And the wines are much cheaper: you can get very decent wines for EUR 6-7 per bottle – in China I would not even dare to buy a bottle at that price. But because it was a holiday I mainly bought better wines, the assortment at the local wine dealer was excellent and we were able to try a lot of new wines.

I would not have mind to stay a bit longer, so maybe I’ll come back again in the near future. I realize I really like the Mediterranean coast in France – the nature, the beaches, the climate and the food. A good place to spend some more time reading and writing. I am sure it’s not the first time I say this about an area on my blog, I guess there are just too many great places on this planet.

I put a set of my holiday pictures on Flickr, you can find my Cote d’Azur trip pictures here.

No comment, except that I should be a bit more careful in the future. It happened to me before with my first Android phone…

I published this article today on the Business Insider, the original is here.

Facebook is not only the biggest social network in the world, but it has also grown to become the biggest online game destination. People that did not play online games before, started playing them on Facebook when they saw their friends also doing that. Because Facebook does not develop the games itself, many companies were started to create content for Facebook. Some of these have even grown into huge companies themselves, such as Zynga that just filed for IPO.

Reading Zynga’s S-1 it becomes clear that the company relies almost completely on Facebook. The SEC filing says in the risk factors section: “Facebook is the primary distribution, marketing, promotion and payment platform for our games. We generate substantially all of our revenue and players through the Facebook platform and expect to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Any deterioration in our relationship with Facebook would harm our business”.

Most other social game companies face exactly the same problem, all their players are on Facebook, which is potentially a big risk. Likely Google+ will also add social games to its social network, and I am sure that Zynga and other developers will then try to get users to play their games on Google+ as well. But it’s not sure yet that Google+ will become as big as Facebook, or that people will use the social network in the same way as Facebook. So whether it will be a real alternative is still a big question mark.

Therefore game developers are looking for other solutions. Today’s Financial Times published an article about how leading browser-based game developer Bigpoint will now distributes its games on the Spil Games social game platforms. For Bigpoint this has the added advantage that Spil Games focuses only on games. As Bigpoint CEO Hubertz says in the article: “Facebook is not a gaming website. Their first interest is not that the user finds our games… but that users can communicate.”

Spil Games’ users go there with the primary goal to play (social) games, and the company also understands game developers better than Facebook does. As Mr. Hubertz notes in the FT article “the decision to tie up with SpilGames reflected that company

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