All the people and media that keep saying that Twitter is useless may have to think again. When I looked on Twitter around 2:30 PM this afternoon I noticed a tweet from Frank Yu saying “Earthquake in Beijing?“. Despite the shaking building, he kept on Twittering and he even made fun of himself when he wrote: “i twittered as the building swayed…screw running out the door, MUST TWEET !“

By that time several other friends in Beijing had started to Twitter about the earthquake, but in Shanghai it was still quiet. Either because the quake was not as obvious here, or maybe because it arrived a bit later in Shanghai (how quick do earthquake waves travel actually?). Although I was busy working I was so fascinated by what happened on Twitter during the next hour or so that I spent more time watching the tweets roll by than focus on the emails I was planning to write.

At first nobody knew where the earthquake was, but soon it turned out that the epicenter was around Chengdu. And of course within a few minutes the Twitter community found at least 3 active Twitterers (http://twitter.com/inwalkedbud, http://twitter.com/lyrrael and http://twitter.com/casperodj) that were reporting live from Chengdu. Quite amazing to see how quickly news spreads on Twitter, because we already had all information before the mainstream media picked it up. In my 80 year old brick-and-mortar Shanghai warehouse office I did not feel a thing, but on Twitter I read that many office buildings in Beijing and Shanghai were being evacuated. Must not be a nice feeling to walk tens of stories in a crowded stairway while you are not sure what really happened and if another shock might hit soon. Being in China, I would not be surprised if some people decided to just take the elevator despite the potential danger.

Some interesting tweets followed. Niubi reported that the Beijing air traffic controllers left the control tower when it started shaking (imagine you are a pilot making an approach to Beijing airport and suddenly you cannot reach the tower anymore!). Later he tweeted the CCTV advise of what to do during an earthquake: sit in the corner with a sofa pillow over your head (no kidding!). According to Shizao the first website that went down in China during the earthquake was…. the Earthquake Bureau’s website (thanks to Kaiser Kuo for the retweet).

Only a while later other media followed. First the blogs (Danwei was the first with a post up I think, soon followed by this post on Shanghaiist), and then the major news agencies. CNN decided to use this Tudou footage in its constant covering of the earthquake, but nicely covered the Tudou logo with its own logo. Twitter kept on being the first to report, and even though initial reports showed not much damage in Chengdu it soon turned out to be much much worse outside the city. In Dujiangyan for example, where the Dutch Chinareis group went just over a month ago to get VIP seats during the water release ceremony, schools and houses collapsed and hundreds of people are now buried under the rubble.

My colleague Thijs Bosma had booked a plane from Shanghai to Chengdu that was supposed to take off soon after the earthquake, but it first got delayed and was later canceled. Shortly after I heard that Chengdu airport had completely closed. Bad luck for him, but nothing in comparison to the thousands of people that have lost their lives today. A terrible tragedy on Buddha’s birthday and exactly 88 days before the Olympics (both these facts I got from Twitter today; 88 is a lucky number in China). It seems the Olympic year is not China’s lucky year: first the heavy snow, then the Tibet protests, followed by the still ongoing HFM disease, and now this huge earthquake (source: this tweet). Let’s hope that things can only get better.

This morning I went to the visa bureau in Pudong to extend my Z-visa / residence permit. In the past years I never had to go here in person to get an extension, but because of tighter visa rules I now had to appear myself. Not a big deal I thought, because I had heard that this should take maximum one hour.

Wrong. Because of the new visa rules many foreigners were trying their luck to get tourist and F-visa extensions, and there were huge queues. Several people were arguing loudly with the staff, but they could not bend the rules for them, and most of the foreigners had to leave China. To make things worse the staff took a 2-hour (!) lunch break despite a notice saying that the service would not be interrupted during lunch. Technically right, because out of the 14 counters 2 were still manned during the break.

The result was that I had to wait for 3 hours before it was my turn. Luckily I brought my fully charged laptop, so I could do a bit of work (even though the place had no wireless internet). I even found a place where they sold coffee. Not a very good quality, and overpriced at RMB 18 per cup, but better than nothing.

One security guard was overseeing the visa hall, but did not interfere in any of the arguments. Instead he decided to take a nap in the corner. The interesting thing was that when he woke up he decided to wake up the guy sitting behind me who had also decided to take a nap. The guy was spread out over two chairs, which was probably the main reason for the guard to wake him up. The guy got quite angry because of this, but the security guard just smiled (he did not understand what the guy told him, which was probably better – also for the guy).

When it finally was my turn the procedure went quite fast. I had already filled out the forms and had all required documents with me. They asked me 2 questions, took a digital picture and within 2 minutes I was outside again. I will get my passport back in 5 working days and luckily don’t have to go there myself, a courier can pick it up for me.

The Shanghai Daily is not the best newspaper in the world (understatement), but it is pretty advanced online. It has its own RSS feeds, several blogs and podcasts, and even an online PDF version. And now it will also be published in the Kindle E-Book reader format, the ugly-looking eBook launched by Amazon last year. For just USD 5.99 per month you can get your daily dose of local Shanghai stories and propaganda delivered on your Kindle. This is a good development, the more papers that get published on E-Books the better (I am a big fan of E-Books). However, I wonder if they will have any extra sales because of this, because the Kindle is only on sale in the US so far and it does not work on Chinese GPRS or 3G networks (correct me if I am wrong). And I don’t really think anybody in the US would be interested in reading the Shanghai Daily.

A nice feature is that the Shanghai Daily will be updated twice daily, meaning that it is more up-to-date than the printed once-per-day version. Right now I have a paper version subscription, but because that normally does not get delivered until somewhere in the afternoon (the Shanghai Daily is a morning paper) I would actually consider changing my subscription from paper to eBook. However, I have a Sony E-Book reader and two iLiads, but those formats are not supported yet. If you redesign your paper for E-Books, why not directly make it compatible for all available formats? The same is true of course for other newspapers like the Dutch NRC Handelsblad that is only available on the iLiad so far. But maybe this is just a first step and we will see the newspaper in other formats as well very soon.

At the moment I am in Holland and among others I went to take a (last) look at the house where my grandparents used to live. My grandfather passed away a couple of years ago and now my grandmother became too old to live here alone and moved into a nursing home. That means the place will likely be sold soon…

That’s a pity because it’s a fantastic place filled with memories from my childhood. I came here very often when I was a kid, playing in the big garden (3400 sqm) or swimming in the pool. Even though Holland has become increasingly full you don’t really notice it when you are here. That’s what I like about it, it’s close to a small town (Ommen), but you feel like you are far away from the busy world. The house actually has two more small houses in the garden, a teahouse (with own bathroom) and a slightly bigger vacation house close to the entrance gate (with its own bathroom and kitchen). There is also a stable for a horse and a swimming pool, which has not been used in many years.

If I would have lived in Holland I might have considered buying the property myself, but it does not really make sense when you live in China. Therefore the house will come on the market soon for a price of about EUR 800,000. In my opinion not bad considering the excellent location. However, the place needs to be renovated (e.g. a new kitchen, new bathroom and possibly changing the lay-out) to comply with modern living standards. In case you’re interested feel free to drop me an email. More pictures of the house can be found here.

After two years in the Jiaotong University incubator center it was time to move on for Spill Group Asia. We moved into the incubator center in May 2006, at that time with just 7 employees. Two years later we have about 70 employees, and we needed to look for a bigger space. We found a good and affordable one in the Si Hang building, located next to the Suzhou Creek at the Xizhang Lu bridge. This is the building where Tudou used to have its office until about 2 years ago. A good building, close to downtown (People’s Square), two subway stations, and with mainly creative industry companies. And also a building with an interesting history.

Over the past month the office was completely redecorated, among others with an additional floor, and this week we moved in. Moving was quite a hassle with so many people, but after some of the staff worked for almost 48 hours straight everything was ready by Monday morning. The new office is big enough for all people to be in one space (in our old office we occupied two separate offices), which is much better for communication. Also we finally have a bigger meeting room, because until now we had a problem when we had meetings with more than 10 people.
In case you also have an office in the Si Hang building or in one of the other warehouses along the Creek close to our building, let me know. I plan to organize the June Lunch 2.0 event in our office, so everybody who plans to join that, can see and hear about our activities during that lunch. For more info about Lunch 2.0 check with George Godula from MHDirekt (georg (dot) godula (at) mhdirekt (dot) com). George, if you already have a website for Lunch 2.0 Shanghai let me know and I will link to it here.

Today Tudou announced the closing of a new round of funding, an investment of USD 57 million. As far as we know, this the largest round of funding ever for a Chinese internet company. In total Tudou has raised USD 85 million over the past 3 years.

Below the English version of the press release that was sent out to the media today:

Recently there have been lots of rumors in the media about our funding. Originally we didn’t plan on making a big announcement, but it seems our silence only generated more questions and speculation, so we thought it best to issue an official statement confirming that we have closed our fourth round of funding. Our “Series D” (as they call it) was for an additional $57 million USD, which we see as sufficient to support our expansion plans for a significant time going forward. We were very happy that our existing investors decided to double-down on us by re-investing in this round, and we were also very happy to welcome a couple of new investors, family and venture funds from Singapore and the US who prefer to remain unnamed for now. In addition to our earlier funding rounds (500k, 8.5M, and 19M), we’ve now raised a total of $85 million.

Everybody knows that video sharing websites require a huge amount of bandwidth and servers to maintain a good service level to users; and as the #1 video sharing website in China, Tudou needs the most bandwidth and servers of all. Users constantly want faster delivery and higher resolution videos, which although expensive we are happily doing by rolling out H.264 high definition videos across the entire site. With over 100 million clip views & page views to over 10 million unique users every day & over 60 million unique users every month, we support a huge amount of high definition videos streaming out to about a third of China’s 175 million broadband internet users.

We know $57 million sounds like a lot – and is probably the largest amount ever raised for a pure-play Chinese Internet company in one round – but actually we turned down offers of even higher funding, because this industry is not about raising more money. We believe that the healthy development of China’s video sharing industry is about providing better services to users, advertisers, and content creators. This round of funding will allow Tudou to create a business model that lets media-hungry consumers demand their entertainment anytime and anywhere, allows advertisers to target demographics precisely and accurately, and fosters innovative content creators to receive just compensation.

Video sharing has come to a critical junction in its development as an industry. With this new round of funding, we now have the resources to patiently build up a solid business model and a healthy, viable ecosystem for all of our partners.

Happy 3rd Birthday Tudou, and check out our nominees of our first Tudou Film Festival online, as well as videos of the April 26th party at Moganshan.

This weekend the 1st Tudou Film Festival was held on the Moganshan in Zheijiang province, a 3-hour drive from downtown Shanghai. Moganshan is the total opposite of Shanghai: a quiet mountain resort surrounded by bamboo forests. Clean air, no traffic jams, and a very peaceful atmosphere. Well, normally at least, because last night I think we kept the whole mountain awake with our celebrations!

Already during the first year of Tudou we had the idea to organize a film festival. Originally we planned to do a kind of Woodstock or Burning Man kind of event somewhere around Yangshuo, but because we were still a tiny start-up at that time we did not have the resources to pull it off. But now Tudou has grown a bit bigger (over 150 employees in 5 offices all over China) and we felt that it was time to dust off our original plans. The format that was chosen was a bit different from the original idea, more like a ‘real’ film festival. People could vote for their favorite video’s on the site in several categories (a.o. best actor/actress, best script, best documentary and best animation) and the awards were given based on the users votes and the votes of a professional jury.

The festival itself was held in the old church on the top of Moganshan. I don’t think the church has been used since the heydays of Moganshan in the 1920s and 1930s, but the Tudou team (with help of the company that also does the MTV Awards) managed to turn it into a professional TV studio within a few days. A stage, a huge screen plus additional flat screens all over the church, professional lights and smoke machines, and of course a mega sound installation – and that all inside an old church.

The awards ceremony started around 6:30 PM and lasted until about 10 PM. All the top films were shown and then the jury announced the winners. All film makers/directors/podcasters were flown in, so the winners really got their Tudou award in person. Between the awards for each category there were performances, mainly by Tudou netstars. I was amazed by the talent of some of the performers.

A young boy really stole the show, he had a great performance on stage and the voice of an angel (his Tudou homepage). A Sony BMG representative who was on the jury mentioned he would consider to sign him up. Also two human beatboxer’s gave a live performance. Incredible what they can do with their voices (see this short Tudou documentary about them with English subtitles, and the Tudou homepage of one of them). The most moving performance was by a poor handicapped man in a wheel chair who earns his money by singing in the subway with his female companion. Someone filmed him (see this Tudou video) and overnight he became a star on Tudou, and now he even won one of the Tudou awards. Quite a contrast to some of the other star performances, and for me it was one of the highlights of the night.

The final part of the ceremony were the “Best of Tudou Awards”. These were given to among others the oldest podcaster (over 90 years old, he could not come to Moganshan), the one who posted the most video’s (over 2000 video’s, meaning at least 2 films per day every day for the past 3 years), and for the one with the most friends. What many people don’t know is that Tudou is actually also a sort of social network, where you can connect with friends. The number one in terms of friends is Celia, who has an amazing 20 million friends on Tudou. 20 million? Yes, even I was surprised by that figure. Celia is working at Tudou’s customer support (she was actually one of the first employees of Tudou), so she is constantly on QQ and the phone with Tudou users with questions.

The night ended with a disco party in the church, but because of the nice weather most people drank their whiskey, wine and beers on the steps leading up to the church. A night to remember for everybody!

I put a set with all pictures I took during the film festival on Flickr.com, you can see the pictures here.

On Saturday morning Gary and I decided to go for a hike, as a training for our Kilimanjaro trip in late May. We started off with a full English breakfast at Mark Kitto’s The Lodge (coffee, OJ, toast, bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomato – all served on their terrace overlooking the valley) so we would have enough energy. They also gave us a basic map with a 3 hour hike that we decided to do. That the map was really basic we found out quickly: after 30 minutes we figured that we had missed a path, because we were at the wrong location. Probably because we were too busy discussing the future of the internet or some other related topic. Never mind, we would find our own way through the woods, it could not be too difficult we assumed.

The hike was nice, although there was hardly a flat part in it. But that’s what we wanted, because also on Kilimanjaro we do not expect too many easy tracks. We walked through tea plantations and bamboo forests, and except for a few local farmers we did not meet a soul during the hike. Even at the temple that we passed along a stream in the valley we did not see anybody. Most of the tracks were quite steep, and we walked down for more than an hour. Eventually around 1 PM we came to a small village where we asked for directions. They told us there was a small path from the village up to the village on top of Moganshan. We took the path and soon the track became very steep. Also the track split, the left part went deeper into the forest, the right one followed a small stream. Of course no sign telling us which direction we had to go. Because our path would pass by a reservoir we decided to follow the stream. After about 15 minutes the track had completely vanished and we were struggling to climb up the hill. The mountain was probably about 45% steep at this point and we literally had to climb from bamboo tree to bamboo tree. Quite fun, but the only problem was that there was a press conference planned at 3 PM, and it was 1:45 PM. According to our altitude meter we were over 550 meters already, and the village was at about 650 meters, so we should be almost at the top. A while later we were at 680 meters, however, and there was still no sign of the top of the mountain nor of a village. Even worse, thick vegetation blocked our way completely and we could not continue.

Right at that moment my wife called to check where we were and to remind us of the press conference. I had to admit that I had no idea anymore where we were – something that does not happen often to me. Because of the time we decided to hike back to the village and I asked my wife to arrange a driver to pick us up there. Going down was a lot easier, but also more dangerous. We jumped from bamboo tree to bamboo tree, and were down in about 25 minutes. There a car was waiting for us and at 10 minutes to 3 we were back on the mountain. It turned out that we had indeed taken the wrong turn, we should not have followed the stream. Because of that we literally ended up on the wrong mountain, so even if we had made it to the top we still had to go down into another valley before we could hike up Moganshan. We had made the right decision to go back, and all in all it was a great experience. But next time we’ll bring a better map and a GPS!