I just created an account at the official Olympic ticketing website for Beijing 2008. This is possible for all Chinese and for foreigners living in China (you need to have at least a 6-months visa). The tickets are not yet available, but you can now already set up your profile there, so that you can be the first one when they start selling the tickets next month. This does not guarantee that you get tickets, though, because if events are oversold the tickets will be randomly distributed (which in China probably means that you need to have connections to get tickets, or buy them on the black market).

I plan to watch at least a couple of events next year August in Beijing. The opening ceremony of course, and probably some athletics events. Likely I will fly up and down between Shanghai and Beijing, because prices for hotels are outrageous. Or maybe I can stay at my parents-in-law, whose apartment is just a 5 minute drive from the Olympic stadium area.

When I was in Beijing over Chinese New Year I checked with the hotel where I had my wedding in 2005. That hotel is virtually next to the Olympic Stadium and I could hardly recognize the area around it anymore (the small tree-lined street right behind it is now an 8 lane highway). My wife and I talked to the manager, and found that they still have rooms available, but that their normal prices in RMB will be changed into USD. This means that their room rates do not start at RMB 1700 anymore, but at a whopping USD 1700 per night (8 times as high). And even at that price they cannot guarantee you the rooms, they want to wait a bit longer to see if they can increase prices even more. All other hotels in the area are fully booked already, so it seems to be a smart strategy.

And that gives me a new business idea: You should rent some small apartments around the Olympic site for one year starting this September, leaving them empty for a whole year (or sub-let them to students during the academic year, there are several universities in the area), and then rent them out to foreigners during the Olympics. A USD 400/month 2-bedroom apartment can probably be rented out for USD 500 per day during the Olympics. It’s a bit of a hassle, but it seems like a low risk investment.

Yesterday Gary and I drove to Taihu, a huge lake (it has a 400 kilometer perimeter) close to Suzhou to do some mountain bike practicing on the hills around the lake (we rode close to Xishan). We put our bikes into Tudou’s new SUV (a Hyundai Tucson), and they fit in easily. The car drove quite well, and it was nice to sit a bit higher in Shanghai’s traffic, because you have a much better overview of all the people around you. Driving this car reminded me of the Jeep Cherokee (with a 4-liter, 6-cylinder engine) that I used to have in Beijing. Because the new highway was practically deserted so we could even test the top speed, with 3 persons (my wife also joined), bikes and luggage we managed to drive 180 km/h. We arrived at Taihu after about 1.5 hours. We first had a nice seafood lunch at an upscale lakeside restaurant and then drove to the mountain bike site.

There is a small mountain dedicated to mountain bikers, something I have not seen before in China. In Shanghai we never train uphill rides, and that was something we could feel while trying to ride up the mountain. We both had to get off our bikes a few times to catch our breath, it was much more difficult than we thought. But we both made it, and the downhill afterwards was fantastic. We heard there will be some official races here early April, and we looked at some of the tracks for that. I could not believe that people dare to go down some of the smalll tracks that we saw. I am not easily afraid on my bike, but some of these track just seemed physically impossible to ride down and I don’t think I’ll ever dare to ride my bike on them. If you want to go here, drive the SuHu expressway to exit Xishan, go straight ahead at the tollgate and take the second right (the road following the lake shore). After about 6 km you will see a cable car lift on your right, about 200 meter after that is the entrance to the mountain bike tracks. It’s also a nice place to go hiking or running, with great views of the lake and the islands around it.

On the way back to our car Gary and I saw an accident, it happened right in front of our eyes. A Shanghai car was driving a bit too fast, and did not notice a slight curve in the road. At the last moment the driver pulled his steering wheel to make the turn, but he pulled too hard. The result was a crash in which he ended up in the ditch on his side of the road. The car was totally wrecked. I wondered whether the driver was hurt, but was hesitant to approach the car. But after about 30 seconds the driver managed to open his door and walked out. He seemed OK although he did not walk very steady. And what was the first thing he did? Looking at the damage he had just caused? No, he did not even look at it. He got out and took a pee next to his car! At the same time he took out his mobile phone to call a friend. A very strange sight. I suspect he was completely drunk. We did not check it out, and continued our ride, glad that we did not ride our bikes on his side of the road.

1bib.com, the Chinese online platform for purchasing and selling cars just had a face-lift. I have been an advisor to this company for over a year now, and the company is doing very well. So far 1bib reached all its milestones and Honglian Tan has built a great team in Guangzhou. They recently launched a new website design. The new layout is refreshing, with a more dynamic style, a vivid orange colour, and a number of cool features and new technology. Features such as comparison, recommendation, lucene search, daily update of special offers and a bulletin board system (BBS) were added.

For car fans, the BBS includes a club for specific brands and a club for uploading and downloading car photos. Car owners can also access and download specific car related forms, such as a car registration form and used car selling contracts.

Other information offered through the BBS includes among others car maintenance, driving rules & regulations, car leasing options, car taxation and the latest news on the Chinese car industry. Viewers can also add comments about cars and dealers. 1bib publishes a monthly offline magazine, so far only in Guangdong province, but starting this month it will be published in Beijing as well.

I think the company has a good potential to keep on growing, and I am proud to be on their advisory board. The company plans to raise a new round of financing over the next couple of months. If you are interested to learn more about this, I can get you in touch with the management team.

I came across this picture on Shanghaiist a couple of days ago. I was too busy to post it then, but it’s so hilarious that I still want to share it with you. It was apparently taken in one of the Lotus Supermarkets in Shanghai.

Zlong Games, part of Spill Group Asia, just finished the production of its first downloadable game for Spill Group. The game, that was officially launched today, will be sold on game portals worldwide. This is a ‘first’ for Spill Group, until now all our downloadable games (on our portals such as gamenext.com) were produced by external companies. But making these games ourselves can be very profitable, so we decided to take over this part of the value chain as well.

Bubble Elements is a so-called bubble shooter. In this kind of games you have to shoot a colored bubble to other colored bubbles. If three or more bubbles of the same color are connected they will all disappear. The game has several levels and is based on the four elements (water, fire, air and earth). The game is full of power-ups, and the further you go into the game the more of these you will encounter.

The game is quite addicitive, and I just played it for almost an hour (this is very long for me, I normally get tired of a game after 5 or 10 minutes). I like it a lot, and not only because we built it. We have a simple flash version of the game, that you can play among others here on our Dutch site. I did not see this game yet on game.com.cn (we had no electricity today), but I am sure it will be on there tomorrow. The more advanced version can be downloaded here for free, this gives a much better user experience with great music and sound effects. You can try this download version for free for 60 minutes. I hope all of you like it!

Today I am working from home, not because I like it but because the government decided to cut electricity in the neighbourhood where our office is located. And without internet access it is a bit difficult to run an online gaming & game development company. So the whole company got a day off, and most seem to be enjoying it because only a few colleagues are online at home (no, I am not checking on them, just noticing it :-).

The good thing is that today is Woman’s Day in China, and as a good employer you are supposed to give the ladies in the office a half day off on this day. Well, I did that this year – although not completely voluntarily.

I won’t complain too much about the electricity cut, I already did that when we got the notice. And I learned that sometimes I am still thinking way too Western: the general opinion among my colleagues was that I should not get upset about it (you cannot change it anyway), but be happy that we at least get a notice in advance. There is a lot of truth in that.

And although it’s bad for general company productivity, it also has it good sides. I noticed that I got a lot more things done this morning than in the office. There people walk into my office all the time (which is fine, I even stimulate that), making it difficult to think some things through or focus on a more complicated email. Today it’s nice and quiet without any external disturbances, except for my ayi who keeps walking in with drinks and fruit. I managed to catch up on a lot of business mails, which gives me a good feeling. I will now go for a lunchtime run in the gym downstairs, also something I cannot do when I work from the office. Maybe I should consider working from home one morning per week?

BrainsToVentures (B-to-V) is a Swiss/German network of entrepreneurial private investors that invest in growth companies. Members of this semi-closed network (you have to be recommended by another member, and existing members have a veto right with respect to the admission of new members) visited Beijing, Shanghai and Singapore last week to get to know more about the early-stage investment culture, and to look at several interesting companies.

I was invited to speak at their private deal conference in Shanghai, and spent most of the day talking to these entrepreneurs. It was very inspiring, not only because all of them are very successful, but also because it gave me some interesting business ideas and even some business leads (for game development, branded games and in-game advertising). I shared my experiences in the Chinese internet industry with the audience, and compared it to the situation in Europe. I feel the Chinese internet is still in its infancy with just 10% of the population online, and I explained to the investors that I see a huge opportunity in China’s mobile internet.

In the afternoon seven start-ups were selected to pitch their business plans to the investors. Among these seven were two companies that I am an angel investor in, which made it even more interesting. Online auto platform 1bib.com presented its business plan and its strategy to gain market share. 1bib.com is looking to raise a new round over the next months, and several investors were interested to participate. 1bib.com is doing very well in the market, and I believe the company can become the market leader in China with this financial injection. I see a very bright future for this company.

Pioco, the bluetooth advertising start-up, also presented its business strategy. I have written about them a few weeks ago, when I was not yet an official investor. Steve Chao, Pioco’s CEO, presented his vision for the company’s future and his current strategy and clients. Pioco is already profitable, but in order to keep on expanding fast it also needs to do an additional round of funding. Pioco received a positive feedback from several investors.

Several other good companies presented to the audience, including an exact Chinese copy of Habbo Hotel, a company that provides low-cost international mobile phone calls, and a Tudou-to-be. For some the 7-minute pitch was too short (meaning that their preparation was not very good), but most did an excellent job in ‘selling’ their company.

At night the angel investors had a dinner together with the start-ups (organized by PwC), followed by a panel discussion with several VC’s (among others Vincent Chan of Jafco Asia, one of the investors in Tudou). Very interesting, although I felt they were a bit hesitant to promote investing in China. Maybe afraid for competition from European angels? The night ended, as many good nights in Shanghai, in Bar Rouge. Too bad that it started to rain, so we could not have our drinks on the outside balcony, but it was a great location to finish this enervating day anyway.

Every now and then I get mails from readers telling me that the atom (RSS) feed of this blog is not working well. I have now put several other ways to subscribe to the content on this blog on the right side (through Feedburner, MyYahoo, Google and Newsgator). If you use one of these services just click on the links. If you don’t have any idea what RSS is, don’t worry. It is just a different (easier, in my humble opninion) way to read weblogs, but you can keep on reading the blog here as well. Nothing will change.