Today is the last day of China’s National Holiday. Finally. The whole concept of National Holidays may seem nice, but for a company that works internationally it is very inefficient. The system works like this: three times a year, during Chinese New Year, May 1 and October 1, the whole of China closes down for 7 days in a row. This vacation started on Sunday October 1 and ends this Saturday. In order to compensate employers staff have to work the Saturday before the holiday and the Sunday after it (=tomorrow). This may be useful when your company only works in China, when all your competitors and clients/suppliers also do not work during this period. But for companies with any foreign exposure it is a nuisance. I continued working most of this week anyway, but many things had to wait until the company starts working again tomorrow.

And I wonder if the staff really likes a forced week off, is it not nicer to be able to take these days for example in the middle of summer or just during another time of the year? I would personally prefer to choose when to go on vacation instead of going on dates determined by the government, and we would also not have to shut down the whole office. On the other hand, as an employee it may be nice to know that you are not missing out on anything while away from the office, and knowing that there are not hundreds of emails waiting to be answered upon return to your desk.

But Micah Sittig writes on his blog that the whole concept of forced week-long holidays may be over soon. He quotes an article in the Party’s official newspaper People’s Daily that says a new concept may be necessary, among others because of transportations bottlenecks (the whole country wants to travel during the same time period). I would welcome this very much!

My car was overdue for a check-up, so I decided to schedule that for this week (it’s National Holiday in China). We called our Buick dealer on Tuesday to check how long it would take, and he told us we could drop the car on Wednesday and pick it up two hours later. That sounded good to me, so yesterday we arrived there around 2:30 PM. My plan was to do a bit of shopping and have a coffee at Starbucks, so I would be back home in time to do some work before a planned dinner party with friends.

But of course things did not work out as planned. First of all it turned out that nobody could check on the parking assistant that behaved erraticaly (the thing that warns you with beeps when you are parking and almost hit something), nor on the lights that sometimes do not go on automatically. Why could he not tell us this the day before over the phone?

Then we were told it would take a bit more time, and we could pick up the car only at 6 PM. I was not too enthousiastic about this. But because the car needed the check-up and I had already spend 30 minutes driving here I decided to change my plans, by just having a coffee and then taking a taxi home. But just when we got home we got a phonecall (it was around 4 PM), saying that the car was ready to be picked up. Great… So now I changed my plans because they would need more time, and then it turns out they need even less time. I already decided to pick up the car right before the dinner party, because I did not want to spend another hour in traffic, and decided to stick to my plans.

So we return to the dealer at 7:30 PM (they are open until 10 PM every day – that’s better than in Europe) to pick up the car. They give us a form to sign, and on the form it is written that the car has a nail in its rear left tyre. I assume they meant that the car had a nail in it, and that they fixed it. But no, they tell us that the nail is still in there. They could not repair it, so they just left it like this. Now I got seriously pissed off. In a not-too-soft tone I ask them why had they not told us this over the phone. Answer: but we are telling you now. Yeah right, so what am I supposed to do now? I drove to the dealership twice already, and now I have a car with a tyre that can blow up every minute. Well, they say, they can change to a new tire, but that would take two hours. I reply that that is exactly why they should have informed us about it earlier, and in my angry mood add that I have doubts about their mental capabilities.

Because we were having a dinner party I decide to take the car anyway, and go to meet my friends. I will find a solution for this later. The tyre has survived so far, but my trust in the service and capabilities of General Motors in China has gotten to an all-time low. This is an official Buick dealership and workshop (and I think it’s even the biggest in Shanghai). So not a hole-in-the-wall workshop, but one that has been accredited by Shanghai General Motors. And cars are among the few things that are not cheap in China, so that’s also not an argument to just accept a low-quality service. A big thumbs down for GM.

Chinese script writers will need to become more creative. SARFT (the ministry in charge of among others TV) will publish a regulation that asks for less extramarital affairs in soap opera’s on TV. According to an article in the Shanghai Daily, soaps have lost the interest of the audience, and less and less people are watching them. But I am afraid that not allowing to show affairs in soaps won’t increase viewership – the soap opera’s are already boring, taking out this part certainly does not make them more interesting.

An online survey of TV viewers showed that the cheating “affects family harmony and leaves a bad impression on the youth”. And it attracts audiences, but they forgot to mention that. According to the article CCTV recently dumped 700(!) episodes of soaps, most of them related to love affairs. So what will happen now? I don’t think Chinese script writers will come up with new great ideas or formats soon, so this means even less people watching TV. Welcome to Tudou.com TV audiences (and advertisers)!

Yesterday it was race day again in Shanghai, and also this year I was present at the Shanghai F1 racing circuit. Spill Group’s Reinout te Brake and Peter Driessen joined me for what turned out to be one of the best races of the year. Because I was not able to secure a parking ticket (you need to buy at least 4 F1-tickets for that), we decided to take a shuttle bus at the Shanghai Stadium. But there were such long waiting lines there, that we changed plans and took a cab. The cab driver was a potential Schumacher: he literally raced us to the stadium even using the parking lane on the highway to pass cars. I liked it though, and I guess it was a good experience in Chinese driving for my colleagues.

After arriving at the race track it suddenly started to pour down heavily, and we were very lucky to find a big Coca-Cola umbrella to stay dry. The heavy rain luckily only lasted a few minutes, after which we walked to our seats. It turned out that my assistant had booked us excellent seats: at the end of the pit lane, just before the first curve! From there we overlooked the first three curves, and could also see the start and finish. Although last year I had Grand Stand seats right at the finish line (that were twice as expensive), this year’s seats were actually much better. In case you plan to go next year, try to get seats at the B1 area.

Food and drinks at the track were so-so. The hot dogs were edible, but there was only ketchup and no mustard. The beer was Foster’s, which is drinkable, but not when it’s not very cold (and this was not the case). It should not be too difficult to improve this a bit for next year’s race. But at least prices were reasonable, with about EUR 3 for 0.5 liter of beer.

The race itself was great. Right after the start the track was still wet, and that made for some exciting scenes. We were all fan of Schumacher (just as most of the Chinese around us), but he did not manage to pass anyone at the start (he started from position 6). But he was driving a great race and with some great maneuvers and a well-timed first pit-stop he managed to get into third place. The next rounds were amazing, for some reason Alonso was loosing 3 seconds per round during two consecutive rounds (without live comments you are left guessing what happened), and not much later Michael managed to pass him. Right in front of us! The whole stand was jumping up and down in excitement, and for a moment I was actually afraid the thing would break down. When he later also passed Fischichella (again right in front of us!) the crowd got crazy, and it was fantastic to be part of that. On the screens we noted that on the other side of the track it started raining about 4 rounds before the end, and we were a bit worried that this might cause Schumacher some trouble. But it did not rain hard enough to force him to come in to change tires (on our side it actually stayed dry), and he managed to win just before Alonso (who was allowed to pass his team mate – causing a thumbs down at him from many people when he passed us). All in all a great race, much better than the first two editions in Shanghai.

Today was an important day for all of us at Spill Group Asia, because we took a majority share in one of China’s leading game developers, Zlong Games. This is the first major investment that Spill Group Asia made in China. Spill Group just sent out the following press release about this take over:

SPILL GROUP buys majority share in well known Chinese game developer

Shanghai – September 29, 2006 – SPILL GROUP, leading developer and operator of online gaming portals, today signed a deal with the well known Chinese game developer Zlong Games Ltd. which makes SPILL GROUP Asia majority share holder of the company.

Zlong Games was founded in 2005 and already is a profitable company that focuses on online casual games, massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG), PC games and mobile games. Furthermore, the company does the outsourcing for the design of 2D and 3D game characters. Currently Zlong Games develops online games for leading US, European and Chinese game companies, such as Real.

The acquisition of the majority share in Zlong Games will help SPILL GROUP achieve their goal of becoming the world’s biggest source of the best online web games and games for mobile devices. Online games will be developed for the Asian market, but also for external parties as well as for SPILL GROUP internally. The games enhance game advertising possibilities and will increase the quality of SPILL GROUP’s own game content for its game portals to an even higher level.

One of the online game portals of SPILL GROUP ASIA is www.game.com.cn. This website is one of the fastest growing game portals in China. Due to this success SPILL GROUP is looking for further acquisitions worldwide. More information on these future acquisitions will follow soon.

For more information on SPILL GROUP visit www.spillgroup.com

For more information on SPILL GROUP Asia:
Marc van der Chijs (CEO)
Phone: +86 21 5155 6358
Mobile: +86 1381 781 0517
www.spillgroupasia.com

Shanghai has developed so fast, but when dealing with state-owned companies it’s still like the old days: frustration, frustration, frustration. A nice (or actually not-so-nice) example happened this week, when on Wednesday a note from the Shanghai Power company arrived that our electricity would be cut off for a while on Friday. My first reaction was: nice, at least they inform us. But when reading the whole thing I got upset, because the power would be cut from 5 AM to 2 PM! During a normal working day, right before a one-week National Holiday. And as you can imagine, an online gaming company does not work very well without power.

We made some phone calls and found out that the reason is that they are building a new subway line next to our office. That’s nice to know, but why can they not cut the power from 9 PM to 6 AM, or during the weekend? They probably did not even consider that, because why should you be customer oriented when you have a monopoly? Our office building has about 70 internet companies, and none of them can do any work this morning. So I had to give the staff half a day off, and I now hope that the electricity will be turned back on by 2 PM.

This week two Spill Group colleagues from Holland are visiting, causing a total lack of postings on this blog. But apart from not having time to blog, the trip is going well. We are having lots of discussions with other IT and gaming companies, and I have a ton of new ideas on how to further develop and monetize our Chinese websites and on gaming and game development in general. Some of these ideas will probably be turned into real businesses as part of Spill Group, in cooperation with other Chinese companies or with external investors. Sorry, no details yet, but I am sure over the next months I will blog about some of them here. And if you really want to know more you can always buy me a couple of beers!

Saturday night Grace and I held a party at our apartment, a combination of our one-year wedding anniversary and a long overdue housewarming party. In total over 60 guests showed up at the party, from all kinds of companies that we worked at or with over the past years in Shanghai (Spill Group, Tudou, SVP, Bertelsmann, Roland Berger) and of course lost of friends and business partners.

We had hired a catering service for finger food (Dragon Party), and they did a great job – good value for money and an excellent service. Among the snacks they prepared in our kitchen were small tuna sandwiches, salmon rolls, tart with duck breast, and even fresh brownies. Check them out if you plan to organize a party in Shanghai (andy@dragon-party.com, mobile: 13917016179).

We had lots of wines and beer, but the main drink during the night turned out to be champagne. The 20 bottles of Moet that we ordered were barely enough! Interesting is that during parties in China the Chinese guests normally are the first to arrive, and also the first to leave. Around 11 the first Chinese guests went home already, when some laowai were still arriving. Maybe we should start our parties a bit earlier next time, 9 PM is more the starting time for a European party than a Chinese one.

It was great to have so many of our friends together here, and also to intoduce many of them to eachother. A bit of networking is always part of parties of course, and I like to bring people together that have businesses with potential synergies. And of course singles looking for partners – there were a lot of them last night. But the main thing is of course relaxing and catching up with old friends, and that’s what we did as well. And when around 2 AM the last guests left we looked back on a fantastic night. A bit too fantastic maybe, because I had a pretty heavy hangover when I got up late this morning…

That did not matter too much though, because when I entered the living room everything had been cleaned up already. It turned out that our ayi had decided to come in around 7:30 AM on her day off to clean the whole house before we would wake up. She won’t read this (she is illiterate) but this was a great surprise!