This morning my dad and I drove over to the Mao River, between Tianmashan and Dianshan Lake, about 35 minutes from my home in Shanghai. After running for two weekends around Sheshan and Tianmashan we were looking for a place to run with less traffic and people. On Google Maps I found a small road next to a river close to Sun Island, and it turned out to be a good place to run.

Getting up was a bit difficult, even though I did not drink too much at Christine Lu’s Affinity party at CVRVE last night (thanks for the nice champagne and cocktails Christine!). But once we arrived at the river I was fully awake, especially because the circumstances to run were fantastic: a clear blue sky and mild temperatures (around 20 Celsius at 8:30 AM).

The road along the river turned out to be even better than I had imagined. No holes, with nice trees and plants on both sides of the road. There was hardly any traffic on the road, because most entrances were closed off with oil drums. Just a few scooters, an occasional local car and a few peasants working in the fields, most of whom were very surprised when they saw 2 foreigners running by, especially when they were also greeted nicely.

The river was more busy than the road, every few minutes a boat sailed by. It’s nice to see them pass by when you run, I enjoyed watching them. We also saw some smaller boats, but they mainly stayed on the small canals to the villages that lined the river.

The nature around the Mao river consists of a lot of lakes and canals, it reminds me a bit of an area in Holland not too far from my parents home (for Dutch people, the area around Giethoorn). Even the high bridges over the canals were similar.

My dad and I did a 21.1 km run (a half marathon distance) as preparation for the New York Marathon that takes place exactly 3 weeks from today. Although I used to find a half marathon distance quite long, it seems to be getting shorter and shorter when you get in better shape. We took it easy today and ran the distance in less than 2 hours, including some stops to take pictures and take in the scenery around us. We were both not tired at all, I felt like I could have run a bit longer without any problem. A good sign for the marathon, although I know from experience that the marathon only gets very hard after about 30 kilometers.

If you are looking for a nice place to run in Shanghai for long distance practice, this might be a good place to check out. On weekdays it may be very busy on the highways, but on weekend mornings you should be there in about 35 minutes from Hongqiao and maybe another 10 minutes more from downtown. You’ll need your own car though, because finding a taxi there might be tricky.

On Friday the kids had their annual Open Day at Soong Ching Ling Kindergarten, where the parents can spend some time with the children in their class rooms. Last year it was fun to see Scott in this regular school environment, so this year I of course blocked the morning in my calendar so I could join.

As usual there were lots of moms and grandparents at the open day, but hardly any fathers. In Scott’s class with about 20 kids I think there were only one or two other fathers. I think it’s a pity for them that they can’t take time off to see their kids play in school. Most of them have their owns businesses or are top business people, so they don’t have to live other people’s agendas. It’s important for the kids to see their parents, but for me it’s also important to see what kind of things Scott and Elaine learn during class and who their teachers and classmates are.

Two kids actually had no parents coming at all, I felt really sorry for them. If both Grace and me would not be able to come I would keep my kids home on a day like this. The two kids were now sitting with a teacher during the morning, while all others were happily playing with their parents.

We first went to Scott’s class, where the kids sang two songs for us (one in English and one in Chinese). Then they had to make a little man with paper, glue and some strings for the hair. The parents could help them, so most were done in about 10 minutes. Then it was free indoor playtime. The classroom has lots of games, books and a big collection of toys to play with. Scott first played with a train and with some cars and then picked 2 puzzles to make. He didn’t need my help, but he liked me being there.

Grace had already gone to Elaine’s class (the times overlapped a bit), and I stayed with Scott until all parents were leaving. Then I also walked over to Elaine’s classroom, where she was playing happily with a puzzle.

When she finished she cleaned up the puzzle (they learn that well in school) before starting to play with a hitting game with a plastic hammer. She is such a sweet girl: when I told her to hit me on the head with her hammer, she said “no daddy, that hurts!”.

It’s nice to observer my kids in the classroom. They really seem to enjoy school. Every morning when I take them to school they are happy to be there and during the Open Day they were proud to show us their skills.

When it was time to go home Elaine actually did not want to leave. Only when she saw that all other kids were leaving as well she packed her toys away and went to change her indoor shoes for outdoor ones. I am happy to see that she is happy in school, and also that Scott is excited to go to school every day.

Hyves has been the dominant social network in Holland since it started, but Facebook is catching up quickly (or maybe they are already bigger now, not sure). The guys at Google Translate seem to know that as well, because if you translate Hyves (with capital H) from Dutch to English you get… Facebook!

Today is my birthday. Every year I wonder what media will be used most to congratulate me. A few years ago it used to be the phone, then it was email (remember the e-greeting cards?) or SMS, then Twitter and this year it’s almost only Facebook. Interesting to observe this shift.

It also reflects the social media I use most for communications – well, not completely true, email is still #1, but nowadays I am more on Facebook than on Twitter. Let’s see if that’s still the case next year or whether Google+ will have taken that position.

Talking about Google, just now I went to Google.com by coincidence (I normally use the Chrome address box to search) and what do I see? A Google birthday doodle. I was really surprised by this and wondered what web celebrity would share my birthday. So I hovered my mouse over the graphic and the text “Happy Birthday Marc!” appeared. Then I got it: when you’re logged into Google and open Google.com on your birthday this doodle will automatically appear. Pretty cool, I had never heard about this actually. Is this something new or has it been around for a long time already?

This morning my wife was shopping at Carrefour and she was looking at some of the Halloween costumes on sale for our kids. She noticed a picture of a girl that looks a lot like Elaine, so she took better look. Then she got a shock because she realized it was a picture of Elaine!

Turns out that a Chinese company had used an older picture of Elaine, badly photoshopped it with their halloween custome and put it on the packaging material of their products. Of course we never gave permission for this. The products are sold in many stores in China, among others Carrefour and Walmart. Not sure yet what we will do, will discuss with my wife when I am back in China tomorrow.

By the way, it’s not only Chinese companies that do this, something similar happened once with Nokia: one of my Flickr pictures ended up in a campaign for the Nokia E65!

Update (Oct. 11, 2011): Grace contacted the company, after some discussions they told us that they used Elaine’s picture for 2 products and agreed to change all the packaging with her picture on it. Let’s see if they will really do it. Hopefully no need for a court case.

When I woke up this morning in my hotel room in Amsterdam the first thing I saw on Twitter was that Steve Jobs had passed away. Although I knew he was very sick, the news was still a shock to me. I only met Steve Jobs once, so I don’t know really know him, but I read most of the books and many of the articles written about him. My feeling is that he was not an easy person to have around, but that everybody respected him and listened to him because he was such a visionary.

He has been a source of inspiration to me and I admire how he managed to turn Apple around and make it the biggest company in the world. And looking at what’s happening on Facebook today, where many of my friends are changing their profile picture to Steve Jobs or one related to him, I am not the only one.

He changed my world, literally: All my laptops, phones and tablets are Apple products, and will likely be Apple products for the foreseeable future. Each time Steve went on stage for his keynotes I knew I had to get my credit card ready for another product that I just had to buy. There is no other brand that has this impact on me and it is hard to imagine there will ever be one.

Even in China, where Apple is still a small (but very well-known) brand, his death is a major event. When I logged into Weibo (Chinese Twitter) this morning I noticed that there was a banner commemorating Steve Jobs above my Weibo stream. Many of the messages are about Steve Jobs as well. I don’t think Steve has every visited China, but he was a role model to many ambitious Chinese as well.

RIP

(Quickly writing this in the lounge before boarding a plane, hope not too many grammar/spelling mistakes)

This morning I did a radio interview with Dutch station Business News Radio (BNR). The topic was the interest that Alibaba has shown in taking over Yahoo. When I first read about Jack Ma’s speech at Stanford last week where he mentioned this, I was a bit surprised. But like I mentioned during the program, now I think it is actually quite logical. Here some of my thoughts on this potential deal.

Back in 2005 Yahoo took a 40% stake in Alibaba for a total amount of over USD 1 billion plus the “rights” for Alibaba to run Yahoo China. A huge number at that time, but a very smart decision because the share is worth a lot more these days. So much more that a few months ago the total value of Yahoo was almost the same as its stakes in Yahoo Japan (where they set up a JV with Softbank) and in Alibaba. Yahoo helped Alibaba to grow with its investment, and Jack Ma knows this. But now the tables are turned and Yahoo is in trouble. Alibaba wanted to buy back its share in Yahoo for a while already, but Yahoo did not want to sell. Now Alibaba has the chance to get back its shares by buying (part of) Yahoo.

Not trying to take a share might actually be dangerous for Alibaba, because then Alibaba has to wait and see who will take over Yahoo (in case it should be sold) and they may get a new shareholder on board that they don’t want to have. So in a way Jack Ma may even be forced to be involved in this deal.

But there is more. By buying Yahoo or taking a big stake in it, Alibaba can enter the US market. I think Alibaba wants to grow outside of its homebase of China, and this may be a great way to kickstart that. Alibaba was the reason that Ebay never succeeded in China, despite investing tons of resources. Now Alibaba wants to fight with Ebay on Ebay’s home turf. Jack Ma even announced that he plans to live in the US for a year, I don’t think he would do that just to buy a share in Yahoo.

But Alibaba likely can’t do it alone, even if it wants to buy Yahoo completely they probably can’t finance it. So they will need partners, and it seems both Silver Lake (a PE fund) and the Russian DST fund are joining Alibaba in a consortium. Seems like a good combination to get Yahoo back on track to me.

But even if they manage to put a bid together that gets accepted by the shareholders, I think there will be a problem: The US government. I don’t think they will like a Chinese company to take control of one of America’s biggest online properties, with a huge database of emails and credit card details, plus one of the biggest search engines. It won’t be the first time they block a deal (think Huawei trying to buy 3Com), and I would not be surprised if a Alibaba/Yahoo deal would be blocked in the same way. For more background on this, see also this article on Digicha.

It would be good for Yahoo to get some new entrepreneurial blood into its veins, whether it’s US, Chinese or Russian. They have some great assets that they are totally neglecting, for example Flickr.com. I love the photo site despite there being no real changes in the past years. As an entrepreneur in China I’ll be following this story with interest.

One of the nice thing about start-ups is that they change constantly. I like change in young companies, because it normally means that you are improving things. In most businesses that I have been involved in the original business plan changed radically over the years. The same happened to UnitedStyles. When we launched earlier this year it was a website where kids could design their own clothes in 3D. A great idea (I still think so), but not one that we executed well enough and not one with enough conversion.

In April/May we realized that we made our lives, and especially that of the technical team, too difficult by letting kids and their moms design clothes in 3D. After doing more market research we found out that if you want to do it in 3D the quality has to be much better than what we had. And that was impossible with the funding we had… But we also found out that people actually prefer to design in 2D, using sketches that look like real fashion design sketches. That was good news, because that is something we could change without spending too much time and money.

What we also did realize is that kids love to design, but that they don’t necessarily buy. Originally we had expected that they would convince their parents to pay for them, but it turned out that that was a bit too optimistic. It did happen of course, but most kids that designed never got to the point that they would order a garment. We had ideas on how to improve this, but it would take too much time to implement to make it feasible. Even though kids fashion is huge online, it doesn’t work (yet) in the way we did it.

There were a couple of other things we learned that I won’t go into detail about here, but our conclusion was that we had to make some radical changes in order to become more successful. So that’s what we did! We decided to sit down with the core team and look at our options. On May 1 UnitedStyles officially relaunched as a company, this time focusing on women wear (so not kids wear anymore, although that will be added again in the future) and with a very different design process. On that day we started redeveloping our site, our engine and our fashion designs.

We see May 1 as a real new beginning, except for the name of the site everything changed. We even added a new co-founder: Joop Dorresteijin, our CTO, is now officially a co-founder of UnitedStyles.com.

On July 1 we closed an angel round for the company and from that moment on things went very fast. The new UnitedStyles (or UnitedStyles 2.0 as we call it) will be launched today in private beta, meaning that the site is open to the public, but that some functions are not visible to all users yet. We plan to be out of private beta in early November.

What is the new UnitedStyles? In our internal business plan we describe ourselves as follows:

Would it not be great if there was a “place” where you can realize your own fashion ideas? UnitedStyles created a free online app that lets consumers design their own fashion, customize their own prints, and preview their design in 3D. Customers can buy their self-designed fashion at UnitedStyles and have it produced (using the coolest industry technologies) and delivered anywhere in the world.

People who like to design can use the UnitedStyles app to start their own fashion brand – for free. Anyone can share their fashion collection with their friends and followers, and sell it in their personalized UnitedStyles web shop.

Basically the original focus will be on woman wear, to start with dresses, that you can design yourself. Not only the style, trim and things like sleeve length, but you can also design your own print in our print editor. The process is quite easy, so that everybody can use the designer, whether you are a pro or whether you try out your designer skills for the very first time. You design in 2D but you can see the end result in 3D, in a much better quality than UnitedStyles 1.0

In the current phase you can only design, but cannot order the physical product yet. Production will go live in early November, so stay tuned!

What makes us extra special is that you can design your own collection on UnitedStyles and can sell this in your own showroom on UnitedStyles. This function will be rolled out to all users after we are out of private beta.

We will not only use the site UnitedStyles.com, but also have a UnitedStyles designer app on Facebook. This app is the same as on our site and can also be integrated into any other site on the web.

Please try out our app and website and let us know what you think, we love to get feedback – also negative feedback that we can learn from. The site is certainly not finished yet, but we believe that you can never launch too early. The earlier the better, that’s how you are forced to find your mistakes and learn from them. If you have any suggestions for the site please let us know!