Since I left Mercedes-Benz back in 2002 I visited every Shanghai Auto Show, but this year I will miss it for the first time. I was in Beijing from Monday until Wednesday and this weekend I will be in Yangzhou to run the half marathon there. That combined with lots of work made it impossible to go to the show.

Since I stopped writing columns for car magazines a long time ago already, there is no real business reason to visit anyway, but I still like the atmosphere at this show. It’s so different from any other auto show in the world: sometimes I wonder whether the visitors are there mainly to look at the cars or at the models (see also some other posts on this blog about the Shanghai auto show). Next year the show will be in Beijing, maybe I will go there so I can take pictures like the one above this post!

Picture source: Shanghaiist

This afternoon I took my family (my parents, Scott & Grace) to the free practice of the Formula One. For days Scott had been talking about it and when we picked him up from school during lunch time he was very excited. Within 45 minutes we arrived at the Shanghai Circuit and my driver found a parking space very close to the entrance of the race track (there were not many cars yet).

We had Grandstand tickets, but because we were about an hour early we had enough time to check out some other locations of the track first. 15 minutes before the start of free practice we sat down at our seats and looked at the activity in the pit lane. We were seated right across from the Massa and Alonso’s cars (Ferrari), an excellent location. We put Scott’s ear protection on, but he didn’t like it too much. However, after the first cars started to leave the pit lane he was so shocked by the loud noise that he did not want to take it off anymore.

Scott was watching completely fascinated by the racing cars. It was impossible to communicate with him, not only because he was wearing his ear protection but mainly because he was fully focused on the action. Not sure if he really understood what was going on (probably not), but he seemed to enjoy it.

After watching the free practice for 45 minutes I went to meet with Alexandre Imperatori, one of the race car drivers in the Porsche Carrera Cup Asia. His next session would start at 4 pm, so he still had over an hour time, and he came to meet Scott and me to show us the Porsche pit area on the inside of the race track. Scott got a chance to sit in his car, but he was a bit afraid and wanted me to hold him, so that didn’t work out. Alex quickly introduced me to his team manager and some other people, and then he had to start preparing for his next track performance.

In the mean time Ho-Pin Tung (reserve driver for F1 Lotus Renault GP) contacted me. He had seen on my Facebook that I was at the racetrack and he invited me to the Lotus Renault pit area. He came to pick me up at Porsche and we walked over to the pit lane. However, because I had Scott with me we could not get into the pit area, because we had no ticket for him Actually at Porsche we had been lucky, only after we entered we found out kids are not allowed there. So Ho-Pin and I just had a chat, and I heard some very interesting news from him that I won’t be able to blog about here – at least not right now. Then Scott and I said goodbye to Ho-Pin (I will see him again tomorrow at a dinner) and walked back to the public side of the track.

Scott was very happy, despite being tired (no afternoon nap today) he was jumping, running and talking about the fast cars the whole time. We stopped for a few minutes at the Mercedes-Benz AMG test area where professional drivers took clients on test drives on a parking lot. Very cool to see their skills up close and to see what they can do with their cars. By that time Scott was so tired that we decided to call it a day and take the car back home. It was a great afternoon at the Formula One race track, I’ll be back on Sunday for the F1 Grand Prix!

Formula One is in town this weekend, so there are lots of racing related events. Tonight Ferrari organized a dinner (with among others their drivers Massa and Alonso) and party at M1NT. Grace and I went to the party which was (mainly) held on M1NT’s rooftop terrace. The weather was great for an outdoor event tonight, spring has really arrived in Shanghai it seems.

Ferrari actually put a real Formula One car on the wall in the M1NT night club. Not this year’s model though, but ‘just’ a 2008 one.

Grace and our neighbor Elaine, who we met at M1NT with her husband

I don’t think I have been at a lot of parties where cigar makers prepare fresh cigars for you. But Ferrari had one during the party!

And even less frequent, at least in China where nudity is still not allowed in public, is a body painted girl. But M1NT pulled it off, the lady was totally naked and body painted in the colors of Felipe Massa’s racing suit with M1NT both on the front and back!

I enjoyed the evening a lot, too bad it was on a Thursday instead of a weekend night. But a party like this compensates for a bit less sleep!

I love to drink wine and try to drink only good wines – Life is too short to drink bad wines, right? Over the past decade I tried many different Chinese wines, but most of the time I was not very impressed with what I tasted. Sure, there were a few decent ones among the tens of locally produced varieties that I drank, but generally they were at least twice as expensive as a similar non-Chinese wines. I’d love to find a good Chinese red wine below RMB 100 that I could drink at night on weeknights, but so far I have not been able to find one.

A couple of weeks ago I was doing a late night ice wine tasting at home. My friend Alexandre Imperatori (a race car driver who among others races in the Porsche Carrera Cup Asia, you can watch him this weekend at the Shanghai Circuit before the Formula One race) had given me a couple of excellent Canadian ice wines, and it was time to try them.

I posted the results of the tasting on Facebook and then one of my FB friends told me that a friend of his was related to the owner of a Chinese vineyard that produces ice wines. I was intrigued, because I had never heard about Chinese ice wines before. He asked me if I would be interested to try the Chinese ice wine, and if so he would arrange for some bottles to be delivered to my home.

And indeed about 2 weeks ago 2 beautifully packaged bottles of Vidal Eastars Ice Wine were delivered to my place. Because I was about to go on a business trip I decided to save them for a better moment, which turned out to be last Sunday. My parents were visiting and they also like good wines, so we opened one of the bottles.

To be honest, my expectations were not very high. I had been disappointed so often by Chinese wines that I expected an okay wine, but nothing special. But I was wrong: the wine was excellent! It was a typical dessert wine, deep yellow with a thick almost oily structure. Of course the wine was intensely sweet and it had a very nice after taste. If someone had told me that this was a Canadian ice wine I would have believed it, this wine was at least on par with some of the bottles I had before.

This means I can’t keep up my saying that China doesn’t produce any good wines. This bottle proved me wrong and I am happy to admit it. And the good news is that I still have a second bottle waiting to be opened!

Eastar ice wine’s website is here (Chinese only). The webshop is empty however, so you can’t buy any wines there. I found another shop online where you can buy the wine, 6 small bottles (375 ml) for RMB 1488 (USD 227).

Spil Games has taken a leadership role in the HTML5 gaming space, not only globally (see for example the Game Jam together with Google or our HTML5 contest), but also in China. We have been involved in all HTML5 conferences that were organized in Shanghai and Beijing over the past couple of months and we have launched our mobile HTML5 game platform at youxi.cn. The good thing about HTML5 games is that you can play them on every mobile smartphone, so not only on Android (like with Flash games) but also on the iPhone.

I personally believe that eventually HTML5 will make apps obsolete, and it seems more and more people agree with me. See for example this article on Venturebeat from a few days ago: http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/07/how-html5-will-kill-the-native-app/ Of course a lot of the commenters don’t agree, it somehow reminds me of the early days of Flash games where there were a lot of non-believers as well. I still remember that about 5 years ago we were trying to convince the Game Academy in Shanghai to start offering Flash courses, but they didn’t believe it would be important for games. Times have changed, now it’s easy to find Flash game courses in China but nobody is offering HTML5 courses yet.

As part of Spil Games leadership role we actively try to roll out partnerships with mobile social networks. Among others we put HTML5 games on Japan’s leading mobile social network Mixi, where we even had the #1 game in January. In China, however, mobile social game networks for smartphones are not as developed yet, but that will change fast as well.

Yesterday Spil Games launched its first HTML5 game on the mobile version of Kaixin001 (still as an app, HTML5 games can easily made into apps with a wrapper). Play it here! This is a big milestone for HTML5 games in China, because as far as I know this is the first HTML5 game on any mobile social network here. Also other giants like RenRen and Tencent don’t have this yet.

Spil Games worked closely with Kaixin to help develop their mobile API, so we would be able to roll out the HTML5 game with social features, such as high scores. But you can now also post your score in your timeline for all your friends to see (notification) or ask your friends to play as well (invitation).

This is just the beginning of course, very soon we have some other big projects that will go live on Chinese portals. Exciting times for HTML5, I believe this is the beginning of the future!

If you’re in Shanghai and want to be more involved in the HTML5 scene, make sure to attend this weekend’s HTML5 conference. Peter Driessen (Spil Games co-founder & CEO) will give a keynote about the future of HTML5 games and Spil Games’ role in this.

For more than a year I have been using the Nexus One Android phone. That’s probably a record for me, because I used to change phones every 6 months or so. It shows I really liked the phone and especially the Android operating system. Before the N1 that I had been switching from iPhone to Android and back (first an iPhone 1, then the G1 (the first Android phone on the market), then back to an iPhone for 6 months and when the Nexus One came out I switched back to Android). I felt the Android OS was better than iOS and I liked the fact that it’s more open than Apple.

But over the past months I had problems a few times with my N1, and I started thinking whether I should not get a new phone. I use my phone probably 2-3 times as much as an average person, so after a year it’s not unusual that it starts to malfunction a bit. The problems started when I suddenly lost all my contact data a few weeks ago and I was not able to retrieve all names and numbers anymore. This was a major nuisance and for the first time I realized that if you edit phone numbers on your phone they are not automatically synced in your Google contacts (most phone numbers I lost were ones that I put in manually during the past year). This is something I never ever had with iOS.

Then I started to have battery problems: after upgrading to Gingerbread my battery time suddenly halved. After turning off some background applications that use a lot of energy (you can see that in Android) it improved a lot again, but it was not as good as before. Not a reason to changes phones yet, I actually considered changing my battery (something you also can’t do with an iPhone). But then a major problem occurred 3 weeks ago: suddenly I could not hear people who were calling me anymore… It did not happen all the time, but only with some calls –

I was in Holland over the past couple of days for business meetings. My original plan was to just stay from Wednesday to Friday, because I had been away from home way too much (because of that this blog is almost becoming a travelogue). But when I saw that I could save EUR 800 by staying 2 days longer I decided to spend the weekend at my parents place.

I had a nice couple of days with them and now I am sitting at Amsterdam Schiphol airport waiting for my flight back home. On Friday my dad picked me up from Amsterdam and we drove to their place. My sister also joined us later, she had had her last day in her current job before moving abroad to a completely different position. She is very excited about it, and I am very happy for her. This means my parents will suddenly be “alone” in Holland, so I am sure we’ll see them often in Shanghai.

Friday night we had an excellent dinner at De Groene Lantaarn in Zuidwolde, one of the better restaurants in the Eastern part of Holland. Very good food and nice wines and of course good conversations with my family. After the dinner was over I fell asleep in the car. I didn’t have too much of a jet lag, but after the big dinner with copious amounts of alcohol I just couldn’t stay awake anymore. At home I went straight to bed and had 8 hours of sleep, I needed it I suppose.

The next day my sister had to go to a wedding, so I spent the day with my parents. The weather was very nice, with temperatures up to 25 degrees, very unusual for this time of year. We spent most of the day in the garden, working and reading a bit. I also went for a run with my dad, but that didn’t go very well for me, especially the first few kilometers. We still managed to run about 7.5 km, but I had wanted to run much longer.

Saturday night I mainly spent reading my book Water for Elephants and I went to bed quite early (11 PM or so). Sunday morning I felt great, so my dad and I decided to go for an early morning run. This time it went much easier and we ran about 12 km over trails in the woods. I loved it, I wish Shanghai had some more nature so I could do this there as well.

The rest of the morning I mainly spent working on emails (once again I am far behind on them), before taking a train to the airport around 2 PM. I am now in the business lounge at Schiphol, enjoying my last few minutes of fast Internet without having to use a VPN. That’s one of the other few things I miss in China. You can’t have it all.

This year South by Southwest (SXSW) took place for the 25th time in Austin, TX. I had never been there but when I was invited to be a panelist I decided to visit the festival. Even though it’s quite a trip from Shanghai (and especially from Phuket…) I recommend it to everybody. The panels and speakers are world-class and there are tons of networking opportunities. Not only are most US Internet start-ups there to promote their products, but also the VCs are all in town plus of course journalists, bloggers and the biz dev people of more established companies.

I went to SXSW with my colleague Floris-Jan Cuypers of Spil Games who flew in from Holland. I had reserved the hotel, which had been a bit of a hassle because all hotels downtown were of course fully booked already