On Friday evening Spil Games Asia had its annual dinner for all employees, my 5th dinner with this company already. Like most companies in China we always organize a dinner in the last days before Chinese New Year, and during the dinner there are speeches, a lot of drinking, and people play games.

In my speech I talked about the changes at Spil Games Asia over the past year, both the good things and the bad. Some key people left last year, but that allowed us to finally build a top management team that is ready to reach some ambitious targets (the targets for January were already met, so we’re off to a good start). I also talked about the future of games and the impact that the iPad may have on the game industry. The industry has changed a lot over the past years, and I think also this year will see some big changes.

At the end of the dinner there was a lucky draw and I was asked to draw the grand prize. And believe it or not, but I managed to draw my own name! Of course I tore up my ticket and drew another number. A colleague said that this is a sign of good luck for the company (getting my own number, not tearing it up and drawing another one), always good to know!

After dinner a group of colleagues went to a karaoke bar where we sang a lot of songs, played some dice and drank more beer. It was a lot of fun and a good way to get to know my colleagues in a different setting. There is also a post with some more pictures of the party on Joop Dorresteijn’s blog.

Now that Scott is over 2 years old and Elaine is 8 months old it gets nice and nicer to interact with them. Scott really started talking now, he switches without any problems from Chinese to Dutch, and even occasionally says some thing in English. Chinese he learns at home from my wife and the nannies, Dutch from me and my parents when they are visiting, and English from the teachers and kids in school. Because his pronunciation is not yet perfect we sometimes have to guess what language he is speaking, or he mixes two languages (e.g. sometimes he says “??? kijken”, a mix of Chinese and Dutch which means “I want to watch the tractor” – a reference to his favorite TV series Tractor Tom).

Elaine also started to talk a lot, her favorite word is still baba. When I come into her room in the morning she is always very happy to see me and she immediately says “baba” to me while waving her hand to greet me. So sweet! It makes me very happy to be a dad. Elaine learns new skills almost every day now. A few days ago she managed to stand on her own for the first time, but of course she fell over after a few seconds. She now also manages to clap her hands, and she has a huge smile while doing that.

Their personalities are completely different. Scott is loud, loves to takes risks (climbing on the couch or table and jumping off) and has a high pain tolerance (on more than one occasion he hit his head against mine, which hurt pretty much but he didn’t even cry). He also loves everything related to cars. If he refuses to do something and you tell him we may go for a car ride later he will immediately follow what you ask him to do.

Elaine on the other hand is a real little lady. She is much more silent, but she can also cry and scream loudly if she is in the mood for that. Generally she just sits and observes the world around her, smiling at the people surrounding her or just completely ignoring them. At times she seems to look straight through me as if I’m not there. If you look her in the eyes, she does not look away but keeps looking at you without blinking. I can’t do that! Compared to Scott she is easily scared, for example when I am driving and suddenly need to brake she will immediately start crying. Also when watching TV she can suddenly start crying because she is afraid. But if you hold her she calms down right away and even keeps on watching the program.

We sometimes take videos of our kids and a couple of them are on Tudou. Below 3 videos that we shot with a simple point-and-shoot camera over the past weeks. The first one shows Scott and Elaine while playing in their playroom. Elaine’s nanny holds Elaine who keeps on laughing. In the middle of the video Scott takes a picture of Elaine with his baby camera, he is good at that already.

The second one shows Elaine on the couch in the living room. My wife is trying to teach Elaine to say mama, but of course she prefers to reply with baba 🙂 It’s quite funny actually to hear her saying baba the whole time. The last seconds of the clips show an article in a Chinese mother magazine about my wife. She was interviewed because they consider her a successful business woman who manages to combine an extremely busy job with raising two kids.

The last one was taken at Scott’s ??? (pre-school / kindergarten) where the class is singing and dancing. I never see Scott interact with other kids because I am always in the office during day time, so I liked it a lot that I could see him here. Scott it the boy in the red coat with a white collar. At 6:10 there is a small accident in which Scott falls pretty hard. But also here he does not cry, stands up right away and keeps on dancing with the group. I am a proud father!

This morning when I opened my inbox the first message that I saw was a press release with the title: Ho-Pin Tung in Formula 1. Ho-Pin will be the 3rd driver for the Renault F1 team in the upcoming 2010 season! That’s extremely good news for the talented Dutch-Chinese race car driver, something he fully deserves after working hard for this opportunity for many years. This means that he will be the reserve driver and will be fully integrated into the team and travel to all the races. He will also be part of the Renault F1 team young driver program, which gives young drivers the opportunity to work closely with the team as they continue to develop their skills as professional racing car drivers. Ho-Pin will have a busy year ahead, because next to his F1 obligations he will continue to compete in the GP2 series.

Over the years I got to know Ho-Pin as a talented and very hardworking person. He is totally focussed on his racing career and his whole life was centered on it. I first met him during the summer of 2003 when my wife (then still my girlfriend) and I produced a TV program in England in which Ho-Pin Tung was featured at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. We kept in touch regularly, and he appeared on this blog many times over the past years. For example when he visited our company in 2007 or when we made a flash racing game featuring Ho-Pin in 2008. See here for an overview of all posts in which he was featured.

Ho-Pin, congratulations with this major step in your career and good luck during the upcoming racing season!

During this weekend I had some time to think about the Apple iPad a bit more. I still believe that the current product is not right for me yet and that I will have to wait for version 2.0 or 3.0 before buying one. But after talking to some other people I realize the iPad now already fills a niche.

For example, this weekend my parents visited us in Shanghai and I talked to them about the iPad. I explained them the functions and its weaknesses, but for them these weaknesses are not such a big problem. For example multitasking (a MAJOR problem for me), if they write an email that’s all they do. They don’t have an IM window open at the same time, nor are they listening to iTunes in the background. The thing is that probably most casual computer users use their computers mainly in this way, and that this is therefore not such a big problem as it is for me. The same with flash, likely most people don’t even know what flash is and they won’t miss it. They’ll just notice some blank space in their browser and won’t care about it.

I guess I, and with me most people who have been blogging about the iPad so far, am not the main target group of this product. At least not initially. My parents have been traveling for the past weeks and they had a Macbook Pro with them on their trip. They found it too big, and they would have loved to have a smaller device like the iPad. As long as it easily connects to wifi, has a decent browser and an email client it is fine for them. There must be many people out there like that who don’t care about all iPad’s weaknesses.

And don’t forget about kids. My son Scott who turned 2 years on already knows how to turn on my iPhone and launch applications. On my laptop he knows how to launch a video on Tudou and he can play some very basic games. This would be the ideal tool for him. No confusing keyboard (he cannot read yet), just a large screen to play games on or to watch videos. He does not care about the device’s limitations. The New York Times sees that as well, in a piece yesterday they summed up why this may be the Toy of the Year. Among others: Kids think with their fingers (touch screen!), the 10 hour battery life (long car rides get a lot shorter with this device), 140,000 apps available already (iPhone apps work on the iPad as well) and it’s the perfect gadget for interactive books. I might actually buy one for Scott when it starts selling.

So maybe the early adopters won’t buy it right away. Or maybe they still do because the product looks so cool and we all hope that a software upgrade will remove some of the current problems. Just like with the iPhone that initially did not even have copy/paste! But if the early adopters don’t purchase yet, there is a big group of other people for who this may the exact right product. Once they are happy there will be a version 2.0 and then the consumers with more requirements will get one.

In my last piece I also mentioned that I think that Apple put the product on the market too quickly because competitors might be entering the market as well. One of my favorite bloggers, Dave Winer, seems to have the same thoughts. This weekend he wrote: Another thought occurred to me — iPad looks rushed. It seems possible that Apple pushed it out sooner because it got wind of a competitive product. Could it be that Google has a DroidPad in the pipe?

Even though he is also not impressed with the product he also feels it has a big potential: The stakes are much higher than with the iPhone. No one should underestimate the potential of iPad. That’s why I said, ironically, there’s no doubt I will buy one as soon as I can. For the same reason I bought an iPhone. You have to understand this product if you want to stay current.

Let’s wait and see what will happen, and how many iPads my family will own by the end of 2010.

Yesterday Steve Jobs launched the Apple tablet in San Francisco which he called the iPad. As usual Apple had only leaked a little bit of information about the tablet to keep people guessing about it, causing a huge free viral marketing campaign even before anybody knew for sure what the product would be like. Apple is the only company in the world that manages to do this, and they manage it time and time again.

Of course I was very excited about the upcoming launch, especially when I heard that Steve Jobs thought that this was the most important product that he had ever worked on. If this tablet would have a bigger impact than the iPod or the iPhone it must be something very special. So yesterday I decided to stay up for Lord Jobs’ sermon that started at 2 AM. My wife was actually still working by that time (she works crazy hours, compared to her I feel sort of lazy sometimes!), so it was not that difficult to stay awake.

As usual the Apple Gods had decided that the masses could not watch Steve and his disciples live on a video stream, but we had to rely on tweets and live blogging from the people in the room. There was a Crunchgear livestream, but that only showed commentary not the show itself. But with Engadget and Gizmodo on autorefresh and Tweetdeck with several keywords open it was easy to follow the whole introduction almost as if you were in the room. It was actually a fun experience to use social media in this way, listening to and interacting with other virtual spectators in the middle of the night, but that’s another story.

Steve Jobs did not waste much time and within a few minutes he showed off his shiny new toy, the iPad. My first impression was “wow, what a cool thing” and I looked forward to see all its revolutionary features. And that’s where it went wrong: there had been so much of a hype around the tablet that my expectations were way to high. And not just mine, on Twitter the Apple fan boys (and some girls) were also not that positive about the iPad (who came up with that name…?).

Sure, the product looks great, but it’s just a bigger iPhone in my opinion. It is supposed to be better than a netbook, but it isn’t because it runs on the iPhone operating system. This means that in the current version you can only run one application at the same time. Want to browse the web while having a chat on MSN? Forget about it, only one application can run at the same time. Want to play a flash game? Sorry, but flash does not run on this computer. Connect a mouse or keyboard through USB? Impossible, because the device has no USB port. How about a video call on Skype? Forget it, there is not even a camera built in.

One major selling point was that the device can be used as an ebook reader and that it would replace epaper ebook readers like the Amazon Kindle. I was flabbergasted that almost everyone seemed to buy it. Everybody who has ever used epaper should know what a difference reading from e-ink makes from reading off a flickering LCD screen. I have several ebook readers and although the epaper technology is still in its infancy it is incomparable with reading from a computer screen. I had hoped that Steve had found a way to integrate epaper with an LCD screen (Pixel Qi has developed such a technology), but the iPad has a normal LCD screen. A missed chance. It may even mean that many people will never try real epaper and do not realize what they are missing.

Of course the device has some excellent other functions, the user interface is great, the table looks very sleek and it may evenchange the way we use computers. But in its current form it’s nothing more than a bigger and more powerful iPhone. I am sure Apple will further develop the gadget into something that everybody eventually “needs” to have, but currently I don’t see the need of buying one yet. Maybe I need to work with it first for a few hours before I see the benefits, but this presentation did not impress me.

When I finally shut down my laptop at 3:45 AM I was quite disappointed. For the first time in a long time Steve’s magic did not live up to its hype. Maybe he wanted to put the tablet on the market too quickly because many competitors are entering this niche as well? The fact that we have to wait at least 60-90 days before we can get our hands on one seems to confirm that theory. Normally Apple’s new products are on sale almost immediately. Well, I’ll probably wait until version 2 or 3 before getting one. I am sure eventually Apple will get it right and then this might turn into the product that will change the world. But this iPad fails to delivery on its hyped up promises.

China’s national college entrance exam, the gaokao, is very important for the future of the test takers because the result may determine the rest of their lives. If you perform well during the two day exam you may be able to get into a top university, if you mess up you’ll end up at a lower school and your career chances will be greatly reduced. So if there are ways to increase your scores on this exam people will try to do so.

One way to get earn some extra points is by showing excellent athletic ability, for example by being a top marathon runner. In order to gain additional points you need to run a marathon within 2 hours and 34 minutes. That is extremely fast, and not only for high school students that hardly have enough time to study. To put the time into perspective for non-runners, with a time of 2:34 you would have won the Olympic Marathon in 1948!

Almost impossible to achieve and so it’s no surprise that some students try their luck with a different strategy: At the Xiamen marathon 3 weeks ago 30 participants among the fastest 100 runners were disqualified because of cheating! Some of them took a ride in vehicles in order to make the 2:34 time and some fast runners put more than one time chip on their shoes. The students not only all had their result canceled, but they now have to apologize or they will be banned from future marathons.

It makes me wonder whether a similar thing could have happened at the Shanghai marathon. There were a lot of points during the race where you could have run off the course and take a car for a couple of kilometers. The only way to prevent that is to put more chip recording mats on the route (the Shanghai marathon only had one at the start and finish and one at a turning point a few kilometers before the finish). A cheaper but less accurate way would be to put video cameras at certain points of the race to record all the runners passing by, which is one way how the Xiamen organization found out about the cheats.

By the way, in case you’ve never heard of the Xiamen marathon and assume it’s probably just a small marathon, that’s not the case. The race is actually one of the biggest marathons in the world with 50,000 participants (the New York Marathon ‘only’ has 38,000 runners). I did not run it yet because of its terrible timing: always right after New Year, this year on Jan. 2, and within just a few weeks of the Shanghai marathon. The course is supposed to be one of the most beautiful in the world, almost completely along the coastline, so I hope that one day I will be able to participate there as well. I promise I won’t cheat!

This post has actually nothing to do with China, but a friend of mine forwarded this BMW ad and I found it so good that I decided to put it on my blog. The print ad itself is from Greece and is already 2 years old, but I had not seen it before. It actually caused quite a commotion among American women bloggers at that time, who were offended by it. I personally think they were taking the ad too serious and also didn’t take into account the big cultural difference between the US and Greece. I don’t think BMW Greece would mind the controversy, it’s always good if people talk about your advertising campaign!

This afternoon one of my colleagues sent me a link to a CNNgo article about a house haunted by ghosts on Weihai Lu. I clicked on it and to my surprise the former office of China Bay appeared in the picture! Long time readers may know that I used to be a managing partner at China Bay (a consulting company) in the days before Tudou and Spil Games. We used to have our office on the ground floor of this beautiful old villa until we were kicked out by the government in 2006. And now that I think about it, when I started Spil Games Asia the first three months we also worked from this office (we only had 3 people at that time).

The villa is still there 4 years later, but the surrounding shikumen (old lane houses) have all been demolished. The place is one big construction area. The CNN article talks about several workers being bitten by animal ghosts, and staff at the Four Seasons Hotel across the street are afraid to do night shifts because they are spooked by ghostly animals.

Local residents probably blame the relocation of the building: they dug it out and moved it a few meters, something that happens more often in China to make space for new buildings. I still remember that when we had our office there, the whole basement was filled with water. We tried to drain it, but that did not work. As a consequence the office was always very moist. So if you believe in ghosts they may have appeared from below the water 🙂

When we had our office in the building I heard the story (that’s also partly in the CNN article) that the villa used to be surrounded by wild animals in a zoo setting. Tigers and other wild cats, snakes, lizards etc. could all be found in the garden. And one of my Shanghainese colleagues once told me that most of them died from hunger during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai (or were eaten by local Shanghainese, as the article says). That seems a nice base for the animal ghost appearances there.

Whether you believe in ghosts or not, it still kind of creepy to read a story like this. I worked in the building for about 2 years, and spent many hours there on my own late at night working on projects. I don’t recall ever seeing a ghost, let alone being bitten by one, but it’s still kind of strange to read this.

Interestingly (and I hope no superstitious current colleague of mine reads this) I heard that the building where Spil Games Asia has its current office is also haunted. It used to be a coins warehouse for 4 banks in the 1930’s (hence the name ????), and during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1937 a major battle was fought in and around it. It was the last stronghold of the Chinese army and several soldiers defending the building were killed. And some might apparently still be floating through the building late at night. Also in our current office I have never seen one, even though it’s happened more than once that I was the last one to leave the building. In case I should ever meet one I will take a picture of it for this blog 🙂