For several weeks I was not able to download the NRC newspaper on my iLiad. This has nothing to do with the NRC, but everything with the iLiad: for some reason the wifi button stopped working after a few months already and now also the manual connection to wifi hardly ever works anymore. But on Saturday I tried it once again and suddenly I could connect to one of my home networks (but only one, I have no clue why the others could not connect).

So I was finally able to download and read some newspapers this weekend, and therefore I also came across the last page of Thursday’s paper. On it was a picture of last weekend’s collapsed Shanghai apartment tower. Famous Dutch poet Gerrit Komrij wrote an excellent column about the building that had fallen over, and he argued that it would make for a great piece of art: just put a fence around it and ask an artist to write a good description 🙂

That in itself may have been reason for a short blog post already, but what really caught my eye is how he heard about the collapse: he most likely read it on my blog! In the article he mentions that a friend on Facebook had sent him the picture from “the weblog of a Dutch entrepreneur in Shanghai”. Interesting how news travels over the world these days, and how it eventually gets back to me again. In case you should read this as well Mr. Komrij, thanks for mentioning it and I enjoyed reading your column!

The last week of June I spent in Holland for some meetings at Spil Games in Hilversum, but also to give a couple of talks. In China I give presentations regularly, but in Holland I just give a few per year: I normally do not travel overseas just for one event, except when I am already there for business meetings or the event is related to online games/new media and (at the very least) business class flights and hotels are paid.

The last week of June fit pretty well, because there were two interesting conferences that I could speak at and another event that I had been asked for a couple of times also fell exactly in this week. On Monday I gave a talk at the Industrieele Groote Club in Amsterdam about Internet Entrepreneurship in China. An interesting audience of about 50 business people in a Club’s beautiful old building overlooking Dam Square in the middle of Amsterdam. I had 75 minutes for my talk, which was easy to fill especially because of the constant flow of good questions. I enjoyed the talk and also the discussions during the dinner afterward and in the bar at the end of the evening.

CRTV, a Chinese radio and TV station in Holland, shot some footage during my presentation and also interviewed me after the talk. I am not sure if it’s already been broadcasted or whether it’s available on the Internet, but I noticed they also have a page on Tudou and if they upload it there I’ll put a link here.

On Tuesday I attended the Mediapark Jaarcongres, a yearly conference at the Mediapark in Hilversum – the place where many broadcasters in Holland are located. The conference itself was interesting, because of the fact that it showed me how traditional the media in Holland still is. Somehow I always thought media in Holland would be far ahead in embracing New Media, but this day taught me that is not the case. They even censored the Twitter projection screen when too many new media people were making fun of the old-fashioned thinking of the traditional media people on stage (the official reason was that people were using curse words, but afterward some Twitterers did a search and could not find that or those tweet(s)). At this conference I was interviewed on stage about running Spil Games in Asia (see this picture). The interview was OK, but I felt the interviewer had no idea about my background. Anyway, it was an interesting day and I met a lot of people.

Interestingly, when my interview was over CRTV was there again and they did another TV interview with me. I assume it was a coincidence? And to top it off, after the conference I drove with a friend in his Mini Cooper convertible to dinner, when a Google Streetview camera car passed by. With a bit of luck we will find the picture with us driving with the top down in Google Streetview soon!

Wednesday was a full day of management meetings at Spil Games followed by an excellent sushi dinner in Abcoude, thanks Willem! By the way, note that Abcoude is probably the only place in the world with abcde in that order in its name.

On Thursday I spoke at the Nationale Marketingdag 2009 (National Marketing Day) about success factors for a casual gaming site in China. A standard presentation for me, but probably the first time I had to do it in Dutch. I realize that when I talk about Internet and games I prefer to speak in English, I really have to look for the correct Dutch words sometimes. After my presentation I was interviewed by Ronnie Overgoor for Blueshots.tv (plus several other sites), mainly about entrepreneurship and Spil Games Asia. I have embedded the video below.

If you would like me to speak at an event or give a talk for a delegation that visits China, you can of course contact me directly, but the easiest is to get in touch with the China Speakers Bureau. They can arrange everything for you (and for me).

Picture: Punkmedia.nl (creative commons)
www.punkmedia.nl

On Wednesday I read that a Chinese H1N1 patient had died while in hospital in Hangzhou. However, the strange thing was that her fever had already been gone for 7 days, so it was not very likely that H1N1 had killed her. At first I still suspected that doctors were just trying to hide the fact that H1N1 had now also been fatal for someone in China (she would have been the first Chinese swine fever casualty), but then I read that the female patient died while in the toilet, which made it even more unlikely that swine fever was the reason for her death.

Her relatives also suspected something else had gone wrong and a violent mob of 50 people attacked the hospital, throwing rocks at windows and ambulances . The crowd was right that something was fishy about her death, because today the hospital admitted that they were at fault: the 34-year old woman had been electrocuted while taking a shower! So you survive H1N1 only to be killed before being released by faulty electrical wiring… One more reason to avoid Chinese public hospitals as much as possible (just like public fountains).

Picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/coolmel/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Every year all Spil Games Asia and Zlong Games employees get a free health check. One part of that is an eye test, which is performed in our company. Because we had some visitors from Spil Games in Holland, they also could do the eye check (both passed, but one unintentionally tried to cheat because he was wearing contacts – which the doctors found out about right away of course :-).

Interesting is that when I left Daimler in 2002 I needed to wear glasses while driving or while watching a movie. Nowadays I don’t need my glasses anymore, and today’s eye test confirmed that my eyes only have a slight deviation from optimal. Kind of strange isn’t it? Could it be because my computer screen at Daimler was not good enough and that when I stopped working and went back to university my eyes recovered? I cannot explain it, but maybe one of my readers can?

Spil Games Asia has a job opening for a new manager of our game development studio in Shanghai. If you’re interested in this position, here is the job description:

SHANGHAI GAME DEVELOPMENT STUDIO MANAGER

Tasks and Responsibilities:

For our Game Development Studio in Shanghai we are looking for a Manager. As the Game Development Studio Manager, you will be responsible for defining, developing, and launching new games (Flash and Shockwave) on our casual gaming portals. You will make sure that our games are accessible and fun, and therefore successful with our target groups (primarily women over 20 playing sometimes with their children under 8, “tweens” aged 8-15, and young girls aged 5-12). You will report functionally to the Game Development Director in The Netherlands but you will also be part of the Management Team of Spil Games Asia. Other tasks and responsibilities will include:

* Leading the programmers, artists and game designers of the Shanghai game studio (50 people)
* Managing and expanding our network of external game developers and studios in China
* Working closely with our game studios in The Netherlands and Germany
* Translating game concepts into successful games
* Optimizing game production by setting goals and guidelines and managing work flow based on high level business targets
* Coming up with original and attractive game content for our various portals
* Working with different departments, such as IT, Marketing, and Portal Management, to fine-tune strategy
* Controlling and analyzing the performance of produced games
* Drafting planning and progress reports and maintaining and managing the department budget

Your profile:

* A relevant Bachelor’s or Master’s degree
* Minimum 5 years management experience in a gaming environment
* Experience in leading large teams
* Strong interpersonal skills, a good communicator
* Good decision-making capabilities
* Intercultural competence, especially within both the Chinese and Western culture
* A proven track record in the casual online gaming market, especially in flash games
* Extensive knowledge of game development, design, user experience, art, and technology
* Experience with Flash and Shockwave 3D
* Familiarity with the target groups and how to meet their needs
* Able to guide complex projects in a dynamic work environment
* Flexible, goal-oriented, and familiar with stakeholder management
* Has an innovative, creative, and problem-solving mentality
* Solid oral and written communication skills in English and preferably Chinese. Non-Chinese speakers will be considered, but candidates with good Chinese (Mandarin) skills will have our strong preference

SPIL GAMES offers:

* A good salary
* An ambitious and fast-growing company
* A fun and dynamic work environment

Job interviews can take place in either Shanghai or Hilversum (The Netherlands).

For More Information:

Esther de Kruijff, HR Manager
Phone: +31 35 646 63 07

or

Peter Hofstede, Game Development Director
Phone: +31 35 646 63 00
peter.hofstede@spilgames.com

On Saturday I wrote about the apartment building that collapsed (or better: fell over) in Shanghai. Over the past days more details about what may have caused this have become available. As many people suggested substandard construction materials may have been a reason, but that was not the only cause. Initial investigations point at the fact that the developer was excavating an area for a garage under the building (Did they forget to build one? It does not seem logical to first build an apartment building and then build a garage below it). They made a big pile of the earth next to a flood wall of the river, causing the flood wall to collapse the day before the building went down. This combination may have been fatal for the building. The official probe will still take some time to finish.

In the mean time the developer is filling up the garage again (shouldn’t they wait until the investigation into what went wrong is finished?) and inspectors are monitoring the other buildings in the compound every 30 minutes. The people living there moved in again after the government told them it was safe to do so. To tell you the truth, if I would be living there I would not dare to go back. The buildings all look the same, so I assume the same building materials were used. Can you really prevent another collapse by checking a building every 30 minutes?

People who bought apartments in the collapsed building are now asking for refunds of their investment, but the question is whether the developer has enough money to reimburse them (in total the community had 629 apartments, of which 489 had been sold so far). The developer’s bank account was “under control”, the district government said, and they also had put 9 people from the developer “under control”. To make matters worse for the developer, an investigation showed that the company was able to buy the land for less than a third of the price of what other developers had paid for similar parcels of land. I assume the government employee responsible for this transaction won’t be sleeping so well these days.

This morning I saw some tweets about an apartment building in Shanghai that had collapsed, but only tonight I saw some pictures of what had happened. The building on Lianhua Road, just a few kilometers south of where I live (I go bike riding there sometimes), apparently just fell over!

It makes you wonder how safe other buildings in Shanghai are. Luckily there was only one casualty because the building was still under construction. If I would have bought an apartment in one of the other buildings I would seriously reconsider whether to move in or not!

Source: Daqi via ESNW

On August 31 I will give the keynote speech during the Opening of the Academic Year at Maastricht University, the university where I received my masters degree in Business Economics. I am very honored that I was asked by the board of the university to give this speech. I still remember that when I first became a student in 1991 the Dutch prime minister Mr. Ruud Lubbers opened the Academic Year, and at that time I would have never imagined that I would ever get this honor. The theme of the day will be “Innovation and Leadership”, so I plan to give a talk related to this.

In the morning there will be a symposium where I will discuss a management idea and students can challenge me about that (see the flyer above that was distributed among students). The winners will get nice prizes. If you’re in Maastricht on August 31 I look forward to seeing you there, and if you are a student in Maastricht: feel free to challenge me!