A couple of weeks ago I was in Beijing for the recording of the Dutch TV program China TV. The program uses short clips of Chinese TV programs, and I comment on them and give my views on current Chinese society.

I have not seen the final program yet, but it will air Thursday night on Dutch TV. If you’re in the Netherlands and are interested to learn a bit more about the real China as I experience it, tune into the VPRO right after Nova.

China TV
Date: Thursday, August 14, 2008
Time: 22:40-23:30
Channel: Nederland 2

This morning I came across a Dutch story related to the Olympics that seemed to be a joke at first. But because I found it on several other international and even Dutch news sites as well, it may actually be true.

What happened is that the mayor of the city of Haarlem in Holland, Mr. Schneiders, was watching the Olympic Opening Ceremony on TV and saw that one of the themes was the invention of printing by the Chinese. That made him upset, because in his opinion printing was invented by a certain Mr. Costers who hailed from the city of Haarlem as well. So what does the man do? He decides to write a letter to the mayor of Beijing saying among others “It is a generally known fact that printing was discovered in Haarlem by our townsman Laurens Janszoon Coster. This happened about 1400 AC.”

A generally known fact? This vague kind of rhetoric you normally find in the Chinese press, but it seems some Dutch now also use it. But is it really so well known? I think I learned in school that Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press (and yes, I learned this in a Dutch school). And that happened a few hundred years after the Chinese seem to have invented it, so they may have very well been first. To me it’s not a big issue who invented it, but the fact that a Dutch politician is so stupid as to write a letter about it makes me a bit sad – sad for him. Is he so ignorant that he thinks he will be taken seriously?

To make things worse, in a related Dutch report I read that he also attached a picture of a statue of Mr. Costers and that he offered Beijing a replica – but only if they would put it on Tiananmen Square… Seriously, is this guy nuts? Or is he just trying to get his 15 minutes of fame by doing some China bashing?

Normally I try to avoid the China Daily as much as possible, but in Beijing it’s the only local English language paper. However, during the Olympics the quality of the paper has gone up considerably and today’s paper was actually quite readable. On the plane from Beijing to Shanghai this afternoon I read through most of the articles and came across some interesting or funny tidbits of information that you might not find in other newspapers. A couple of examples:

• During the Olympic Opening Ceremony it stayed dry the whole time, even though it rained in the south of Beijing. And according to a message on Twitter, immediately after the ceremony was over it also started to rain in the northern suburbs of Beijing. A coincidence? Probably not, considering what the China Daily writes on its front page: The chief of Beijing’s meteorological bureau said “We fired a total of 1104 rain dispersal rockets from 21 sites in the city between 4 PM and 11:39 PM on Friday, which prevented a rain belt from moving towards the stadium”.

• The director of the Beijing Climate Center is good at forecasting the weather, on page 2 of the paper he mentions: ” The weather will further cool down after the closing ceremony on August 24″. Right, I could have predicted that as well. It always gets cooler when the summer is over!

• In an article about the free bike race (everybody can watch it for free as it is a road race through the city and the countryside) some volunteers tell something about their workload: “Every day, we have to get up before 6 AM and don’t finish until after 10 PM”, a volunteer says. “We don’t get weekends off and we don’t get paid, but I have never been happier.” Now that’s the Olympic spirit!

• During the Olympic Opening Ceremony the airport was closed. It only re-opened after the ceremony was over. The first plane to leave was that of Japanese prime minister Fukuda, he left right after midnight according to the article. According to my calculations that means that he missed the lighting of the Olympic flame, because that was around midnight. French president Sarkozy probably waited until the Olympic fire was burning, because his special plane was the second to take off. “17 minutes after Fukuda left”, according to person in charge of air traffic management at the Beijing airport.

• The paper also shows its readers how Chinese athletes chose their marriage partners and compares it to Westerners. The article starts by saying that Andy Roddick married a swimsuit model and that Ronaldo dates “Spanish hottie” Neireida Gallardo. Then the article continues: ” Based on the behavior of testeron-crazed Western athletes you would expect Zhang Jie (one of China’s most successful athletes to hook up with movie star Chow Yun-Fat or at least singer Andy Lau.” But no, the article continues, she chose a “small husband”. And she is very happy with him, saying “all Chinese girls should marry a man like Zhang. He supports me unselfishly.” Some more examples follow, and the article ends with a quote from the badminton head coach of China, who says: “These husbands are making a tremendous contribution to Chinese sports, they deserve gold medals as well.”

• Beach volleyball is a new sport for Chinese audiences, and some of them might not realize that women compete in just tiny bikinis. The paper quotes Ma Deshan, a 65-year old retired government employee that traveled to Beijing with his wife to watch a match. “There he found bikini-clad competitors, cheered on by dancing “beach babies” cheer leaders and a raucous crowd.” His surprised reaction: “This is really new for us. It’s noisy, but you see, everybody seems very happy.”

If you’re in Beijing pick up a copy of the paper during the Olympics, it covers the Games quite well and you can also get a bit of a feeling for Chinese couleur locale!

Last night I went to the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics in the Bird’s Nest with among others Gary, courtesy of Dell computers. It was an amazing event, probably the best show I have ever seen. I am very happy that I could be part of this: I was celebrating in Beijing the night in 2001 that China was awarded the Games and now 7 years later I was at the Opening Ceremony!

Getting to the Bird’s Nest was a bit of a hassle. Originally we were supposed to park next to the stadium, but at the last minute the whole parking situation was changed (for security reasons?), so we had to walk for about 30 minutes to get to the stadium. Worse, however, were the security checks. Especially check number 4 (out of 5) took ages to get through. It was hot and there was hardly wind, not the best weather to stand in line for an hour! But that’s the way it is, security is a top priority during these Games so it’s just part of the game. One thing was strange, however. Nobody checked our passports or ID cards, even though all the tickets were supposed to be in a person’s name and we were told numerous times we could not get in without proper ID. I assume this will be the same for the closing ceremony, for which I also had to hand in passport pictures and passport copies in order to get my ticket.

The show itself was fantastic, it lasted for about one hour and had Chinese history as a theme. Zhang Yimou spent over 2 years to design and direct the show, and it paid off. It reminded me a bit of the North-Korean mass games, but this was much more high-tech and had a much better art direction. I think China can be very proud of pulling off such a show.

After the show all 204 countries (>11000 athletes) walked around the stadium with their flags. On TV that’s always quite boring, but being in the stadium I enjoyed every minute of the 2 hour parade. The best for me was of course the Dutch team, wearing an orange shirt and sitting in one of the first rows they all waved at me 🙂 Interesting was the mystery man in the Dutch delegation, I happened to take a picture of him before he was taken away. Also Team China led by Yao Ming was impressive, and the stadium was screaming from excitement when they entered.

The finale were the speeches of the IOC and the BOGOC (Beijing Olympic Games Organizing Committee), the Olympic Flag and the Olympic fire. Li Ning was chosen to light the fire and he literally walked around the inside of the roof of the stadium to get to the Olympic Torch. Very well done.

During the Ceremony I followed what was happening in the stadium on Twitter. I sent a lot of messages out myself as well, and got many many replies. The Twitter backchannel was very useful for me, I got a lot of information about what was happening by checking Twitter every now and then. I think backchannels will become more and more important during big events like the Olympics. We also looked at Wikipedia, to find out which country would be next to enter the stadium and who was carrying each flag.

While the show was in progress I did two live radio interviews with Dutch radio. I hope I sounded OK, because I could hardly hear what the presenters were saying and I probably talked a bit louder than usual as well. I was thinking that next time I’ll probably just turn off my phone, but then I cannot Twitter either (solution: buy a phone just for Twitter). I also tried to stream live footage on Qik, but that did not work… I could not get the special Qik phone (a Nokia N82 that the people from Qik.com gave me) to connect to the internet. A pity, but I’ll try again over the next days and try to show some other events here.

All in all it was a great night for everybody in the stadium. Some minor negative things were that it was quite hot inside, but that did not matter too much (beer was cheap anyway at just RMB 5 per Tsingtao!). Getting back to the bus afterwards was a hassle, it took a lot of time because roads were sealed off, but I guess that’s unavoidable when you organize a show with an audience of over 90,000. I very much enjoyed the night at the Bird’s Nest!

For some of the pictures that I took during the opening ceremony see here.

Later today I will be flying to Beijing with Gary for the Olympic Games. I am quite excited about it, and I look especially forward to the Opening Ceremony tomorrow night. I will cover my Beijing activities as usual on Twitter, Friendfeed and Flickr. And possibly also on Qik, if I am able to get my iPhone to work with it (someone from Qik will meet me in Beijing to help me set it up).

Saturday night I plan to go to the Holland Heineken House, traditionally THE place to party during every Olympics (and it’s not only for Dutch nationals, as some people think). It’s located just south of the Great Wall Sheraton on the 3rd Ring Road in the Agricultural Exhibition Center. If you also would like to go you can download an invitation here.

For a while I did not write about the Spil Games sites in China, and now this is already the second post in a week. Reason is that we keep on breaking all our records. On Monday game.com.cn broke through the 1 million unique visitors per day for the first time, a big milestone for the company. For people who are not familiar with internet terms, 1 million unique visitors means that 1 million different people (or to be more precise, IP addresses) have visited our site yesterday. If somebody comes to the site twice or three times per day, he/she will only be counted once.

To put the growth in perspective, on August 4, 2006 we had 20,000 unique IP’s (the site had just launched), and on August 4, 2007 we were at 240,000 unique IP’s for game.com.cn. Next to that our other main site xiaoyouxi.com registered about 800,000 uniques on Monday, for a daily total of 1.8 million on our Chinese sites. All our statistical data comes from Google Analytics.

Over the course of the next few months, we plan to make our sites even more attractive with among others additional community features. I wonder how big our sites will be one year from now!

This afternoon I plan to treat everybody at Spil Games Asia and Zlong Games ice cream to celebrate their big achievement.

When do the 2008 Olympic Games start? The Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympics will take place this Friday, August 8 at 8:08 PM. That should be the official start of the Olympics, but apparently that’s not the case in China.

To my surprise the first football (soccer) matches already take place tomorrow (see the schedule here). At 5 PM Wednesday afternoon the first 3 women’s preliminary matches will start, with another 3 later that evening. And on Thursday there will be 8 men’s preliminaries in football stadiums all over China. Interesting is that none of these games takes place in Beijing, the first football match in the capital city will only take place after the Olympic flame has been lit.

I don’t know too much about past Olympic events, but is it normal that some matches take place before the Games officially start?

Outside China the summer months are normally not the best months for online gaming portals. But in China things are different, July and August are always the best period for Chinese entertainment sites. Last year we broke all records for Spil Games’ Chinese sites during the summer and this year looks like it will be exactly the same.

The reason is that a lot of people visiting our sites are students, and they have a lot more time on their hands during the summer holiday than during the rest of the year. Chinese kids normally don’t go on long holidays or play outside a lot, like their European counterparts, and so they spend a lot of their free time behind a computer screen. Furthermore, it’s too hot to do much else in large parts of China, so the internet is a good way to avoid being bored.

We saw the effect in our July stats today. Game.com.cn grew an amazing 50% in July to over 15.2 million unique users and xiaoyouxi.com added about 25% new users to a total of 13.5 million unique visitors during this month. This means we now have a monthly reach of 28 million Chinese players, which is far above my expectations (note: there is likely some 10-15% overlap between the users of the sites, so real reach will be a bit lower). Guo Haibin and his team: congratulations for this amazing result!

Sales are also growing each month (figures are confidential), a sign that the online advertising market is finally starting to grow in China. Of course having sites with huge traffic makes it easier as well, ad agencies and advertisers take us a lot more serious than just a year ago. Too bad most ad sales are still for a fixed period of time (buying a banner position for one day or one week) instead of based on total views (CPM) or clicks (CPC). In that regard the Chinese online advertising market is still years behind.

The only thing that does not take off yet is in-game advertising. Zlong Games (our in-house game development studio) can easily create advertising space in the games it makes, but there is no demand yet from advertisers. Surprisingly, because that is where you can really interact with your audience – if you do it right.

I think one major reason is that the advertising agencies are not selling in-game advertising to their clients yet. Either because they don’t understand the benefits or because they are happy with the status quo. In-game advertising agencies are not gaining much traction yet either, but because of the potential impact of ads in games they eventually will. Until then we just keep on growing our gaming portals!