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!

This weekend I noticed a smart car next to our house. At least it looked like a smart, but when I had a closer look I saw there were quite some differences. Then I also noted the brand name Toyota on both the side and back of the vehicle. I got a bit excited, was this possibly a prototype of the new Toyota iQ? Because I started my career in the automotive business and also occasionally write columns for a car magazine I still follow what’s happening in the industry.

Looking a bit better at the car I noticed that it had AMG on its doors. That’s a bit strange for a Toyota, because AMG is part of Mercedes-Benz. I looked up the Toyota iQ on my iPhone and compared the cars. It certainly was not the same car, so I realized the owner put some fake Toyota badges and a fake AMG sticker on his car.

So what car is it? The Toyota branding put me on the wrong foot for a moment, but then I realized it must be one of China’s smart clones (there are several of them). Looking at my pictures from a smart clone at last year’s Shanghai Autoshow I figured out that this is the Shuanguan Noble (see last year’s picture here or this YouTube clip).

So the owner not only drives in a cloned car but also changes it to a better brand. Now he drives a double fake car, a bit embarrasing…

When I arrived in China many years ago I deliberately decided not to live in one of the compounds in Shunyi (close to Beijing airport) where most of my colleagues had their villas. I took an apartment close to the Second Ring Road (at the then brand-new East Gate Plaza) and have lived in the city center of Beijing and later Shanghai during my whole stay in China. I never thought I would ever move to the suburbs, it’s just too convenient to be able to have shopping malls and restaurants within walking distance.

But having a baby boy changes everything: with an additional full-time nanny, a 6-days a week ayi plus more longer-staying family members suddenly our 4-bedroom apartment is getting too small. And with a child we want to have a garden instead of just a balcony. So about two months ago we started looking for a villa and found a suitable one quite quickly. It was a 400+ sqm villa in the Hongqiao Golf Villas compound, and we planned to move in two weeks ago.

But a few days before moving there were some complications: the house was not renovated yet, the landlord was avoiding us for unknown reasons and when we managed to get in touch with her she was extremely arrogant, hang up on my wife and seemed to be looking for a way out of the contract. Eventually we decided this would not work, so we canceled the house contract, informed our moving company, and were lucky to be able to stay a few more weeks in our current apartment.

We went looking for houses again like crazy, and last week finally found a nice villa where we could move in quickly (see picture). A bit more expensive than originally planned, but I was so fed up with the time it takes to look at houses plus we really liked this house and compound, so we decided to go for it. We will move in this Friday already.

From then on I will be living in Suburbia, something I always dreaded. But now I am actually looking forward to it. It will be very quiet, I will be able to have breakfast outside in the garden and I will also have my own gym at home. The commute to work will be longer however, which is the biggest downside. All in all I look forward to living in the suburbs, I suppose I am getting older…

By coincidence my parents (who are visiting Shanghai) just mentioned Randy Pausch’ The Last Lecture to me, and I decided to watch it again on YouTube. There I noticed that Randy passed away yesterday, age 47. His Last Lecture was an inspiration for me and many other people.

On the Internet many people are talking about Randy right now. 3o minutes ago he was number 7 in the list of hottest tags on Twitter, and at this moment he is number 3 already (higher than terms like iPhone or Barack Obama). To commemorate him Google even put a link on its homepage to the Last Lecture video, I have never seen Google do that before.

If you want to learn more about Randy, you can see his Wikipedia entry here, his YouTube video here, and a transcript of The Last Lecture here (pdf). Carnegie Mellon University wrote a touching In Memoriam that you can read here.

Rest in Peace.
The Google home page today with the link to Randy Pausch’ video at the bottom

A couple of months ago Dunkin’ Donuts announced that they would open their first store in China in May this year. I love donuts, so I was quite happy to read that there would be an alternative for the Japanese-owned Mister Donut chain. However, so far Dunkin’ Donuts promise did not come true. I have not seen any retail outlet for their donuts in Shanghai, even though it’s July already. Maybe they got cold feet at the last minute? The company already had a bad China experience: As some long-term residents in China might know Dunkin’ Donuts used to have some outlets in Beijing in the late 1990’s, but they closed them down because China was not ready for donuts yet at that time.

Well, if Dunkin’ decides to cancel or postpone its market entry, there might be another competitor that is more willing to take risk: Krispy Kreme. This company already has stores in Hong Kong, but not on the mainland so far. By coincidence I saw a job ad for senior executives for Krispy Kreme in today’s Shanghai Daily. The advertisement says that a Krispy Kreme joint venture will launch Krispy Kream outlets in Shanghai, but it does not state a date.

I wonder, however, if they will be able to attract any serious talents because the English in the ad is terrible. Why don’t they just spend a few dollars to proof read it? Especially when they want to recruit people who are fluent in English!
A few examples of strange sentence structures that I noticed in the ad:
– (Krispy Kreme) offers special tastes of doughnuts and coffee loved by diverse people all over the world such as U.S., England, Australia and others.
– Common facts: No disqualifications for the international business trip
– Year of birth only from 1965 to 1980 required
Furthermore there were spelling mistakes, and instead of fast food they used the word quick service restaurant. Hopefully their donuts will not be as localized as their ads are!

Today Spill Group officially changed its name to Spil Games. Over the past years Spill Group has become known as a leader in game portals. Therefore the brand image under the name Spill Group did not accurately reflect who we are, what we do and what we stand for. The main purpose of the new brand name is to quickly give our customers, portal visitors, the press, and other business partners an accurate representation of our identity and exactly what we do.

The logo has changed as well, the new logo is more playful and exciting, as a gaming company’s logo should be. The new logo keeps the original corporate colors and branding, but has been revamped to include a bouncing ball element. And of course with a new company name you also need a new website: check it out at http://www.spilgames.com.

The name Spill Group Asia won’t be used anymore either, from now on our Asian operations will carry the name Spil Games Asia.