In October this year M1NT will open its first private club in mainland China, on the 20,000 square foot penthouse floor of the M1NT Tower in Shanghai (currently still called the Cross Tower, on Fuzhou Lu close to the Bund). The 24-story building used to be owned by Goldman Sachs, but they sold it last year for USD 150 million, and it is now being upgraded to a Grade A office space with the M1NT premises on the top floor.

The concept of M1NT is that the club is owned by shareholders who are also members, with the business model being that ownership encourages patronage and will in turn reduce promotional expenses. In total a maximum of 500 shareholders will be accepted, plus a total of 2000 ordinary members who pay annual fees. The model was successfully launched in Hong Kong, where M1NT opened its club in 2006 on 108 Hollywood Road (Central).

My wife and I had lunch with two people from Investor Relations at M1NT last week, and we visited the future club. I have to say hat I was very impressed by what I saw. First of all is the location absolutely stunning. From the club you have a complete view over the Huangpu river and the Pudong skyline on one side (see the picture on top of this post, taken from the building), and over Puxi in the direction of People’s Square on the other side. The penthouse floor itself is also quite amazing, because the ceilings are almost 7 meters high. Something you do not expect in an office tower! With windows up to 6 meters high you have an obstructed 360 degree view of the whole city.

When you enter the first thing you will see is a 17-meter long hammerhead shark fish tank, behind which the private shareholder lounges are located. Walking past the sharks you will find the big cocktail lounge area and one of the largest bars in Asia. Past the bar you will enter the dining area where head chef Ian Pengelley (of London’s Gilgamesh fame) will be able to show off his talents in an open kitchen setting. The restaurant will feature Pan Asian Cuisine, a fusion of Chinese, Malay, Thai, Indian and Japanese cuisines.

The place also has a rooftop terrace that will open in April next year. There you can lounge on deck chairs or watch the city below you from a big jacuzzi, in a setting surrounded by palm trees. It certainly seems like a great place to bring business guests or for a summer night party. If it becomes as nice as I imagine it will be, it could be a big hit. This is the kind of high-end place that Shanghai is still lacking, and I look forward to seeing it once it opens!

If you are interested to become a shareholder you can find more information about the application process on M1NT Shanghai’s website.

Advertising is everywhere in China. In the most unexpected and unlikely places you are bombarded with advertising messages (see for some good examples this article by Sam Flemming). And one more advertising location has now been added to the list: ringback tones. I personally hate the current music ringback tones, and when I call people that use them the conversation may be off to a bad start because of it. Why force me to listen to music you may like? To make matters worse, people normally do not change their music either. One person I regularly need to call has a horrible and way-too-loud ringback tone that has not changed in the past 2 years, and the person probably does not even realize it because she never hears it herself.

But things will be worse soon, because instead of listening to music you will start to hear advertising messages… China Mobile launched the ‘service’ on July 1 with initially 3 advertisers. How does it work? A user can earn back some of his mobile fees by signing up for the program. The mobile user has to download the ringback tone for 0.5 RMB. From that moment on everybody that calls the number will hear the ad, and the person gets 0.03 RMB per call. Per month you can earn a maximum of 10 RMB, which means that you have forced about 300 people who call you to listen to ads.

Right now the advertising ringback tones are only available in Beijing, and there has been hardly any promotion for it. Currently about 3000-4000 ringback tones are broadcast each day, but that number will grow exponentially when more people will learn about it.The service will be rolled out nationwide later this year. I do not look forward to it.

Exactly one month from today the 2008 Beijing Olympics will open, on 08-08-08 at 08:08 PM (8 is a lucky number in China). And today I received my tickets for the Beijing Olympics, and of course I had to take a picture of the tickets 🙂

I only bought tickets for the last 9 days of the Olympics, including a ticket for the Closing Ceremony. But a couple of days ago I heard that I am also invited to attend the Opening Ceremony of the Games as a guest of Dell (thanks to Tudou). That means two trips to Beijing during the Olympics, I am looking forward to it!

If you have a restaurant and want to translate that word into English for your sign, but you don’t want to spend money on it, what do you do? You just use free translation software! That’s what the owner of this restaurant likely did. However, he probably did not speak a single word of English, because when the software gave an error message he used that as the translation on his sign…

Thanks to Shanghaiist, that got the picture from Fools Mountain. Whoever took the picture originally: thanks for sharing!

Last Friday we organized a Lunch 2.0 event at the Shanghai office of Spill Group Asia. In case you never heard about Lunch 2.0 before, it is basically a regular event where employees of internet companies visit another start-up during lunch time to learn a bit about that company and its culture, to meet fellow geeks and new friends, to talk about interesting internet topics – and to have a free lunch. The event is loosely organized in several cities all over the world, and one of them is Shanghai.

The roots of Lunch 2.0 lay in Silicon Valley. The San Francisco Chronicle had a nice article on Lunch 2.0 about a year ago, in which they among others describe how the event started:

Unlike in New York or Hollywood, where status is measured in expense accounts and elite restaurants, Silicon Valley usually views lunch as an unwelcome break from the high-speed workday. Google and other high-tech firms even serve up gourmet cuisine to keep their workers in the office.

But a small group of high-tech go-getters, determined to get inside Silicon Valley companies, decided to reinaugurate the business lunch. They created a loose-knit community in search of a free lunch — and social interactions with their peers. They call it Lunch 2.0. Their slogan: “We really want to eat your lunch.”

In Shanghai the concept just started and the Lunch 2.0 at Spill Group Asia was just the second one in this city. A group of about twenty people showed up in our meeting room to talk about entrepreneurship, how to set up a legal entitiy in China and about getting funding for your start-up. Luckily Facebook did not work too well in China in the days before the event, otherwise we may have had too many people for our meeting room (Facebook is the only tool used to promote the Shanghai events and all registrations go through this site). The food was typical for an internet company: we provided everybody with unlimited pizza and soft drinks.

During the event Catherine Morgan from CIA China held a presentation on incorporating offshore companies and foreign companies in China. She mentioned that many start-ups don’t really think about the legal structure of their entity when they set it up, which may lead to problems later when a company gets VCs on board or plans to go IPO. Their company helps them (or the VC) to change the structure, if that’s still possible. One thing she mentioned, is that it’s normally better to set up a Cayman Island company instead of a BVI, as listing in for example HK will be impossible with a BVI. Also we discussed the registered capital of a company, and the reasons to go for a higher or lower capital when setting up the business (e.g. important when you need more capital to run your operations).

Afterwards I held a short talk on angel investing in China, and criteria for angels or VCs to invest (or not to invest) in companies. There were a couple of companies that were funded and a few that are still looking for funding, so it was a nice mix for a discussion. Most important for me is always the entrepreneur: a good entrepreneur can make a weak business plan work, but a bad entrepreneur can make a good plan fail. The plan itself always comes second in the angel funding stage, because the plan can still be adjusted at that time.

I enjoyed having the group over at our office, I hope the participants also enjoyed the talks and the lively discussion. If you’re interested in organizing it in your company, get in touch with Georg Godula on the Shanghai Lunch 2.0 Facebook page. I look forward to the next Lunch 2.0 event!

On Monday I was in Beijing for the recording of an episode of the new Dutch TV program, “TV China”. Interesting was that the studio was on an army base, so I could not just take a taxi to get there. I was picked up by a car with darkened windows so I could get in and out of the studio without being spotted as a foreigner! The studio itself was the same as most film studios I have seen so far, just a big dark room filled with camera’s, sound equipment and huge amounts of cables. The set was quite nice though, with huge pictures of the Forbidden City as background and using classical Chinese furniture. I can tell you that Chinese furniture looks nice, but if you sit on a wooden chair that is a bit too low at a wooden table that is just too high it gets quite uncomfortable after a while!

The format of the program is that short clips of Chinese TV programs (and in my case also Tudou clips) are shown, and that the presenter (Chinese/Dutch author Julie O’Yang) talks with the guests about these clips. I enjoyed doing the program, and we talked for more than 2 hours about all aspects of Chinese society, with an emphasis on youth and youth culture. The final program will be only 45 minutes, so two thirds of the material will not end up in the final cut.

The “China TV” program was produced for VPRO Television in the Netherlands and directed by Pieter Fleury. The program consists of 5 episodes that will be broadcast in The Netherlands from August 11th until August 15th, 2008 (during the Olympics).

Today’s Shanghai Daily has an article on its front page creatively titled “It’s express delivery for a Delta dasher”. The article is about a new high-speed train connection between Nanjing and Shanghai, which construction started yesterday and that should be in operation before July 1, 2010. Pretty fast, but that’s what you get used to in China and the opening date right before the Expo 2010 is probably correct.

When I read the article I noticed a couple of things that cannot be correct, however. The article mentions for example that the ride on the 300 km stretch between Shanghai and Nanjing will be just over 1 hour. Then it mentions that the maximum speed of the train will be 250 km/h. Hold on, if a train goes max. 250 km/h it can not do a 300 km stretch in one hour. Especially not because there are up to 17 stations along the route where the train will stop!

And even more interesting, according to the article “the new train line will be leaving the stations every 3 minutes”. That would mean 20 trains per hour, which seems a bit too much to me – even during rush hour. Should the Shanghai Daily editor-in-chief not carefully read the articles before publishing them on the front page?

Tonight I flew from Beijing to Shanghai with Air China. Because I was tired after my trip I decided to upgrade to First Class, so I would have a bit more space to relax during the flight (I actually ended up working for most of the flight, but that’s my own fault 🙂 and get a decent meal. The plane was supposed to leave at 5:30 PM, and indeed we left the gate a few minutes before that. We taxied to the runway, but halfway we stopped. We stood there for 15 minutes when the pilot came on the intercom telling us that because of congestion we could not take off yet. Quite normal on the busy Beijing-Shanghai route, and because I already expected a delay I just leaned back in my seat and kept on reading.

Because I was in the first row of the plane I could not only look to the side but also a bit to the front. Therefore I could see that all around us planes were taking off, but we did not move. After about one hours of waiting I decided to ask the flight attendant. She looked around as if she had something to hide and then whispered to me: “We have a mechanical problem, the engine is leaking oil and a mechanic will need to repair it.”. That did not make me very happy, but I always prefer safety over trouble during the flight. I was surprised, however, that she just told me. Why not mention this on the intercom, were they afraid people would start to revolt after already being on the runway for over an hour?

I called my wife to tell her about the delay because engine trouble and also Twittered about it while sitting on the plane. A few minutes later the plane finally started to move again, I assumed to taxi back to the gate. But no, I was wrong, it taxied to the starting position. The pilot came on the intercom saying that we would take off in just a minute. I could not believe what I heard, a few minutes earlier I was told we had engine trouble and now we suddenly take off. I managed to send out another Twitter message and indeed off we went.

I am still not sure what happened. Did the flight attendant lie to me (she spoke English with me, so I am 100% sure I understood her correctly)? Did they take a calculated risk, meaning that the flight attendant was not allowed to tell the passengers (which would explain why it was not announced to the rest of the plane)? Or did a mechanic mysteriously manage to look at the engine while we were on the runway? Anyway, the flight itself was uneventful and we safely landed at Hongqiao airport, but I am still a bit puzzled.