Some pictures I took this morning while walking to the bakery to get some fresh bread for breakfast.

Friday night after finishing work Gary, Qi and I had a dinner at La Gondola (great Italian restaurant by the way, check it out. Next to Westin Hotel, corner of Henan Lu and Yan’an Lu). Instead of hitting Shanghai nightlife, we decided to hit some golf balls at the driving range next to JinMao. It was still quite busy at 11 PM, and also still quite warm. Nice way to end a busy week, and not too expensive (total RMB 80 including a beer and two cokes).

(BTW, photos were taken with my phone, that explains the low quality)

The Chinese government has announced plans to limit the time that gamers can spend online. After 3 hours their characters abilities will be halved and after 5 hours almost all strenght of its characters will be gone. Most big Chinese online game companies have already agreed to include these measures into their games. Of course they have to, otherwise their business licenses will be cancelled.

Will hackers be able to break the code so players can play as long as they want? Very likely, but because most players in China are young people who can only play in internet bars, there will be probably be monitoring systems there as well.

Yesterday Oriental TV came to the Toodou.com office to produce a program about us. They will produce a 25-minute program that will be aired later this week at 7:00 PM. According to the producer, the program has the second highest rating in Shanghai, so lots of viewers probably.

Also the Toodou team was featured yesterday in a 4-page special in the Wai Tan Hua Bao (you won’t see me in the pictures, I was not there when the reporters came to visit), and the front page has a huge full-color picture of some of our team members.

This morning I watched the program that Dragon TV produced last Monday. I felt they did not clearly bring accross the message about what we are doing. One reason is that the item was only five minutes, and they also profiled one of our users during that time. I hope the other program they will produce with this material for CCTV will be better (at least it is longer, I think 15 minutes or so).

Many reviews on the web as well, but most are in Chinese. I came accross this one in English yesterday on techcrunch.com.

The site keeps growing. Lots of good new video’s and podcasts were uploaded again, and the amount of users keeps increasing. It’s great to see that when some people have an idea and manage to implement that in the right way, that it can be so successful so quickly – and all of that without spending one penny for marketing!

Interfax reports that from September 1 onwards all Shanghai mobile phone users will need to register with their ID card:

All mobile phone and Xiaolingtong (PHS) subscribers in Shanghai, new and old, will have to register their legal names with city authorities beginning September 1, the Shanghai Communications Administration and the Shanghai Public Security Bureau (PSB) said on Friday.

“We have tightened control in order to protect mobile phone users from malicious and fraudulent SMS (short messaging service) messages,” Hu Yonglong, Vice Director of the Shanghai Communications Administration, told Interfax.

Mobile phone and Xiaolingtong subscribers will now need to show their Citizen Identity cards and register their legal names when buying a new SIM card. Telecom operators will be required to confirm and register the legal names of new subscribers in a database.

Existing mobile phone and Xiaolingtong subscribers must registered their legal names with authorities at designated locations across the city within three months from September 1.

Let’s wait and see if it is just an announcement or if it will be really enforced. If it should be enforced I expect that people who use mobile phones for illegal activities will buy their numbers outside Shanghai, or will give poor unemployed workers a few kuai to register in their names. And also I do not expect the amount of spam SMS to reduce: I get about 3-5 per day, and most are from China Mobile anyway!

After lunch I had a wine tasting session to determine which wines to serve during my wedding. This is one of the nicest parts of organizing a wedding. We decided on two nice Bordeaux wines, a red 2000 Chateau Haut Dina and a white 2001 Chateau Bauvallon. During the tasting we discussed a few things about foreigners doing business in China, and the way they often look at the market (if every Chinese would buy one of my products etc.). Thomas Kaeppelin (manager of DT Asia, the wine supplier) then made a good remark: “If every second Chinese would drink a bottle of wine per day (like in France), there would not be enough wine in the whole world!”

Interfax posted this story this morning:

PowerNet Technology, a Chinese online gaming firm, has developed a new online game in cooperation with the China Communist Youth League (CCYL) named “Anti-Japan War Online,” which will begin commercial operation by the end of 2005, a PowerNet official said Tuesday.

“The game will allow players, especially younger players, to learn from history. They will get a patriotic feeling when fighting invaders to safeguard their motherland,” a PowerNet Project Manager, surnamed Liu, told Interfax.

The background for “Anti-Japan War Online” is the Japanese invasion of China during World War II, from 1937 through 1945. Players are able to play simulations of key battles, but will only be able to play as the Chinese side. Players will also not be allowed to kill other players in the game. In addition, fighting in the game between Japanese and Chinese soldiers will be shown only in miniature, so as to reduce the violence level of the game, Liu said.

The new massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) will begin internal testing later this August, with commercial launch of the game expected in 2005. The online game is based on PowerNet’s self-developed game engine.

The CCLY said in statement that few games on the Chinese market today generate a “national spirit” that can educate young players. As a result, the CCYL will actively partner with online gaming companies to jointly develop “patriotic” online games.

“‘Anti-Japan War Online’ is a patriotic online game that is both interesting and instructive, and can attract and guide young players,” Chen Xiao, the CCLY official in charge of partnerships with online gaming firms, told Interfax. “We will pay close attention to the authenticity of historical facts in the game.”

Interesting, anti-Japanese protests are not allowed anymore, but a game like this is sponsored by the government! I wonder how many people will play this game. Would they play it because they are patriotic? Or only if the game is as good as they other online games they normallly play? I guess the last reason is more important for the younger generation.

The first thing I normally do when arriving at the office is to make a big cup of coffee. Normally Sophie has already turned on the machine before I arrive, so the only thing I have to do is push a button and a minute later I have a large cup of steaming hot Italian coffee.

This morning I noticed that the coffee machine was still off. I turned it on, but nothing happened. I tried the computer nex to it, also not working. Ergo, a power failure in that part of the building. The office is located in an old villa (a sign over the entrance gate says 1903, but the National Heritage sign on the building says 1920), and this is the first time in 6 months that this has happened, so that’s not too bad.

I needed to make some copies, so turned on the copy machine, which is in a different part of the building. But instead of the ‘warming up’ message a huge amount of white smoke came out of the machine. Well, that was the end of the machine, 3 months old and ready to be scrapped. And it wasn’t even a cheap Chinese one. Definitively not a good start of the day.

Five minutes later two repairman came. Lots of loud talking as usual, but in the end they had no clue about what had happened, and blamed workers that had been redecorating our neighbour’s office the day before. So still no electricity, and because of that also no internet. So now I am writing this post at a Coffee Beanery outlet having a XL coffee and free wireless internet. My secretary will call me once the problem is solved, which I hope is within 2 hours, because then my laptop battery will be empty.