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It's a small world

Sometimes it seems the world is really small. Look at what happened yesterday for example: I was riding in a cab with Gary, my biz partner for Toodou.com, when he got a call from a guy from the US that he would meet later that afternoon. Turns out I also met this guy a couple of weeks ago through an online business forum, and when he arrived in Shanghai the week before I had lunch with him and his wife. This was a total coincidence.

In the evening I went out for a couple of beers with Hugo Verkuil. Hugo arrived from Europe that morning for a short biz trip, but has so much energy that even though he did not sleep on the plane, he still was ready to go out. He is a friend from university who used to be with BCG, but just started a high-level job with Unilever. I picked him up from a biz dinner that he had to attend, and there I see a guy who I know from several years before in Beijing. This guy, Peter, used to be Chairman of Wall’s ice cream in China. Turns out he is now Hugo’s boss (head of worldwide ice cream activities for Unilever), who ‘lured’ him away from BCG.

Over a beer at New Heights I am talking with Hugo about Toodou.com and about Gary Wang. And yes, you might have guessed it, Hugo knows Gary. They were classmates at INSEAD 3 years ago. The world seems to be really small. Or is the international business circle so small?

TV shooting for Toodou.com

The podcasting multimedia website that I co-founded last year is becoming extremely popular. With up to 700,000 page hits per day, and over 50,000 registered users (15 days ago it was only 30,000 registered users!) Toodou.com is exceeding the figures from its business plan. Lots of media attention, not only from blogs, but also interviews with magazines and newspapers. This morning we had a TV crew in our office that interviewed us and followed our work during a couple of hours. They will make two programs, one will be aired on Dragon TV as a part of City Beat next Sunday, the other one will be broadcasted on CCTV next month during TechMax. If I don’t forget about it I will put the exact times here later.

Internet speed

This weekend the internet speed was once again extremely slow. It started Saturday around noon, when I noticed that I got server timeouts on my Gmail account. This site normally works fine, even on busy times on the net, so when it is not loading on a Saturday afternoon something must be wrong. It turned out that almost half the (foreign) sites I tried to load did not work. Strangely, it was not the case that only European or only US sites worked, it seemed very randomly. I was planning to work on the organization of my honeymoon in the Philipinnes, but that turned out to be impossible, as also here about half the sites of hotels and resorts did not load.

I talked to a friend in Zhejiang province, and he had the same problem. So it seems to be something bigger than just my neighbourhood. And when my parents tried to call me on Saturday night they told me they could not get a connection to my mobile, and had to call three times to my landline in order to get through. Sunday afternoon things suddenly were back to normal again. I could not find anything on the net about it. Was anybody else affected or does anybody know what happened?

Cooler weather


It seems the height of summer is over in Shanghai. Early this week still temperatures were still around 37 degrees, but not we are back around 30-31 degrees. I like the heat, but I also appreciate a bit cooler weather. Finally I can go for a walk at lunch time again, without having to take a shower afterwards and change clothes. In the evening it is actually quite cool (lower 20’s). I went running two days ago, and when I walked back from the gym at 10PM it was very pleasant to be outside. Normally I tried to be back inside asap because of the heat, but now I walked around my apartment block to cool off a bit.

Apple History


Since about 10 months I am using an Apple computer, and I am extremely satisfied with it. Not one virus hit me in 10 months! Quite amazing, considering that I used to have one about once every 10 days (no, please do not start attacking my computer now…). It is very user friendly, quick, and does not hang itself up. Compatibility with Windows computers is almost 100%, and the few programs that do not run on Apple yet (or not as good, such as the Skype interface) will probably do so soon. And of course Apple’s Operating System is way ahead of Microsoft.

What I did not realize, is that Apple had the same advantage over other computers already more than 20 years ago. Thanks to Rexblog I came across the election issue of Newsweek from 1984 in which all the ads were from Apple. One person scanned all these ads and put them on this page. It is a fascinating read: they are introducing users to cut and paste, which was a revolution back then. And they were the ones who introduced the mouse and the 3.25″ floppy (storage: 400K), I never knew that. I could not believe it when I read that Apple already had an email client in 1984 (MacTerminal), and that you could read the Wall Street Journal or make airline reservations online with an Apple. That is 8 years before I had my first email address!

Responsibility

Two interesting related news items in the Shanghai Daily today, about responsibility for an accident. The first one was against a travel agent: a tourist had drowned while swimming in the sea in Thailand. The family of the deceased decided to file a lawsuit, because the travel agent should have warned the tourist that it is dangerous to swim in the sea. In my opinion totally ridiculous, but the court did not see it that way and awarded the family damages.

The second news item was about the family of an old man, who had died in a bath house in Shanghai. According to the family he slipped and fell down, but the bath house said that he fainted and then fell. I think both are not enough reason to sue the bath house, because everybody can fall there (there is always the danger of water on the floor, you cannot avoid that). But also here the court saw it different and said that bath houses should pay special attention to older people.

Well, I am glad I am not in this service industry in China, because this is just ridiculous. How can a company be held liable for mistakes (swimmer) or accidents potentially related to being old (bath house)? If I were the bath house I would not let elderly people in anymore. And for the travel agent? Ask for a certificate that shows that you can swim, otherwise you will not be allowed on the beach or near the water. Is that really what people want, or are the courts just treating the average citizens as little kids?

Taxi line @ Hongqiao airport

Yesterday I flew back from Beijing to Shanghai. As usual the flight was delayed, this seems to be standard when flying this stretch. We had to wait for one hour on the runway before we were allowed to take off, due to ‘traffic control’. What this means was not mentioned, I suppose too many planes were on this route.

Another thing which has become standard is the long line for taxi’s at Hongqiao airport. The picture shows how long it was. For people who don’t know Hongqiao, behind the taxi starts the normal waiting line (3*50 meters of queing between low iron fences). I had to wait for about 45 minutes this time, which gave me enough time to wonder why the management of the airport does not come up with a solution for this. It is so simple, even Beijing airport has implemented it already: put the taxi’s not behind each other,but next to each other, and things move much quicker. Now the slowest boarding passenger holds up all other taxi’s as well.

VoipBuster


I am a heavy Skype user, even though the quality is not always 100% in China (due to the internet firewall?). One of the many nice things of Skype is that you can also call regular phones, for a very small amount of money (I tried to look up the rates just now, but the Skype.com site seems to be down in China). However, I now found a Skype competitor that offers calls to regular phones in most of Europe, the US, Australia and even China for free! The company is called VoipBuster.com. I tried it for a few days before posting here, and it is quite stable. The only thing you have to do is put a deposit of EUR 1 in their account. This is not used up, although I don’t think you can get it back either. Without the deposit you can only make calls up to 90 seconds, then the call is automatically disconnected. I don’t know how they do it, but it works. One bad thing, at least for Apple users like me, for now the software only works in a Windows environment. I did not try to run it on Virtual Windows for Mac yet.

Wedding preparations

This time I am not going to Beijing for business, but to prepare for my wedding. In less than one month (on September 10) I will tie the knot there. And still so much to prepare… Qi is now a full-time wedding planner, she quit her job at Bertelsmann last week, and will not start to work in her new position at Roland Berger until right after our honeymoon.

We made a wedding site for all our guests (especially for the ones from overseas), it can be found at www.chijs.com. Also lots of wedding pictures on there, as you might now in China these are normally taken several weeks or even months before the wedding. I wrote a post about it a couple of weeks ago, but due to problems with my former weblog I don’t think it was ever published. I might post it again in a few days.