Last week Elaine was chosen as Star of the Week for her Nursery class, and so her picture was put at the entrance to the school. Elaine was very proud of her achievement, and of course I am also proud of her being the first Star of the Week in her class.

I am also proud of her language skills, and how easily she switches from Dutch to Chinese and to English. Her Chinese is now basically fluent, her English is quite good (and even better than Scott when he was 2 years and 4 months old) and her Dutch is already at a basic level (she understands most Dutch things I am saying to her, but her vocabulary is not big enough yet to really talk back to me in Dutch).

Sometimes things go a bit wrong though, especially after I come back from a business trip and she did not hear nor speak any Dutch for a couple of days: on Saturday she came to me and asked me “You leave me papa?”. I was a bit surprised by her question, I thought she was asking me whether I was going on another business trip. But no, it turned out she was trying to find out whether I like/love her, and she used the Dutch word ‘lief’ for that, which does sound very similar to to English ‘leave’. She was using English grammar, however, so it took me some time to figure out what she meant.

Another example of a Dutch mistake that she makes and that always makes me laugh is when I ask her what she is eating (=’Wat eet jij?’). It happened a few times already that she answered ‘Elaine’. It took me a bit to figure out why she answered with her name, but then I realized that she thought I was asking her her name, which sounds similar in Dutch (=’Hoe heet jij? -> Eat=eet, your name=heet).

Scott, who is now 3 years and 9 months old, is now fluent in Chinese and almost fluent in English and is very good at Dutch. He can even translate things from Chinese to Dutch or English for my parents when they come to visit. That can come in handy sometimes with our staff who only speak Chinese.

It’s amazing to see how quickly kids pick up the languages we speak at home and how natural they switch from one language to the other. Interesting is also that the kids often speak English among themselves when their nannies are around (so the nannies can’t understand what they are saying) and Chinese when they are with my parents in Holland (for the same reason). But if they ask them something they switch to another language without even thinking. Wish I had learned Chinese and English at their age already…

I am at the DEMO Fall 2011 conference in Santa Clara, CA at the moment. It’s my first time at this conference, that takes place at exactly the same time as its competitor TechCrunch Disrupt. I visited most of the TC Disrupt conferences over the years, and I expected DEMO to be very similar. Although both events showcase start-ups that launch on stage during the event, there are quite some differences.

First of all companies have to pay USD 18,500 to present on stage for 5 minutes at DEMO. TechCrunch Disrupt is free to present, if you manage to get in of course. Both events cost money to attend, DEMO USD 1795 and TC Disrupt USD 2995 for the current event, although I met several people that got in for free (mainly VCs – disclosure: my tickets were given to my by a VC firm as well). I find USD 18,500 a lot of money to invest for a 5 minute presentation for a start-up. Maybe I am biased because I am based in China, but with that amount of money we can run UnitedStyles.com for about 5-6 weeks right now.

When you present you get a lot of press coverage of course, but looking at my Twitter stream and RSS feed the coverage of Disrupt seems better than DEMO. Maybe because TechCrunch does hardly write about the companies presenting at DEMO, but Venturebeat (that works together with DEMO) does have writers at Disrupt. Gust.com did a good job this year by presenting on stage at DEMO and getting a write up on TechCrunch at the same time by sponsoring Disrupt.

In terms of start-ups, the consumer oriented ones seem to be better off at Disrupt, but if you are perceived to be more ‘boring’ you’ll probably have a better chance at DEMO. Over the years many products from established companies have launched at DEMO. Some of these are really interesting, but you won’t see them at Disrupt.

DEMO has been around for many many years and used to be the #1 place to launch your start-up. It has a good reputation and several VCs and entrepreneurs on stage mentioned that they once launched a company at DEMO. Disrupt seems to have taken over the #1 position, at least in my perception, and at least for now – not sure what will happen after Mike Arrington announced on stage on Monday that this will be his last working week at TechCrunch after the fall out he had because of the CrunchFund.

Disrupt definitively has more action, more loud music and much better food. It’s more like a rockstar event. DEMO seems to be more of a serious conference, it is smaller and if you attend as an investor it’s easier not to miss any of the interesting companies. There are a lot more companies presenting on stage at DEMO, 80 in total during this conference. Because they all have just 5 minutes to present and there is no expert Q&A like at Disrupt, I feel you get more information more quickly. Most people in my Twitter and Facebook network seemed to be at Disrupt, not at DEMO.

Both conferences have its pros and cons, but I personally like TechCrunch Disrupt better. If I would launch a company I would certainly first try at Disrupt, paying USD 18,500 for a slot to present at DEMO just does not feel right to me for a start-up. Maybe that was okay 15-20 years ago, but times have changed. For that amount you can launch a company and a (simple) product these days.

Putting on my investor glasses I think Disrupt may have the more interesting companies on stage, but at DEMO you get to see more companies in a shorter time, which is also important. Also if you invest more in non-B2C companies DEMO may be better. One thing in which DEMO excels is the quality of the presentations. The quality at TechCrunch Disrupt is certainly high, but the ones at DEMO are even more polished and seem to be better prepared. I guess that is logical if you pay so much money for a few minutes in the spot light.

Location wise Disrupt is cool because it is located in downtown San Francisco and it has some very good parties. On the other hand, DEMO is easier to reach by car (it’s a the Hyatt Regency Silicon Valley) or when you are not staying in SF itself – and you can easily park there as well.

And lastly, if you are a coffee addict like me it’s a pretty big con if there is no coffee available throughout the day, esp. if you are still a bit jet lagged. DEMO had coffee in the morning, but they took it away after the conference started. I solved it by making several trips to the hotel lobby and get my caffeine shots there at the hotel bar, but it feels awkward to have a conference without coffee.

This weekend I flew to California, and spent the weekend in Sonoma to (among others) look at some wineries. A couple of pictures from the short road trip.

The Golden Gate was still in the clouds in the morning, as usual this time of year.

By coincidence I saw a sign for the Kendall-Jackson winery along 101, so I went to check it out. Kendall-Jackson is one of my favorite Californian wine brands – I actually found one of their Grand Reserves last weekend in Xiamen.

The Tomato Festival was going on at Kendall-Jackson, which had been sold out for months. But I was lucky, one of their wine club members who overheard me telling the lady I had just flown in from China had extra VIP tickets and gave them to me for free (normal ticket price USD 65)! I even got extra tickets for wine, so I could have 10 glasses of their wines (I didn’t drink them all though). The Tomato Festival is really nice, which many local restaurants preparing their finest foods that you could all taste for free and of course all of the best Kendall-Jackson wines.

And all of that in the gardens of the Kendall-Jackson chateau:

Another good wine area in the Sonoma wine regio is Russian River. The closer you get to the coast the nicer the area gets, there are beautiful redwood forests covering the hills surrounding the Russian River. Very different from the wine hills just 15 miles to the East of it. This picture was taken in Monte Rio at the Russian River bridge.

From Monte Rio it’s a less than half hour drive to the Pacific coast, where the Russian River ends in the ocean. This picture was taken in Jenner, it reminded me of the Great Ocean Road close to Melbourne, Australia.

Further down Highway 1 the Pacific Ocean beaches are virtually deserted.

I ended the trip in Tiburon, where you have a great view over the bay to San Francisco and the Golden Gate bridge.

Today the lead singer of one of the best bands in history would have turned 65 years old. Freddy Mercury of rock group Queen died back in 1991, but his legend lives on. To honor his birthday Google made a fantastic animated Doodle on the music of Don’t Stop Me Now. If you go to Google.com today (or if you are in the US on Tuesday because of Labor Day), you will see the logo above that you can click to watch the Doodle. It took a team at Google 3 months to produce and the result is excellent:

Link to the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/m5RtSTrLk6k

This year’s annual outing for Spil Games Asia was in Xiamen, the coastal city about 600 km north of Hong Kong. I had never been there actually, so it was a good opportunity to get to know the city a bit. Because of the distance from Shanghai we took a plane, Xiamen Airlines flies many times per day between Shanghai and the city, and with a group of 100 people you can get very nice discounts.

We left early Friday morning and around 10:30 AM we landed in Xiamen. The first thing I noticed was a KLM plane that was parked at one of the gates. I had forgotten that KLM now also flies directly from Amsterdam to Xiamen, a sign that the island city is booming! I guess most of the people flying on the Xiamen-Amsterdam route are Chinese business men, because I hardly saw any non-Chinese in the city. At some points I even felt like a tourist object myself, with people staring at me (likely tourists from the countryside), something that never happens in Shanghai anymore.

We were not very lucky with the weather, on both days it was a bit foggy and rainy in the morning, but the afternoons were sunny (albeit hazy) and at night we could even see the stars above the sea. But we were actually relatively lucky, because we were told a typhoon had just passed by – which explained the weather. It was hot and humid, with temperatures in the lower 30s, and it felt like Hong Kong in summer.

Xiamen has fantastic beaches, and on most of them there was hardly anybody. They are all sandy beaches and they stretch most of the eastern and souther part of the island (I did not see the west and north). There is also a lot of green in the city, with some big salt water lakes and some tree covered mountains north of the city center. The fact that it is a port town makes the city feel alive.

I liked the city, even though it is not very Westernized yet. Sure, there are the usual McDonalds and KFCs, and there is even a Starbucks now (just one), but generally it is a very Chinese city. No fancy Western restaurants (the best one, The House, had great food and service, but some of the others guests in shirts and shorts made it feel like a backpacker place) and terrible service in clubs and bars. I won’t go into detail, but if you just want to have a cold beer in a club it’s almost impossible. They try to upsell you to a bottle of Jack Daniels until it drives you crazy. In the end we left without even having a beer: they wanted us to buy 12 beers right away, otherwise we could not sit down!

Except for the service nightlife seems to be decent. Eventually we found a Texas (!) bar and restaurant right on the sea where we had a couple of beers and a bottle of chilled white wine with some colleagues. Also here some things went wrong when ordering of course, but in the end we had a nice evening there. The only thing I found disturbing was the neverending flow of beggars. Every few minutes one would stop at your table, trying to stop your conversation and sometimes even touching your arm. I guess the bar owners can’t stop them, but I can’t imagine it’s good for business.

The highlight of the trip was the half day that we spent on Gulangyu, the old International Concession island opposite Xiamen’s city center. A beautiful island, even in foggy and rainy weather. It’s quite small, walking around it takes about an hour, and filled with European colonial houses. Many of them dilapidated, but several of them restored to their former glory and turned into boutique hotels or fancy residences. Of course I checked out the real estate prices. I somehow had expected relatively low prices, but it turned out that a nice villa sets you back at least 2-3 million USD… And that’s in town, not even a villa close to the beach with a nice sea view. Crazy.

Gulangyu has some very nice beaches, and except the ones close to the city center they were virtually deserted. I did not bring my swimming trousers, but I would have loved to take a dip in the ocean. Next time maybe, because I will certainly be back one day. Then I will stay in a hotel on a beach, bring some books and just have a couple of very relaxed days there.

Spending a weekend here was fun, and it was a good way to get to know some Spil Games colleagues a bit better. I think most people liked it a lot, at least I heard only positive stories from everybody. Like me, most people had never been here, so it turned out that the destination was a good choice. For some people this was even their first flight! I would like to thank the organizers of this trip for their hard work to make this such a success. I know it was not easy to manage the organization for such a big group and at such a tight budget, but you gave all of us a fantastic couple of days away from the office. Thanks ladies!

I took a couple of pictures with my phone during the trip, you can see the set here.

I wrote this article for the Business Insider, the original was published here.

Several trends are happening at the same time in the online game market. Where a few years ago the most popular, and most profitable, titles were triple-A games, nowadays the most played games are casual and social games. These are games that are much simpler and less expensive to produce than triple-A games. Another trend is that mobile games are growing very fast, something that had been forecast for years already but only happened after the iPhone and the app store took off. And lastly a trend that may still be less visible for the general public but that people in the industry talk about a lot, is the shift to cross platform games.

When they hear the word cross platform games, most gamers will think about MMO (massive multiplayer online) games that can be played on different consoles, such as the Xbox or the Playstation. But that’s not the real trend I have in mind here. What’s happening now is that developers are working on games that can be played on mobile devices and regular computers, giving a similar experience on all devices. This is happening especially for social and casual games.

Some people, such as Popcap’s Giordano Contestabile, see cross platform gaming as playing a game which presents different vertical slices of the same environment on different platforms, all interconnected into a wider gaming experience. With this he means that different parts of the game can be played on different devices. Although this may certainly happen for some games, I don’t believe all players would be in favor of this. In my opinion the whole game experience should be available on one device, if that is possible.

One service that is bringing cross platform games to the general public is OnLive. Although this is a cloud gaming platform that delivers a game from a server real-time through the Internet, the end result is the same as what cross platform gaming is trying to achieve. You can now theoretically play the games that are available through OnLive on every Internet connected device with video, including on phones or on TVs.

Remote streaming needs a fast Internet connection however, and that’s not always available to everybody. Next to that it will likely prove difficult to develop touch controls for all different mobile devices, although OnLive also provides a controller for playing games on an iPad. For casual games using a high-bandwidth service such as this one may also be a bit over the top, but for MMO games it is certainly a good cross platform solution.

Although I believe in services like OnLive, I think the real cross platform games will be games that can not only be played on every device but are also optimized for every device. Especially this last point is important, because you will need different resolutions and different kinds of game controls (keyboards, touch etc.). One way this can be achieved is by making many different versions of the same game in different languages, like some companies have been doing for mobile games in the past. But with the advance of HTML5 this is suddenly a lot easier. Because HTML5 runs in all new browsers (including browsers on smart phones), the main problem is solved right away. You will still need to make sure that the game can be controlled through a keyboard/mouse/controller or by touch and you will need to add different resolutions, but once that is done the game is ready to ship.

HTML5 still has its limitations, but it works well for many social and casual games, and is getting better literally every month. It is today exactly a year ago since Spil Games launched its HMTL5 strategy, driving the convergence of games on mobile devices and on the Internet. At that time this was still completely new, but 12 months down the road HTML5 is widely seen as the future for the mobile web and as a viable alternative to native apps. I therefore believe true cross platform gaming in the sense of playing the same game on different devices might come from HTML5.

In my opinion cross platform is more than just cross device, it should also include being able to play the same game on different online gaming platforms. The big advantage of HTML5 games is that these games can also be played on social networks, e.g. on Facebook or Google+, or on dedicated social game platforms. That is where most social and casual games are being played nowadays, so just having an app or game that runs on many devices is not enough.

One problem that I foresee, however, is that it will be easier to play a certain game on a laptop than on a phone, or the other way around. For example, I normally get higher scores in the game Angry Birds on my iPad than while playing it in Google+ on my laptop. The opposite is true for some shooting games, where I am too slow on a touch screen. When you want to play against other people on different devices, this is a potential problem. Maybe a handicap system like in golf can be invented for this? Getting additional points or additional lives while playing on certain devices may help to equalize scores. I have not heard that anybody is doing this, but I am sure someone will eventually come up with this idea.

I believe that once cross platform gaming takes off it will give another big boost to casual gaming. Being able to continue to play games that you started on your laptop at home,  on another device while commuting to work will be literally a game changer. Unite the world in play, on all kinds of devices and all kinds of online and social game platforms. With cross platform gaming we are almost there!

Back in 2003 when I was working with Sierk Vojacek in TV and video productions we produced a TV commercial for a local beer brand I had never heard of: Snow Beer. I am not sure anymore whether it was part of the payment, but after the shooting we ended up with quite some bottles of beer. I remember I didn’t particular like it, the color was very light and the beer didn’t have much taste, but on a hot summer day it was drinkable.

Over the years I saw Snow Beer more and more, especially outside the big Chinese cities. Likely because it’s dirt cheap, but maybe also because the light beer is more suitable to the Chinese taste than my favorite Tsingtao. What I did not realize, however, is that Snow Beer is not only the biggest beer in China, but actually is the best selling beer in the world! The beer is only sold in China, but it still managed to grow twice as big by volume as the global number 2 Bud Light. Quite amazing for a company that is only 15 years old!

The last time I remember drinking Snow Beer was during a Spil Games outing a few years ago, but then I had to drink so much of it (toasting and drinking ad fundum with colleagues) that I don’t really remember how it tasted. So I may give it a try again this weekend. A big bottle costs about EUR 0.30 (cheaper than bottled mineral water!), so it’s not a big waste if it still has hardly any taste. Cheers!

 

I just had an excellent experience with China Eastern in New York, their service in their New York office is really good. Interestingly, it actually all started pretty bad.

Because we didn’t know exactly when we would fly back to Shanghai after the Tudou IPO we didn’t book a ticket yet. So this morning we called China Eastern to see if there were any business class seats available on their direct New York-Shanghai flight tomorrow that we can book with miles (I collected almost a million KLM miles and because China Eastern is part of Skyteam now, I can use them for this airline as well). That was possible, but we had to come to their office, in walking distance from our hotel.

When we arrived at their office the Chinese receptionist was extremely bitchy. I am not sure what her problem was, but she refused to speak English with me (“I am talking to your wife, so I speak Chinese”). Then she said we could not book award tickets with KLM miles (“If you are the owner of Skyteam you can, but you certainly can’t”), and told me to call KLM. So that’s what I did, and after a 15 minute call with KLM in Amsterdam it finally turned out they could not find any empty seats. Then the receptionist told me “Oh, I had already seen that in the system”. So I could have saved 15 minutes on the phone with KLM if she had just told me that… At that point I had had it with her and told her I was going to speak to the General Manager.

Grace and I walked through the office into the office of the GM and closed the door behind us. She was surprised of course, but after we told her what had just happened she apologized and said she would help us to try to solve it. She was extremely helpful and got her sales manager involved to sort out the problem. There were indeed no seats available in the system, but they changed that for us.

Problem was that the KLM and China Eastern computer systems are not compatible, so I still had to call KLM. I did so, but there they could still not see the seats in their system. Then China Eastern told me to ask KLM to put us on the waiting list for award tickets, but KLM’s system was not able to do that. The person in Amsterdam I talked to even got his manager involved, but they couldn’t figure out how to do it. They were very friendly, but finally they told me to let China Eastern call Air France in Paris to solve it. The sales manager did so, but Air France told them to call the US office. So that’s what the China Eastern person did, but then the USA office told him to call the KLM number in Holland again… And so of course we were stuck again at where we were an hour earlier (yes, this took a full hour).

But the China Eastern staff did not mind and kept on trying to find a solution. They even put our names in the system with a locator code so KLM could book the award tickets against them, but even this KLM could not do in their systems. Then we tried to book an open award ticket, but that also did not work. I have to say that KLM really tried, but it seems Skyteam’s computer systems are not fully aligned. After another 30 minutes Grace suddenly had an idea that we should have thought of earlier: book an award ticket on a date that was still available and then let China Eastern change it to tomorrow. And that finally worked, it still took me another 20 minutes on the phone with KLM, but eventually they managed to do it. Then China Eastern’s sales manager changed the reservation in his system, and we were done!

I have to say that I am really impressed by how willing China Eastern was to help. This was in their New York office on 5th Avenue (with a view of the Empire State Building!), so not a travel agent or so, and 2 people spent 2 hours helping us out. Maybe it was because they wanted to make up for the arrogant receptionist? I don’t know, but they did everything they could to solve it. We were allowed to sit in the GM’s office the whole 2 hours, were served drinks and had some nice chats with the Chinese staff while on hold on the phone. This changed my impression of China Eastern very much, and I am almost looking forward to tomorrow’s long flight – almost 15 hours non-stop flying time…