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…

Today Tudou.com was listed on the NASDAQ, almost 7 years after Gary and I founded the company! No time to write a post, so just a couple of random pictures that I took today.

Grace and Marc with the NASDAQ listing certificate

I love the slogan: Dream it, Do it, NASDAQ

NASDAQ welcomes Tudou on Times Square!

Closing ceremony, can you spot me?

More Tudou logos on Times Square

Since a few weeks the speed of my blog is a lot slower than it used to be. If you’re on a fast Internet connection you may not really notice it, but I now even got an email from a reader complaining about it.

Because I did not change any settings in WordPress and my hosting provider has not changed I had no idea what the problem was. But then UnitedStyles CTO Joop Dorresteijn noticed that the pictures cause the long loading time. It turns out that during my holiday I probably changed some settings in Flickr (where I host my pictures), and each time I now use a Flickr picture on my blog it does not load the 640 pixel version but the original high resolution picture – meaning normally 2-3 MB per picture. I will reverse the settings in my Flickr account, so from now pictures should be smaller again.

There is no quick fix to change the source file of the pictures in older blog posts, but maybe I will spend some time this weekend to manually change the links for the last couple of posts (there will be typhoon anyway, so I can’t go out).

Every year a couple of typhoons pass by Shanghai, but the last big one that exactly hit Shanghai was on the weekend of August 6-7, 2005. Exactly 6 years later another super typhoon will hit Shanghai on the same weekend, also on 6-7 August. Current predictions are that typhoon Muifa will blow into Shanghai from the East China Sea and make landfall here late Saturday night, with wind speeds of up to 130 mp/h (210 km/h). Its path can still change, but has been pretty stable for the past 24 hours.

That means a weekend full of rain and wind, with just 15 minutes of complete silence when the core of the storm is over Shanghai. I saw on my blog that the last big typhoon brought up to 300 mm of rain in 2 days. Today’s rainstorm was a lot less heavy than Muifa, but that already transformed some roads into canals. I took the picture below from my car window on Hongxu Lu, the water was so deep that most cars did not dare to drive through it!

Two days ago I needed to check a KLM reservation, but I could not log onto the KLM site with my frequent flyer number. So I tweeted about it and KLM later sent me a reply wishing me a good flight, which I retweeted to my followers. A few hours later while boarding for a flight from Shanghai to Amsterdam, I gave my boarding pass to one of the ground staff at the gate and instead of the usual green light a red light turned on… She didn’t know why but told me to go to the desk to find out what was wrong.

Before I could even walk over to the desk 2 KLM employees approached me and told me that they had a surprise for me, that’s why my boarding pass set off an ‘alarm’. They told me that because of my tweets they wanted to thank me with a gift, and they handed me a Nike paper bag containing an Nike iPod sensor! Because they followed me on Twitter they read I am a runner, so this was an excellent gift. The KLM social media reps also took a picture of me with the present for their site, I must have looked really surprised in the picture.

I just did a Google search and found that KLM does this more often, they even have a site for this: http://surprise.klm.com/ They describe the concept there as follows: “To see how happiness spreads, we committed little acts of kindness to brighten a passenger’s day. So next time you fly with us, we might just pop up somewhere unexpectedly.”

I really appreciate this KLM, especially considering our love-hate relationship on social media over the past years. Based on some tweets of mine Dutch newspaper Het Parool even wrote an article about among others KLM’s Twitter policy. At that time (over 2 years ago), KLM did not really have one yet, but that has changed since. KLM is since a few days 24 hours a day active on social media like Twitter – despite their Twitter profile still saying 8 AM- 11 PM.

Thanks a lot for the surprise KLM. I am impressed by your new social media strategy, lots of other companies (not only airlines) can learn from this. One of my personal social media slogans is “The more you give, the more you’ll get”, so I am sure for you this strategy will lead to more positive results as well.

One of the goals that I set myself for our summer holiday in Europe was to get into a much better running shape. I will run the New York Marathon in just over 3 months, and because I likely won’t have a lot of time for the necessary long training runs, I at least wanted to make sure my basic shape is in place now already. Next to that I wanted to run outside on my Vibram Five Fingers. In Shanghai I mainly run on the treadmill in my home gym, both because of the air pollution and because it’s just too hot to run outside. But in order to run 42 kilometers almost barefoot (the Vibram FF’s feel very similar to running barefoot) you need to do quite some training on the road, or at least on another surface than a treadmill, as well.

The runs worked out much better than I had imagined. Over the past 3 weeks I did at least 5 runs over 15 kilometers (incl. 2 half marathons), and I even did a 16 km and a 21 km run within 2 days of each other. Although I still feel a bit tired after the runs I do not have a lot of muscle ache anymore (after my first runs that was still the case), and the next day I feel good enough to run again. Happy to know this, it gives me a lot of confidence for the actual marathon.

During my vacation I ran on the island of Vlieland on the beach and through the dunes, I ran in France in the hills in the Provence close to St. Paul de Vence, and I ran several times in the woods around Ommen in The Netherlands. Running in the woods is great, you don’t meet any other people once you are more than a few hundred meters away from the closest road and nature is beatiful. I found a lot of new trails to explore in the future, and with my Nike GPS+ watch I was able to find them all back on Google Maps later. I didn’t take my phone or camera during my runs, but if I had I could have shot a lot of great pictures.

In a way I was lucky that for most of the time the weather was not very good in The Netherlands. It was way too cold for the time of year and it rained a lot. Perfect for running. I like to run in the rain, it makes long distance running easier and you don’t meet any other people – most prefer to stay dry indoors. The only downside is that the trails (I ran a lot on trails in the woods) can be slippery, and you have to watch out that you don’t fall.

And of course that’s what happened to me: during a 16 km trail run I slipped after about 10 km and hurt myself. I managed to get up again and finished the run without too much pain, and I thought things were fine. But when I arrived home it suddenly started to hurt a lot, I didn’t really feel it while running. I will spare you the details, but if you fall down while running at 12-13 km/h and there are some small stones on the ground you can imagine the result… Anyway, I am fine again now, and I started running again. But I will be even more careful in the future.

Today we will fly back to Shanghai, I am happy to go back but I am not too happy that I will have to run on the treadmill again from now on. As I have said several times before already on this blog, the thing I miss most in Shanghai is running outside in nature. You can’t have it all…