Sunday night I was planning to have a late dinner with a friend at Sundance on Camino Real in Palo Alto, but it turned out that the place closes at 9 PM on Sunday. I was in the mood for a good steak with a glass of Californian Cabernet Sauvignon and a quick search learned that there was a grill place in Los Altos that was still open. The place was packed when we arrived, but because of the time some people started to leave already so we had a table quite quickly. The steak (tenderloin) was pretty good and they had a decent selection of Cabernet Sauvignons by the glass, so I was quite happy.

After the main course I decided to get the bill, but then the waitress asked me to wait a bit because there would be a surprise. I had no idea what to expect of course, but 3 minutes later a huge dessert arrived. The waitress told me that a friend who I had helped to find a job had sent it to me. I thought it was a mistake, I don’t know many people in Los Altos and most of the ones that I know are all start-up entrepreneurs living in Shanghai. The waitress said that he would come to our table in a minute, so I just waited.

And indeed someone walked over and introduced himself. To be honest, at first I had no idea who he was but then I vaguely remembered his name. Not sure if he wants his name on my blog, so I just use his first name, which is John. John explained to me that I had helped him a couple of years ago to get a job at an analytics firm. Then I indeed remembered helping him once with the preparation for some questions for his job interview (over Twitter I think) and I also remember meeting him once a while later at M1NT, probably during Geeks on a Plane.

He had recognized me when I walked into the restaurant and then decided to thank me for my help (he got the job) by sending me a free dessert. Thanks a lot John (he told me he reads my blog), a very nice gesture. It’s a small world! Let me know next time you’re in Shanghai and we’ll grab a coffee.

The past 3 days I spent in New York City for the TechCrunch Disrupt conference and to do lots of meetings. Despite the 12 hour time difference with Shanghai and the busy schedule, I had a great time in Manhattan. I arrived late on Sunday night after a trip of almost 24 hours from Shanghai (I flew through San Francisco with a several hour stop-over there) and was so tired that I decided to go to bed straight away. But once I arrived in my hotel room around 9:30 PM on Sunday night I was suddenly fully awake again… So I went down to the bar of the Paramount hotel and had a beer and some light food. My colleague Floris-Jan Cuypers had also just arrived (from Amsterdam) and he joined for a beer as well. We didn’t make it late though and once I was back in my hotel room I fell asleep quite quickly.

Of course I woke up only a few hours later, that’s the good and bad thing about huge time differences: I need less sleep with a jet lag (the first days normally only 4 hours per night) so you can be much more productive, but it’s not enough to feel well rested. I felt tired after getting up but once I started working on my mails I quickly got over it. After a few hours it got light outside, so around 6 AM I decided to go for a run. On my infrequent trips to the Big Apple I always try to run in Central Park, one of my favorite places in the world for a morning run. I was too tired for a long run, but I managed to do about 6 kilometers at a very slow pace (40 min…). Lots of people were running already despite the early hour and I felt truly happy running there, enjoying the nice weather and the beautiful scenery.

At 8 AM Floris and I caught a cab to Pier 94 for TechCrunch Disrupt. We had breakfast there and then managed to get good seats in the conference hall. Many of the talks were interesting, esp. the fireside chats with Fred Wilson (www.avc.com) and Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, and the Charlie Rose interview with Y Combinator’s Paul Graham. But I found the emphasis on AOL (TechCrunch new mother company) a bit annoying, Arrianna Huffington’s panel was typical old media (“If I would tweet I would tweet this” etc.).

Compared to TC Disrupt in San Francisco this version was not as good. The event has gotten too big and the location was not optimal (too cold and too noisy). Also I felt that the audience was not as interesting as the one on the West coast, I hardly knew anybody and also I didn’t meet a lot of interesting new people. In SF that was very different, so likely I won’t go to the New York conference again next year.

In the afternoons we mainly had meetings. I can’t blog about them here, but I was very pleased with the people we met. Although we set up the meetings only last week they turned out to be much more important than the TC conference! We had only planned to have a few meetings, but in the end we had talks and presentations every day for the past 3 days and therefore missed about half of the TC conference. No big deal, we saw the most important people speak and we (of course) also joined the after parties.

On Tuesday I went for a run again early in the morning and this time I managed to run all around Central Park (about 13.3 km incl. the part from the hotel back and forth to the park). Most people don’t run the full round, so the Northern part is much more quiet than the Southern end. A good preparation for the New York Marathon that I will run in November this year with my dad and sister (we all managed to get tickets!). Wednesday I was too tired so I skipped the run and had a big breakfast with lots of black coffee at Times Square instead.

All in all a very worthwhile trip, even taking into account the long travel time and the big time difference. No real time for sightseeing during this visit (but at least we managed to do a bit of clubbing on Tue night), and I am now on my way to San Francisco for a few more days of meetings and then heading back to Shanghai for a few days in China with my family.

In just over a week Ho-Pin Tung will be the first Chinese race car driver to participate in the Indianapolis 500. And guess what? Tudou’s logo will be featured on his car! Very cool, many thanks to Ho-Pin and his team for helping to make this deal.

And that’s not all, Tudou will send some of its reporters to follow Ho-Pin Tung around the Indy 500 race and the footage will of course be put exclusively on Tudou. So if you want to know more about how Ho-Pin prepares for this race or get his reaction after the race come to Tudou.com.

This is actually not the first time that one of the companies I am involved in works with Ho-Pin Tung. Back in 2006 the logos of youxi.cn (now Spil Games’ Chinese mobile game website) and game.com.cn were featured on Ho-Pin’s Formula 3 race car. And in 2008 we even made a flash racing game for Ho-Pin, you can still play it here in English and here in Chinese.

Today I finished a book on my Kindle that was so good that I want to share it on my blog as well. It’s Siddharta Mukherjee’s The Emperor of all Maladies – A Biography of Cancer. The 2011 Pullitzer Prize winning book written by an oncologist is a history of cancer, a history of the disease (or actually the many diseases that are all called cancer), our understanding of cancer and how treatments developed over the years.

It was a fantastic book to read, but because it’s quite a thick book it took me about 3 weeks to get through. I mainly read late at night and as the book is quite theoretical at some points, that is not always the best time to read it. But I enjoyed it very much and have a much better understanding of what cancer and cancer treatments are all about. A new world opened itself up for me, not always a pretty world, but a world that 1 out of 4 people eventually end up in.

The fight against cancer is something that we might never win, but we understand our enemy a lot better than just 25 years ago. As Mr. Mukherjee puts is, cancer is a distorted version of ourselves. Cancer genes are mutated genes of normal genes. Cancer genes seem to be immortal and they keep on growing into a possibly more perfect version of ourselves. Scary in a way, but if we would ever find out what makes cancer immortal, it may also lead to new breakthroughs in other areas of biology and medicine. One of the things I take away from the book is that, in general, we are not able to beat cancer and may never be, but

This weekend the Tudou Video Festival 2011 took place in Beijing. Or to be precise, about a 45 minute drive from Beijing on the grounds of the Goose and Duck Ranch. In the days that I still lived in Beijing (until early 2003) I had been to the Goose & Duck a couple of times (it was still called Goose & Duck Farm at that time), but the place has grown quite a bit since then.

I drove to the Video Festival straight off a plane from Amsterdam and started with a cold beer with Gary at lunch. Not the smartest way to avoid a jet lag, but you only live once right? In the afternoon I watched some of the pitches that companies did for their films, walked around a bit in the resort and eventually even slept for almost an hour. I normally try to avoid sleeping during the day after a flight, but after a pretty hectic schedule in The Netherlands without much sleep and with more than enough alcohol, I really needed to close my eyes for a while. I felt great after I got up and then spent the rest of the afternoon in the sun next to the river with my Kindle. Very enjoyable!

After an early dinner we went to the huge tent that had been set up for the 1000+ guests that attended the event (Tudou had chartered a large number of buses to get the people to and back from the Huairou countryside). We had excellent seats and had a good time during the festival. As I wrote in other blog posts about the past Video Festivals I am every year again surprised about the high quality of the films. Most of the finalists are as good as professionally produced content and that’s of course why a lot of people show up: this is THE place in China for talent scouting! Even people from the Sundance Festival attended this year’s event, and 10 of the finalists of the Tudou Video Festival will now compete in the Sundance Festival as well.

After the show was over there was a great after party with wine, beers, and even cognac, lots of food, several shows on an improvised stage, live music and several bonfires. I had a great time talking to many old and new friends. A nice ending of an interesting day!

See all the winners of the Tudou Video Festival here on Tudou: http://tdvf2011.tudou.com/

Sorry for the relatively low quality pictures: I took them with my iPhone and then uploaded them at the lowest quality, like I normally do when I am abroad. Except that I was of course back in China already