When I was working at DaimlerChrysler Northeast Asia in my early days in China, the company had a bus factory (Yaxing-Benz) in Yangzhou, Jiangsu province. I went there regularly, but did not like the city at all. There was nothing to do in those days, the city literally pulled up the sidewalks at 8 pm and turned off all the lights. The factory was old and dirty and there was a lot of joint-venture politics going on that I don’t even want to think of anymore. When at a certain point the German CFO of the company (Juergen Pfrang), who I worked with closely, was murdered in Nanjing I sort of decided I would never go back to Yangzhou anymore.

Anyway, I had not been to Yangzhou in over 10 years, but when I saw that there would be a half marathon there I thought it would be interesting to see what had become of the city. My plan was to train hard to run a good time, but too much travel and work hindered that plan a bit. I am generally in good shape, so even without training specifically for this I felt I should be able to run a decent time.

On Saturday afternoon my colleague Joop Dorresteijing and my dad took the car to Yangzhou, about a 3.5-4 hour ride. In the old days the ride took us about the same amount of time, even though we still had to take a ferry across the Yangtze river (now there are several new bridges). But there is so much more traffic than 10 years ago that you can’t drive fast anymore.

We arrived in Yangzhou around 6 pm, checked into our hotel (the same as I used to stay in 10 years ago, luckily it was completely renovated now) and went to pick up our numbers at the marathon office. That went quite smooth and 15 minutes later we were walking around Yangzhou’s city center. I could hardly recognize the place anymore, it had been completely transformed in 10 years. I guess this was to be expected, but somehow I disliked Yangzhou so much that I thought it would still be stuck in the old days of no bars and restaurants and bikes instead of cars. It was actually a quite pleasant city, not as busy as Shanghai but with all the modern conveniences. A bit like Shanghai 10 years ago I guess.

The half marathon started at 8 AM, but we had to be there before 7 AM already so I got up at 5:40 to eat a small breakfast (half banana, small piece of banana bread, some yoghurt and a cup of coffee) before driving to the start of the race. We got there on time and found that we were in the 2nd starting grid behind the professionals. Pretty good, because that means you don’t need a lot of time passing slower runners in the first kilometers of the run. However, we quickly found that this is China and many people went into starting grids closer to the starting line. At a certain point hundreds of runners even entered the starting area for the professionals!

So what do you do in that case? Just do like they do and also move to a better start position. So 20 minutes before the start we managed to get right behind the professional athletes and we could watch them do their preparations. The race was also the Chinese national championship, so a lot of top Chinese runners were at the start. Of course the usual Kenyans were there as well, you see them at all marathons in the world these days.

The start was supposed to be at 8 AM, but because it was broadcast live on TV as well and the program started at 8 we had to wait a couple of more minutes before we were allowed to go. But then at 8:05 the gun was fired and we were off. As usual the professional runners were out of sight within a couple of minutes, I’m always amazed at how fast they run. My dad and I decided to run together and we quickly settled into a speed of just over 12 km/h. Because the course was broad and mainly flat (except for a few bridges and a hill in a park north of Yangzhou) that was an easy pace to run. The first 10 km we ran in 46 minutes, an excellent speed for me.

The number of spectators was amazing, many more than during for example the Shanghai marathon. They were all screaming Jia You as loud as they could and some groups even had drums. At some parts along the course there were so many people watching that the people in the back of the crowds could hardly see the runners. As a participant it’s great to see this and it makes running a lot easier.

The scenery along the race course was beautiful. 8-lane roads in the city and smaller paved roads in the parks north of Yangzhou. The organization was good (except for the problems at the start line) and there were refreshments and water every 5 kilometers. I know I dehydrate quickly when it’s sunny (which it was during the run), so I drank some water while running at almost every stop.

My dad and I kept on running together, but I noticed he was having a hard time in the final kilometers. I slowed down a bit to stay with him and used my extra energy to wave at the public and clap my hands above my head, which led to the spectators doing the same. Too bad I could not film it, is was really cool.

Around kilometer 20 my dad told me I didn’t have to stay with him and that I should pick up my own speed. I had calculated I could still run within 1:40 if I would really go for it. I still felt great, so I sped off. In the final kilometer I passed a lot of people and eventually crossed the finish line in 1:39:55. A record time for me! My dad finished about a minute later and we had some water while waiting for Joop to finish as well (he came in at 1:49, also an excellent time). We all felt pretty good and were very happy with the race course and organization. If you are into running and live in China this is a race you should check out!

After the hit success of the first Tudou “made-for-Internet” drama series in October 2010, Tudou launched its second “made-for-Internet” drama series

Today I was looking at the stats for my pictures on Flickr and I was surprised to see that I had just hit the 1 million view threshold: my pictures and picture sets have been viewed over 1 million times over the past years. On average about 500-600 pictures are being viewed per day at the moment on the site.

I put my pictures on many places on the web and I always assumed that Flickr would be the place where most people would see them. But that’s actually not the case: I just checked the stats at my Posterous account (which only contains pictures I take with my mobile phone) and there I get over over 34,000 views per month, or over 1000 per day! Stats see here: http://sitelogiq.com/chijs.posterous.com (not sure how accurate these stats are, but I have nothing better)

I don’t pay much attention to my page views actually (I like to share information but don’t do it to make money from it), but it’s interesting to see how big of an audience you can build without doing any promotion.

Since I left Mercedes-Benz back in 2002 I visited every Shanghai Auto Show, but this year I will miss it for the first time. I was in Beijing from Monday until Wednesday and this weekend I will be in Yangzhou to run the half marathon there. That combined with lots of work made it impossible to go to the show.

Since I stopped writing columns for car magazines a long time ago already, there is no real business reason to visit anyway, but I still like the atmosphere at this show. It’s so different from any other auto show in the world: sometimes I wonder whether the visitors are there mainly to look at the cars or at the models (see also some other posts on this blog about the Shanghai auto show). Next year the show will be in Beijing, maybe I will go there so I can take pictures like the one above this post!

Picture source: Shanghaiist

This afternoon I took my family (my parents, Scott & Grace) to the free practice of the Formula One. For days Scott had been talking about it and when we picked him up from school during lunch time he was very excited. Within 45 minutes we arrived at the Shanghai Circuit and my driver found a parking space very close to the entrance of the race track (there were not many cars yet).

We had Grandstand tickets, but because we were about an hour early we had enough time to check out some other locations of the track first. 15 minutes before the start of free practice we sat down at our seats and looked at the activity in the pit lane. We were seated right across from the Massa and Alonso’s cars (Ferrari), an excellent location. We put Scott’s ear protection on, but he didn’t like it too much. However, after the first cars started to leave the pit lane he was so shocked by the loud noise that he did not want to take it off anymore.

Scott was watching completely fascinated by the racing cars. It was impossible to communicate with him, not only because he was wearing his ear protection but mainly because he was fully focused on the action. Not sure if he really understood what was going on (probably not), but he seemed to enjoy it.

After watching the free practice for 45 minutes I went to meet with Alexandre Imperatori, one of the race car drivers in the Porsche Carrera Cup Asia. His next session would start at 4 pm, so he still had over an hour time, and he came to meet Scott and me to show us the Porsche pit area on the inside of the race track. Scott got a chance to sit in his car, but he was a bit afraid and wanted me to hold him, so that didn’t work out. Alex quickly introduced me to his team manager and some other people, and then he had to start preparing for his next track performance.

In the mean time Ho-Pin Tung (reserve driver for F1 Lotus Renault GP) contacted me. He had seen on my Facebook that I was at the racetrack and he invited me to the Lotus Renault pit area. He came to pick me up at Porsche and we walked over to the pit lane. However, because I had Scott with me we could not get into the pit area, because we had no ticket for him Actually at Porsche we had been lucky, only after we entered we found out kids are not allowed there. So Ho-Pin and I just had a chat, and I heard some very interesting news from him that I won’t be able to blog about here – at least not right now. Then Scott and I said goodbye to Ho-Pin (I will see him again tomorrow at a dinner) and walked back to the public side of the track.

Scott was very happy, despite being tired (no afternoon nap today) he was jumping, running and talking about the fast cars the whole time. We stopped for a few minutes at the Mercedes-Benz AMG test area where professional drivers took clients on test drives on a parking lot. Very cool to see their skills up close and to see what they can do with their cars. By that time Scott was so tired that we decided to call it a day and take the car back home. It was a great afternoon at the Formula One race track, I’ll be back on Sunday for the F1 Grand Prix!

Formula One is in town this weekend, so there are lots of racing related events. Tonight Ferrari organized a dinner (with among others their drivers Massa and Alonso) and party at M1NT. Grace and I went to the party which was (mainly) held on M1NT’s rooftop terrace. The weather was great for an outdoor event tonight, spring has really arrived in Shanghai it seems.

Ferrari actually put a real Formula One car on the wall in the M1NT night club. Not this year’s model though, but ‘just’ a 2008 one.

Grace and our neighbor Elaine, who we met at M1NT with her husband

I don’t think I have been at a lot of parties where cigar makers prepare fresh cigars for you. But Ferrari had one during the party!

And even less frequent, at least in China where nudity is still not allowed in public, is a body painted girl. But M1NT pulled it off, the lady was totally naked and body painted in the colors of Felipe Massa’s racing suit with M1NT both on the front and back!

I enjoyed the evening a lot, too bad it was on a Thursday instead of a weekend night. But a party like this compensates for a bit less sleep!

I love to drink wine and try to drink only good wines – Life is too short to drink bad wines, right? Over the past decade I tried many different Chinese wines, but most of the time I was not very impressed with what I tasted. Sure, there were a few decent ones among the tens of locally produced varieties that I drank, but generally they were at least twice as expensive as a similar non-Chinese wines. I’d love to find a good Chinese red wine below RMB 100 that I could drink at night on weeknights, but so far I have not been able to find one.

A couple of weeks ago I was doing a late night ice wine tasting at home. My friend Alexandre Imperatori (a race car driver who among others races in the Porsche Carrera Cup Asia, you can watch him this weekend at the Shanghai Circuit before the Formula One race) had given me a couple of excellent Canadian ice wines, and it was time to try them.

I posted the results of the tasting on Facebook and then one of my FB friends told me that a friend of his was related to the owner of a Chinese vineyard that produces ice wines. I was intrigued, because I had never heard about Chinese ice wines before. He asked me if I would be interested to try the Chinese ice wine, and if so he would arrange for some bottles to be delivered to my home.

And indeed about 2 weeks ago 2 beautifully packaged bottles of Vidal Eastars Ice Wine were delivered to my place. Because I was about to go on a business trip I decided to save them for a better moment, which turned out to be last Sunday. My parents were visiting and they also like good wines, so we opened one of the bottles.

To be honest, my expectations were not very high. I had been disappointed so often by Chinese wines that I expected an okay wine, but nothing special. But I was wrong: the wine was excellent! It was a typical dessert wine, deep yellow with a thick almost oily structure. Of course the wine was intensely sweet and it had a very nice after taste. If someone had told me that this was a Canadian ice wine I would have believed it, this wine was at least on par with some of the bottles I had before.

This means I can’t keep up my saying that China doesn’t produce any good wines. This bottle proved me wrong and I am happy to admit it. And the good news is that I still have a second bottle waiting to be opened!

Eastar ice wine’s website is here (Chinese only). The webshop is empty however, so you can’t buy any wines there. I found another shop online where you can buy the wine, 6 small bottles (375 ml) for RMB 1488 (USD 227).

Spil Games has taken a leadership role in the HTML5 gaming space, not only globally (see for example the Game Jam together with Google or our HTML5 contest), but also in China. We have been involved in all HTML5 conferences that were organized in Shanghai and Beijing over the past couple of months and we have launched our mobile HTML5 game platform at youxi.cn. The good thing about HTML5 games is that you can play them on every mobile smartphone, so not only on Android (like with Flash games) but also on the iPhone.

I personally believe that eventually HTML5 will make apps obsolete, and it seems more and more people agree with me. See for example this article on Venturebeat from a few days ago: http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/07/how-html5-will-kill-the-native-app/ Of course a lot of the commenters don’t agree, it somehow reminds me of the early days of Flash games where there were a lot of non-believers as well. I still remember that about 5 years ago we were trying to convince the Game Academy in Shanghai to start offering Flash courses, but they didn’t believe it would be important for games. Times have changed, now it’s easy to find Flash game courses in China but nobody is offering HTML5 courses yet.

As part of Spil Games leadership role we actively try to roll out partnerships with mobile social networks. Among others we put HTML5 games on Japan’s leading mobile social network Mixi, where we even had the #1 game in January. In China, however, mobile social game networks for smartphones are not as developed yet, but that will change fast as well.

Yesterday Spil Games launched its first HTML5 game on the mobile version of Kaixin001 (still as an app, HTML5 games can easily made into apps with a wrapper). Play it here! This is a big milestone for HTML5 games in China, because as far as I know this is the first HTML5 game on any mobile social network here. Also other giants like RenRen and Tencent don’t have this yet.

Spil Games worked closely with Kaixin to help develop their mobile API, so we would be able to roll out the HTML5 game with social features, such as high scores. But you can now also post your score in your timeline for all your friends to see (notification) or ask your friends to play as well (invitation).

This is just the beginning of course, very soon we have some other big projects that will go live on Chinese portals. Exciting times for HTML5, I believe this is the beginning of the future!

If you’re in Shanghai and want to be more involved in the HTML5 scene, make sure to attend this weekend’s HTML5 conference. Peter Driessen (Spil Games co-founder & CEO) will give a keynote about the future of HTML5 games and Spil Games’ role in this.