Zlong Games (Spil Games Asia’s Shanghai game development studio) is doing very well, the October results just came out and the studio generated more than 100 million page views during this month! Congratulations to Leo Liu and his team for this great result, very nice to see how the company and its games developed over the past couple of years.

Zlong produces mainly Flash and HTML5 casual games for Spil Games, both single- and multiplayer games. The company also makes social games, for external social networks but also for Spil Games own network of online game websites.

Within a week of Tudou officially releasing its iPhone and iPad application in the Apple App Store, the Tudou Video App has quickly ranked no. 1 among all Chinese free apps.

I am sitting in a plane back to China after an intensive week in Holland. I left China Sunday night around midnight on the overnight KLM flight. I wasn’t feeling completely well (I am having a minor case of the flu for almost 2 weeks already), so I had 3 glasses of champagne and 2 Tylenol and that combination helped me to get over 7 hours of sleep. The plane landed at 5 AM and after waiting for the suitcases for 25 minutes (noticing once again that it takes much longer for your suitcases to arrive at Schiphol than in China or most other Asian airports) I was on my way to Rotterdam by 5:30 AM.

A brand new Jaguar XJ with a driver picked me up from the airport and took me to the Bilderberg Parkhotel, where I had 2.5 hours to freshen up and do a bit of work. I made some phone calls, wrote several emails, and had 4 cups of coffee before leaving for the Erasmus University / Rotterdam School of Management at 9 AM sharp (again by Jaguar of course).

In the morning I gave a talk at the yearly Entrepreneurial Seminar, together with several other Dutch entrepreneurs. My talk focused on characteristics of successful entrepreneurs, and I tried to make the speech more interesting by giving lots of real life examples that I have seen in companies that I am part of or invested in. I recognized a lot in the talks of the other entrepreneurs as well, the main characteristics for all of us was that you need to fail at least once, should be willing to take big risks, be extremely competitive and work at least twice as hard as others. Our stories did not necessarily convince the students that they should become entrepreneurs as well, in an article about the conference Dutch newspaper De Pers wrote that only one student was confident enough to choose the start-up life. Well, I also started in a corporate career before I realized that was not really my thing.

In the afternoon I gave a two hour lecture/workshop about doing business in China for Masters students. I really enjoyed this, it was a very lively session with tons of questions from the students. They all had to pay an entrance fee to get in, meaning that they were likely much more motivated to actively participate than during a regular lecture. Despite the fact that I was a bit tired after the flight and still didn’t feel well I think it went quite well and I realized that this kind of lecture is something I enjoy doing very much. Maybe I should seriously consider teaching university students in a future life, it gives me more energy than it costs.

At night I drove back to Amsterdam with a friend from my university days, Jasper Bugter. I realized we had not seen each others since my wedding 5 years ago, so we had lots to catch up on. We picked up his wife Tamalene at their house in Amstelveen and then headed into the city. At a special beer cafe we tried several different bock beers (typical beers for this time of year) and had a great night. Around 11 I headed back to my hotel and fell asleep right away.

On Tuesday I had a breakfast meeting in my hotel before taking a train to Hilversum to Spil Games. There the first thing I did was to walk around the whole office and talk to as many people as possible. I realize that despite being in the Dutch office several times per year I don’t really get to talk to most people, aside from saying hi when walking by their desks. I also went out for a cup of coffee with executive searcher Frank van der Linden (and had my second right in a Jaguar in as many days), not because I am looking for a new job but just to catch up. It turned out that we have some mutual acquaintances (not unusual considering his huge network) and I also heard some stories about how my dad was when he was still a manager: my dad recruited Frank for his 1st internship back in 1984.

On Tuesday night I had dinner with a friend who has been in the fashion business for the past 13 years or so (both online and offline). Always good to catch up, especially because of my involvement in UnitedStyles.com. At night I had beers with a group of friends from my fraternity, which was cool as well. But because I still was not feeling too well and I had to get up early I didn’t stay too late. Probably good, because I woke up at 5 AM and the whole of Wednesday was a strategy meetings with the Spil Games management team in our office in Eindhoven. We do this a few times per year now, and every meeting gives all of us new insights and helps us to make sure we do the right things. The online casual games market is changing very quickly, but I think Spil Games is able to change with the market and even anticipate the changes. After a nice dinner in Eindhoven we got back to Amsterdam after 11 pm, where I worked on my emails for an hour and then went to bed.

Thursday morning I had breakfast with trend watcher Vincent Everts to catch up on what we’re both doing, and he used the opportunity to do a video interview with me as well (or here if you don’t have a VPN in China – note: interview is in Dutch). After that Vincent drove me to Spil Games, where he talked to some of the other managers and eventually even stayed for lunch. The afternoon I mainly spent working on a presentation but I didn’t make much progress: the office is an open office, meaning that everybody walks by the whole time and many drop by for a short chat. I enjoy that of course, but it doesn’t increase work efficiency. I don’t think I could work in an open office environment anymore. At night I had dinner with a business friend at Restaurant Lute in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel. It was my first time in this restaurant and the food and wines were excellent. And the location is quite convenient, the person I had dinner with had landed at 7:30 PM at Schiphol airport and was in the restaurant less than 20 minutes later!

Friday morning I worked in my hotel room for several hours, which was much better than in the office. No distractions except for the beeps of new emails coming in (so I turned off my email for a while). I was in the office by 11:00, so I would be in time to meet with Ho-Ping Tung for lunch at Spil Games. As regular readers of this blog probably know Ho-Pin Tung is a Dutch-Chinese race car driver, and he is currently the 3rd driver (reserve driver) for the Renault Formula One team. We normally see each other at least once a year, either in China or in Holland (Ho-Pin travels a lot more than I do). Always good to catch up with him and hear his stories about life as a race car driver. After lunch I took half a day off to meet with my sister as well. Ho-Pin drove me to her office and on the way there he showed me some of his driving skills in his fast Renault Megane RS. Very cool Ho-Pin, I was quite impressed (and I probably should have shot a video for this blog).

I spent Friday night and Saturday morning at my sisters new place. She just moved to a new house, a beautiful renovated farm. Much nicer than my house actually (but also a lot smaller of course). We went to see The Social Network, the movie about Facebook. I just missed it when it premiered in San Francisco last month (it came out on the day I flew back to China), but now I finally got a chance to see it. I loved it, it does not give a true view of Facebook’s start and Mark Zuckerberg’s personality, but it was a great start-up story anyway. Very inspirational and with some similarities to the things I have seen over the past years. If you are an Internet entrepreneur or want to be one, you have to see it!

Saturday afternoon Sonja and I did some shopping in Germany, mainly for me to buy Seelachs (I have not found this anywhere in the world but in Germany, I love it). We had a walk on the hills of Hoch-Elten as well, and after that she put me on the train to Schiphol Airport. That was about 12 hours ago and now I am already somewhere above Western China having breakfast. I had a good week in Holland but I am happy to be back in Shanghai with my family in a couple of hours.

This is pretty cool, an ad for Tudou’s original drama series That Love Comes was shown on Times Square in New York. Not that we are suddenly trying to target US users, but it was a nice gesture from PR Newswire.

And it seems that That Love Comes is not just seen as an entertainment series, because it’s now also used in a university course: The University of Mary Washington uses the series for an extra credit project as “an opportunity to explore and analyze China today through the window of cultural production”. I like the idea!

I had been to the World Expo a couple of times already over the past 6 months, but it was always business related so I didn’t get to see many pavilions yet. I had planned to take a day off from work to go here for a while already, but somehow never managed to do so. And because the Expo will close in less than 2 weeks I decided to bite the bullet despite being flooded with work & travel, and invite my wife and parents-in-law for a VIP visit to the Expo.

It seems that it’s getting more and more busy at the Expo before the gates will close for the last time next week Sunday. Last Saturday over 1 million people visited the Expo, despite the fact that the official maximum is 600,000 people. Today around 3 pm we saw that about 570,000 people had entered the Expo grounds so far, which explains why it was so extremely busy everywhere. Waiting lines for popular pavilions were 3-4 hours and some had waiting lines of 7 hours or more (Saudi-Arabia was rumored to have had a 12 hour wait last weekend!). Who in his right mind would line up for 7 hours or more just to visit a pavilion? Well, I for sure would not, so I had arranged a special tour. This means that you don’t have to wait at pavilions so you can see a lot more in a few hours than normally. It becomes more and more difficult to arrange this now that the Expo is almost coming to a close, I guess too many people found out about the trick and a lot of pavilions got tired of all the so-called VIPs.

The only line we could not avoid was at the entrance, but because we did not come very early (I first did my mails and RSS feeds at home and worked on a presentation) we got in within 30 minutes. I brought my Kindle, so I didn’t really notice it actually. The first pavilion we visited was that of The Netherlands, the one that I had been most times already. I very much like the architecture (it’s one of my favorites in that respect) but find they could have shown more about ‘real’ life in The Netherlands, instead of focusing on art, culture and new technologies. Other pavilions like Belgium and Germany did a much better job at that.

After The Netherlands we walked over to Belgium that shares its pavilion with the EU. I liked this one a lot, some very nice audiovisual presentations that give you a good feel for what Europe (and Belgium) is all about. I guess this Expo is different from most others, because most pavilions focus mainly on Chinese visitors (potential future tourists) and were trying to brand their country. In my opinion Belgium did a great job, for example by giving every visitor a free chocolate bonbon. Next was Denmark, where a huge line of several hours would have stopped me from visiting, but also here we could just walk in. The Danish pavilion features a bike path inside and you can bike through the pavilion. Downside is that you have to wait another hour in line for that, but still people did so. At the Danish pavilion I saw the Little Mermaid for the first time (I realized I had never been to Copenhagen, except to change flights at the airport), the Danes had flown in the original sculpture!

Next was lunch, we had made a reservation at the Belgian pavilion. This place has some excellent food, once again fantastic branding for Belgium. I had among others fresh salmon, cheese croquettes and a salad, and combined that with Belgian fries with a Chimay beer. One of the better lunches this year! After lunch we watched a short Expo parade with some marching bands and floats, before heading to the German pavilion. Germany is pretty strict in who they let in at the VIP entrance (except when you are a German national and bring your passport) and the waiting lines there are huge as well. But also here we had no problems and could enter right away. I liked the pavilion very much, a great combination of culture, technology and real life. Plus some good shows that kept people inside the pavilion for a long time. Very well done, it’s just a pity that most people had to wait in line so long. A nice touch was that Grace and mine former employer Daimler Northeast Asia also had its own presence at the German pavilion (they showed a Mercedes-Benz passenger car), so of course we took a picture there.

France was next on the list. I didn’t hear too many good stories about this pavilion and now I understand why. The pavilion itself is not bad, but you have to wait several hours to get in and it’s not worth the wait if you have already been there before. The wall projections of scenes from France are okay, but compared to other pavilions not very special. I liked the pieces of art from the Musee D’Orsay, however, but it was too crowded and noisy to really appreciate them. The last part was paid for by Louis Vuitton, they built a whole brand experience for Chinese customers. Very smart marketing! We wanted to buy a baguette afterward, but the lines to get into the bakery and souvenir shop scared us away…

We ended the tour at the Israel pavilion, which was a bit of a deception. It was just an audio-visual show in Chinese (with subtitles on panels next to the people) about how great Israel is and what kind of technologies come from Israel (“During the London Olympics you will watch the sports in Beijing through a new satellite from Israel!”). After the show the doors to the rest of the pavilion open and then you realize there is no other part, and you’re back on the street again. Glad I did not have to wait in line there!

My parents in law decided to stay, watch some shows and maybe visit some other pavilions, but Grace and I had too much work to do so we decided to head back. We had both been on the phone several times during the day and my phone’s battery was almost empty from continuously checking and answering emails, so I wanted to get back to my laptop. We took a walk along the Huangpu river waterfront (the only quiet place at the Expo) and took a ferry to Puxi (the corporate pavilions and the city pavilions are on that side). At exit 1 there are always a lot of taxis, so we hopped on one and were home 30 minutes later. I had a great time today despite the crowds. The Expo caused a lot of trouble for people in Shanghai and I am happy that it will be over in 10 days, but on the other hand I may miss it a bit as well.

A full set of pictures of today’s visit you can find here on Flickr.

Tudou.com‘s first high quality original drama series That Love Comes is now available with English subtitles for non-Chinese audiences. If you want to catch a glimpse of what young Chinese like to watch you can see episode one here and episode two here. Each episode is about 30 minutes. We plan to upload the first episode to YouTube as well for faster viewing outside China, I will add the link here once that’s done. I also embed episode one below.

The series is now already extremely popular on Tudou. The first episode came online Friday night and has now (Tuesday night) already been watched over 5 million times in normal quality, over 6 million times in HD and over 3 millon times in super high quality. That Love Comes will be distributed to over 10 overseas TV networks, including Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV that will air it all over Asia-Pacific. Enjoy the series!

This weekend Grace and I flew to Korea for Joop Dorresteijn & Suna Cho’s wedding and we had a great time there. The traveling itself did not completely go well, but that’s something you get used to in Asia. It started off with the regular two hour delay on the tarmac before take off from Shanghai because of ‘air traffic control’. I lost quite a number of working days already sitting on a plane that does not move. If the airline would just let you wait in the lounge it would be okay, but in that case the flight would be officially delayed and they would get a fine (if the doors are closed before departure time China calls the flight on time…). Anyway, I now already expect delays and normally keep on working on my laptop even if they tell me not to, but the worst thing is that you never know how long it will take.

We arrived in Seoul (Incheon) where everything went fine, except that China Southern had the gate that was furthest from immigration, it was literally a 25 min walk and train ride go get to the exit of the airport. After going through immigration and getting our luggage we went to buy tickets for the bus to Daejeon (3 hours), and found we had just missed it. The next bus was fully booked, so we had to wait another hour… We had a quick dinner at the airport and I checked my emails. My mailbox was flooded with new Twitter followers and at first I did not know why. Turned out Dutch magazine Management Team had put me in a list of the 15 Twitterers that you have to follow (others in the list are a.o. Richard Branson, Tim O’Reilly and Seth Godin). Probably a bit too much honor for me but thanks anyway!

The bus ride to Daejeon was pretty good, the bus has excellent seats (almost similar to business class seats on a plane) and I got a ton of work done on the bus. Around 11 PM we arrived in Daejeon and we managed to find a taxi to drive us to the hotel. At least that was the plan, but the taxi driver did not know how to operate his GPS, so after 10 minutes we decided to get out in the middle of nowhere and try to find another cab. That eventually worked and at 11:45 we arrived in the hotel, where they could not find our reservation. Well, with a bit of patience and by being very determined they finally managed to locate it and right before 12 AM we were in our hotel room. Exactly on time for a conference call that my wife had planned for midnight…

The next morning we had breakfast and then met several of Joop’s family members in the lobby to go to the wedding venue. That was about an hour’s drive from the hotel (Joop had rented a bus for us). Originally the weather seemed to be overcast with a chance of rain, but when we arrived the sun broke through the clouds and within no time most clouds disappeared. A good omen Joop!

Joop and Suna were already completely dressed up for the ritual, and then it was my turn to get dressed in traditional Korean wear as well. The reason was that I was among the carriers (together with Richard Yu) who would have to carry first the groom and later the bride to the altar. An interesting ritual and pretty heavy as well (especially the heavy wooden carriage that the bride uses was quite something to lift!). Very cool to be part of this, thanks for letting me do this Joop!

The wedding ceremony itself was full of rituals, and although I didn’t understand much (it was all in Korean) it was an interesting and impressive sight. At the end of the ceremony Richard and I were asked to be part of the ceremony again, this time to throw live chicken into the audience. People did their best to grab them and later somebody explained to me that the one who catches it can bring the chicken home!

After the ceremony was over we took pictures with the couple and then it was time for a big buffet. It was quiet warm actually so I enjoyed the cold beers in the nice Korean village setting. Interesting is that we among others met a Dutch lady living in Seoul (her husband is an expat in South Korea) who knew all about me because of this blog and Twitter (Hi Esther!), that’s why I love social media! When the lunch was finished we went back to the hotel for a rest or to do some sightseeing, before we would go for dinner. The evening was again in a traditional Korean setting, we had an intimate dinner with family and close friends in a 250-year old Korean restaurant in the countryside outside Daejeon. Very enjoyable, but a dinner can be quite long if you need to sit on the ground with a traditional low Korean table… But we managed and it was a very special evening with some traditional performances, traditional food and of course speeches and presents.

After we got back to the hotel we decided to have an after-party in one of the local Hofs (a kind of German-style bar). And an after-party it was: I even decided not to put the pictures online! Let me say that we had a lot of fun drinking a mixture of local draught beer and shoju wine, that we made friends with other Koreans that loved our performances of Dutch and English drinking songs and that I had a bit of a headache when I got up the next morning!

On Sunday we left Daejeon (Joop & Suna stayed a day longer) and went back to Seoul by the fast KTX train (top speed > 300 km/h). An efficient and not-too-expensive way to travel all over Korea (the 1 hour trip cost about USD 18,-). In Seoul we took a taxi to our hotel, checked-in and immediately left again to go shopping and sight-seeing.

We walked a lot that afternoon and eventually ended up at a sunset Han river cruise. Not very special (there is not a lot to see on the Han river), but still a nice way to end the afternoon. We then had dinner in a good Korean BBQ restaurant where we had a Chinese waitress/BBQ cook, so we finally could communicate relatively easy (not many people speak decent English in Korea). After dinner we went to a nice JjimJilBang (a traditional Korean bath house), the Dragon Hills Spa, to refresh and relax. Very enjoyable, I love this kind of spa (there is one in Shanghai as well, one of the few bathhouses where you can bring your whole family).

Today we did a bit more sightseeing and eventually ended up at Lotte World for a nice lunch and to do some more shopping. In the afternoon we took a taxi to Incheon before flying back to the kids in Shanghai. We missed them a lot, that’s the only down side for this kind of trips: I’d love to bring the kids but they are still too young. We had a very nice time in Korea and a fabulous experience at the wedding. Joop & Suna, thanks a lot for the invitation and all the best in your future together!

This is a copy of a post on TudouChina.com, original post here

A quick update that the long awaited