Cool HTML5 game news: Spil Games and Google are hosting an HTML5 Game Jam in Spil Games’ headquarters in Hilversum, the Netherlands on the weekend of October 9

It’s Monday morning 6 AM and I am sitting in a hotel room in Eindhoven, looking back at a great weekend. Friday night was nothing special actually, I went to Tudou around 7 PM to pick up my wife, had a chat with Gary and then spent an hour in a traffic jam to get home. After the kids were in bed I worked a bit and packed my suitcase.

Saturday morning I took a flight to Hong Kong for a trail run with Marcel Ekkel. He is back in HK after a working as an expat in Jakarta and it was nice to catch up again. We had planned to do a 34 km trail run (stage 1-6 of the Hong Kong trail), but because we started off a bit late we only managed to run/hike 21 km before it got dark . Enough for me to be honest, I am in relatively good shape again but not in top shape yet. And running a trail means most of the route is either uphill or downhill… It was very enjoyable, amazing how much nature there still is on Hong Kong Island, just a few kilometers from one of the busiest cities in the world.

After the run we went to a gym to shower and change clothes and then had a nice dinner with some beer and a bottle of Australian Chardonnay on a terrace at IFC overlooking Hong Kong harbor. At 9:30 I had to take the Airport Express back to HK Airport in order to catch a flight to Amsterdam at 11 PM. As usual that went quickly and I even had time for a glass of champagne and some French cheese in the Air France lounge. The flight I mainly spent asleep, or at least resting. I finished a book (Super Sad Love Story, great book!) but that’s about the only thing I did during the flight.

My dad picked me up at 5:30 AM at Schiphol airport (thanks dad!) and we drove to the beach at Zandvoort straight away to go for a run. I was still tired from my run the day before and a bit jet lagged from the flight, but once I put on my running gear I felt great again. We ran from Zandvoort to IJmuiden and back over the beach and hardly saw anybody else. Seeing the sun rise over the dunes was a beautiful sight! The way back was not easy for me because of the head wind and because my upper leg muscles were still hurting from the Hong Kong run, but we managed of course.

We then drove to Hilversum for a cup of coffee at Peter Driessen’s house (Peter is Spil Games CEO) and to take a shower. He borrowed us 2 bikes so we could ride to the gold course to watch the final day of the KLM Dutch Open at the Hilversumsche Golf Club (thanks for the invite KLM!). We had a nice afternoon there, walking quite a distance on the course and enjoying good food and wine in the KLM Elite lounge.

At night Peter and I drove to Eindhoven where we had dinner. After dinner I was too tired to go for drinks, so before 10 pm I was back in my hotel room, read a couple of mails and some RSS feeds before falling into a deep sleep. I had a great weekend! I’ll be in Holland for meetings the next few days and will be back in Shanghai on Friday night.

After last week’s Spil Games’ announcement that the company launched HTML5 mobile game websites on all of its portals and is putting its full weight behind HTML5, this week it is Tudou’s turn to announce an important HTML5 development. If you want to watch one of Tudou’s over 40 million videos on a mobile device, the video will be automatically real time (!) transcoded, using HTML5 and HTTP live streaming. The technology is now in open beta for Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile and in closed beta for the iPhone and iPad.

Globally Tudou is the first video website rolling out real time video trans-coding access to its complete video library. YouTube, for example, announced some HTML5 support, but so far not for all of its videos. Tudou believes that HTML5 video rendering will become the next major protocol delivering video content across multiple platforms. Good to see that once again Tudou is leading innovation in the video space, not only in China but worldwide!

In the meantime, Tudou is gradually launching the Tudou Mobile Widget 2.0 across Symbian, Andriod, Windows Mobile, iPhone, iPad, Java and Bada platforms.

I believe that HTML5 will become the new standard for online games, especially for games that you play on a mobile device. No more need to download apps, but play them directly in your browser. And also no more wars between Apple and Flash, because HTML5 can be played in a browser on any device, even on an iPhone or iPad.

Spil Games, which has grown into the world’s largest online casual gaming company, believes HTML5 will be the future standard and has decided to put all its efforts behind it. Today we launched HTML5 mobile game sites on all our portals, except for our sites in China and Japan that will follow in September. This means that if you have an Android or iPhone and visit one of our sites (for example www.agame.com) you will see our HTML5 gaming portal in your mobile browser. Spil Games also organizes a HTML5 developer contest with a total of USD 50,000 in prizes for the best HTML5 games, for details see www.html5contest.com

Below the picture is the press release that we are sending out right now:

HILVERSUM, THE NETHERLANDS, August 31, 2010

Although I am not a big fan of Baidu’s search results, I have to admit they are quite innovative. Their latest innovation is something I have not seen anywhere else so far: if you search for game related words such as ??? (mini game) you will first see 4 mini games before you see the links to the highest ranked mini game websites. And not only that, you can even play the games right there on the Baidu.com site, see for example Popcap’s Plants vs. Zombies below. (If anybody from Popcap reads this, did you make a deal with Baidu or are you as surprised as me to see this game there? According to the text the game was supplied by youyouwin.com, not Popcap).

It seems a smart move from Baidu, that can pull this off because they are a semi-monopolist after Google left. I wonder if the users really like it, do you prefer to play games in a search engine result page instead of on a social network or a site dedicated to casual games? Maybe because many of Baidu’s customers are low end users they will be okay with it, but for me it’s annoying and an additional reason to stay away from Baidu.

It seems Baidu is planning to roll out integrated apps for other areas as well. So far there are two other categories that have this feature: entertainment (right now with only PPTV and Douban.fm as search results) and software (that can be downloaded directly without going to another site).

China is different from any other country, I have experienced and learned that many times over the past decade here. But even I would not expect pictures of the burning wreckage of a plane crash on the home page of the airline that crashed one of its planes just over a day after the accident.

But that’s exactly what happened: on Tuesday Henan Airlines flight VD8387 crashed during a night landing in foggy weather in Yichun (Heilongjiang), killing 42 passengers and injuring 54. And today the whole website of the airline has been replaced by a site that reminds me of an official mourning site. No links to any other information, just a message saying that they regret the crash with some additional information and phone numbers to call. To me it feels a bit creepy…

h/t Shanghaiist

In early 2006 my Gmail box was almost full. I tried to get additional storage but it was impossible despite Gmail’s slogan of “Never delete another message anymore”. In the end the only thing I could do was to delete thousands of emails to get sufficient new storage. At that time I wrote on my blog that I would not mind paying USD 100 per year to get unlimited storage. Well, it seems my prayers have been heard, because when I got a message yesterday that my Gmail account was once again full (despite now having 7 GB of storage available instead of 2.7 GB in 2006) I immediately received an offer to buy additional storage. This is not something new, but so far I didn’t need it so I hadn’t tried it yet.

So of course I immediately bought more space and I now have another 20 GB to fill, enough for many extra years of emails (assuming average file size won’t increase) and with the option to also use it for other in the cloud storage (e.g. Google Docs). The price? Just USD 5 per year. Considering that I was willing to pay USD 100 it seems like a bargain. If you need more storage that’s also available, up to 16 Terabyte right now (16384 GB).

It also gave a me the chance (or better: it forced me) to sign up for Google Checkout. Yes, I am a late adopter for once. Nothing special, but it works a lot faster than PayPal in China, so I am likely to use it more often. In that respect storage is a good marketing tool for Checkout, Google!

More information on Google Storage here

During my short summer holiday in Holland I started running a bit more. I love it but I need to make time for it, and time is always my biggest constraint it seems. Not only because of work, but also because of the kids. And with a wife who regularly works until the early hours it means I normally don’t go to bed until 1 or 2 AM. So it’s virtually impossible to run in the morning before taking Scott to school and going to work.

But I set myself some goals and decided to start practicing more again. My plan is to run at least 25 km per week and to row another 15 km – at least when I am not traveling. That means my basic shape should be good enough to run a half marathon without too much trouble (except for muscle ache in the days after because I am not used to the distance).

One problem that I often have when I start running more is that I get injuries. Some people told me that that’s because I don’t stretch enough. As a runner in the high school track team we always did a lot of stretching exercises, but I hated them. I hardly ever do them and normally just start my runs a bit more slowly. I feel stretching doesn’t bring me much.

And now it seems that science confirms my experience. A study sponsored by USA track & field shows that stretching does not lead to less injuries. Interestingly there also does not seem to be any correlations between age, gender, mileage or level of competition and injuries. The only two factors that seem to influence whether a runner gets injured more is being overweight or having a recent injury.

If you are a big fan of stretching don’t suddenly stop doing it, however. If you are used to doing it and suddenly stop you double your injury risk. That probably explains the ‘myth’ that you need to stretch, because if you’re used to it it seems to really help.

The summary article on USA Track & Field is here: http://www.usatf.org/news/view.aspx?duid=USATF_2010_08_20_12_13_14
For more details or the clinical details you can go here: http://www.usatf.org/stretchStudy/index.asp

Thanks to Joe for sharing the link on DailyMile.com