A couple of weeks ago I put a video on my blog of a sand artist who had made a tribute to the football World Cup. I thought that was quite spectacular, but this week I came across a form of art that’s at least as special: water art.

It’s basically an artist putting some oil pigment on water and dispersing this to create a work of art. The artist is highly skilled and in this video he paints among others a desert on water and later on a Buddha. See it for yourself in the embedded video or here on Tudou.

For the full story behind this video see here on TudouChina.com, the English language Tudou blog.

Yesterday I went to the soft opening of the Dutch Design Workspace, an incubator in Shanghai for Dutch companies active in the fields of design, fashion and architecture. I am on the selection committee of the incubator program and this was my first visit to the Workspace. I was pleasantly surprised, the Dutch Design Workspace looks great. The space is big and very bright, with lots of windows and a very nicely designed interior. Plus it has a very nice rooftop terrace!

The Dutch Design Workspace is open for small and medium sized Dutch design companies. These companies could already have done a project in China and want to develop their (international) business or start for the first time in the Chinese market. At least one of the key designers of this company will move to China to live in Shanghai and work within the incubator location together with the rest of his (local) team.

The second group that the incubator aims at is individual Dutch designers. He or she should have a strong design talent and sufficient skills to work in a flexible environment. The designer will live and work in Shanghai, close to the location of the incubator. For these participants the incubator offers a flexible solution; they can start with workspace on an individual basis that can be extended once their activities grow.

The third group is local designers, researchers and other collaborators. The participants from this group shall have a strong relationship with one of the participants, one of their projects or Dutch Design in general. The support of the incubator program does not apply for this group; market standard fees will be charged for the workspace.

Selection will be made by the incubator organization to ensure that they fit the requirements of the Dutch Design Workspace, level of design quality and do not become competition to other Dutch participants.

The first three companies that were selected for the incubator program, architecture firm MVRDV, museum and expo designers Northernlight and multidisciplinary design firm FiveSpices,

Tudou is looking for a part-time social media intern for its Shanghai office. We are looking for a native English speaker with a good knowledge of written and spoken Chinese. A proven track record in English language social media (SNS, blog, video etc.) is a must. You should be a good writer and be available for about 2.5 days per week for at least 6 months. Starting date: asap

The internship gives you the opportunity to be active in a very dynamic working environment and to be one of the first people to learn about internal and external developments at Tudou. You will be reporting to Tudou’s VP of Marketing & BD and work closely together with our PR people in the US (and probably also with me sometimes).

Interested? You can get in touch with Ms. Anita Huang at ahuang (at) tudou (dot) com for more information about this position. You can also directly send her your resume. Make sure to include links to some of your online presences.

Next month Tudou

While driving commuting between home and the office I always work in my car through a 3G connection. The connection is normally fine, but what gets on my nerves are the ads that China Unicom keeps on serving. No full screen China Telecom ads anymore like a year ago, but some still cover half the screen. At least they go away after a few seconds – so quickly that you can’t even take a screenshot.

Yesterday I was driving home when I checked Spil Games’ Arabic site DailyGame.com. I opened the site and noticed a big pop-up on the lower right side. Knowing that Spil Games does not sell pop ups on its sites I knew right away that this was once again an illegal China Unicom action. To make things worse the pop-up did not disappear automatically and even caused my browser to crash (Chrome, not Firefox). At least it gave me the opportunity to take a screen shot.

This just reminded me of a picture that one of my blog readers sent me: http://www.startinchina.com/components/com_jd-wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/china_telecom_ads.jpg

So at least the pop-ups are smaller now…

On the day of the final of the football world cup a lot of people in The Netherlands were overjoyed that the Dutch team made it to the finals. But some went a bit (too) far: in the YouTube video above a Dutch priest turns the Sunday mass into some sort of football party. At first I thought it was a practical joke, but it seems to have been a real event. What I read in the Dutch press is that the Catholic church authorities were not amused and suspended the priest.

I don’t really have an opinion on this. For me religion, and the Catholic church in particular, is one big act already and at least this is a play that many people can relate to. But I can also understand the church authorities who feel their power over the church (and over the few remaining people who are still going to church) slipping through their fingers. As an outsider it’s funny to observe and I had a good laugh watching the semi-serious church goers in the clip. Maybe I should put the video on Tudou, I wonder what the Chinese would say about it.

For the third time this year a staff member at Spil Games Asia resigned because he/she could not afford the cost of living in Shanghai anymore. Our salary level is not low compared to many other companies, but it turns out that the cost of living in Shanghai is so high that for some people it just does not make sense to stay anymore.

Housing prices are the main culprit. If you bought a house a few years ago things are fine, prices have doubled or tripled over the past years so you are safe. But if you rent in order to save some money to pay the down payment for a future mortgage you are out of luck. Housing prices in the city are so high now that people with normal salaries can hardly afford them anymore.

So what we are seeing now is that people are moving to other cities. The first person that resigned this year for financial reasons received an offer from a good Internet company in a smaller city on the East coast. With a similar salary he could get himself decent housing there, but in Shanghai he would never be able to afford that. The second one decided to become a civil servant in his hometown. The pay would be a lot less, but in the end he would have more spending power (and probably an easier life). Yesterday a third person resigned to move back to her hometown with her husband. Again housing prices in Shanghai were the main reason.

People who are originally from Shanghai normally won’t leave because they have their roots here, but people who come from cities in inland China are now starting to go back. It always happens after they have stayed in Shanghai for some time and realize they basically have no future here. If you can’t even afford a house how can you start a family here? It’s the same trend as the one for migrant workers 2 years ago, they also left the coastal regions to go back home. There are more opportunities in inland China now and you only need a fraction of your Shanghai income to have the same quality of life.

This means a brain drain for cities like Shanghai, but it’s probably good for China as a whole. The distribution of knowledge will be more even and this will help the development of the non-coastal areas. It may cause some problems for companies because it puts an upward pressure on salaries for experienced staff. You are still able to find (or keep) people as long as you are willing to pay, but for top people salaries now already come close to those in Europe.

My colleague Richard Yu wrote a good article on TechCrunch about future of the mobile market in China. His prediction is that Android will win the mobile wars in China and become the biggest platform by far. I fully agree with him, see for example the last paragraph of this blog post that I wrote a few days ago.

The fears that because Android was originally developed by Google it can never win here are unfounded:

(…) officially sanctioned versions of Android are flourishing, starting with last year