Tomorrow another edition of BarCamp will take place in Shanghai, at the NetCircle offices starting at 9:30 AM. I don’t know why they chose this date, because this weekend will be a working weekend in China, but it seems many people will attend anyway (97 registrations so far on Friday afternoon).

If you don’t know BarCamp, it is an unconference where everybody can give short talks on certain topics and where everybody participates. You have to show up in the morning to get your name on the schedule and then you can give your talk or show off your ideas or product to others. For a list of some of the topics that were proposed for tomorrow see here.

Normally these events are a lot of fun, you get to know many people and you will likely learn a lot as well. I won’t be able to join because I’ll be in meetings most of the day in my office, but if you have no other plans I can highly recommend you to check it out. You can sign up here.

At night there will be a rooftop party sponsored by Wieden + Kennedy at their office on 1035 Changle Lu (5/F), with beer, wine and music. The party will start at 8 pm, see here for more details.

Not only did I have a company outing this weekend, but we also moved to a new house. While going through boxes of old papers in my study I found two newspaper pictures from May 2000 in which I appeared next to Arnold Schwarzenegger. At that time he was still the Terminator instead of the Governator, and I was still just a mid-level manager at Daimler.

The story behind the pictures (The top one appeared in the Beijing Youth Daily, the one at the end of the article in the China Daily) is that DaimlerChrysler was a sponsor of the Special Olympics. Arnold Schwarzenegger was their ambassador and there was a torch run on the Great Wall for media and sponsors.

For some reason none of the Daimler vice-presidents wanted to participate in the run with Arnold (maybe they were afraid they couldn’t handle the uphill run with him?). Because I was a runner someone then asked if I wanted to represent Daimler there. Of course I said yes, and of course I made sure to run up front next to Arnold. So I made it onto CNN for the first time that day and onto these pictures that appeared in several Chinese media. I can’t believe it’s 10 years ago already, time flies…

I am not a big fan of management books, I believe more in following my gut feeling when running a company than in reading and implementing all kinds of theories. Does that make me a good CEO? Difficult to say, because how do you evaluate a CEO? Based on his behavior? Or based on his results? Probably more the latter than the former, but then the next question is against what to measure the results: what were the objectives and were they the correct objectives?

Today I saw a link on Twitter (forgot who sent it, I clicked on it but did not read the article until after I finished my working day) to an article by Ben Horowitz on how his VC fund evaluates CEOs. Even though I normally don’t read too much about management theories, I found the subject interesting and decided to read the article anyway. I was quite impressed and I recognized a lot of what I see in day-to-day business life. If you’re a CEO (or plan to be one) it’s an excellent read. You don’t often come across VCs that blog openly on how they measure a CEO’s performance.

Ben asks himself 3 questions:

1. Does the CEO know what to do?
2. Can the CEO get the company to do what she knows?
3. Did the CEO achieve the desired results against
   

Last weekend Spil Games Asia went on its annual outing. This year we went to Moganshan (a mountain in Zhejiang) and Nanxun (a water town) for our two day trip.

We had a bit of bad luck with the weather, because despite the forecast of sunshine it rained on Friday when we left Shanghai. The rain followed us to Moganshan where clouds and fog joined us as well. The result: none of our staff could enjoy the beautiful views of the bamboo forest covered mountains and some of the old European style villas on it.

But the trip was fun anyway. During the bus trip we all sang our company song, that our sound guy and some other staff had composed over the past days. We sang it so often that it’s still in my head now.

Upon arrival on the mountain we had a big lunch with some beers and then went for a hike. Because of the weather we cut the hike short and spent

Lots of fun and interesting things happened over the past days, but I didn’t find the time yet to write blog posts about it. Because I likely won’t have much time over the next days either I decided to just put some pictures with short descriptions online. A picture says more than a thousand words, right?

Elaine had her 1st birthday last Friday and we had a nice dinner (Beijing Duck) at home for her birthday. Because my wife and I both had to work we decided to postpone the real celebrations to Saturday. This is Elaine with Grace on Friday night.

Saturday morning I had to get up very early because we were invited for a tour around the US pavilion with Hillary Clinton. To make a long story short, we could hardly see Clinton and we certainly had no meet and greet with her. The next day, however, Hillary made it up to us by allowing some of our Geeks on a Plane group to meet with her in her hotel.

Even though the Hillary Clinton visit was a bit different than expected, I still had a good time talking to among others VCs Mark Suster and Alexander Lloyd and recruiter Jeff Hu. Here we are in the VIP area of the US pavilion to take some pictures with the flags of the US & China.

After the US pavilion visit I rushed home for Elaine’s one year birthday brunch at the Marriott in Hongqiao. She especially loved the ice cream!

At home Elaine got to wear her beautiful birthday dress. She is quickly turning from a baby into a pretty toddler girl!

Elaine’s 1-year birthday cake, an ice cream cake.

Elaine doing her 1-year pick (zhua zhou), to find out what kind of things she will do in later life.

On Sunday night I had dinner with the Geeks on a Plane at The Waterhouse. A nice boutique hotel and excellent restaurant right on the Huangpu River, next to the Cool Docks. In the picture organizers Dave McClure and Christine Lu.

Monday night was the Startup2Startup dinner at Shanghai Tang cafe with (again) the Geeks on a Plane. Met tons of people and had a great evening – and an excellent dinner. I was supposed to be on the FastPitch panel where start-ups would pitch to investors, but too bad this part of the event got canceled because of time constraints. In the picture Mark Suster giving a keynote to the audience during dinner.

And today, Tuesday, I gave a speech at the Dutch Expo Pavilion for the Dutch Gaming Days. The title of the talk was Parallel Universes, differences between the game industry in China and Holland. I talked about this based on my experiences of setting up Spil Games Asia over the past years. The audience was a mix of Chinese game developers and game companies and some Western companies looking to do business in China, and I got some interesting leads for Spil Games. My colleagues Leo Liu and Richard Yu (see picture below at the Dutch Expo Pavilion) also joined the presentations.

And in between all these pictures? Mainly work I am afraid, so not interesting enough to take or post photos.

Last week Tudou announced the launch of its made-for-Internet original content production plan (“Orange Box“) and an independent filmmakers’ incubation program (“Warehouse no. 6”). The announcement may appear to be yet another entertainment initiative, but Tudou’s move is actually a calculated and strategic attempt to expand its content offerings, learning from the television model.

Many companies are jumping to capitalize on the growth of the online video industry in China, as they see the trends of consumer media behavior changing and advertising dollars shifting toward Internet video. Online video sites, portals, search engines and TV players are re-organizing themselves around the video entertainment market paradigm change.

According to China iResearch, total advertising revenue in the online video industry in China has grown almost 70% from RMB800 million in 2008 to RMB1.3 billion (or US$200 million) in 2009. And this growth will continue: The online video ad market growth is projected to be between 60% to 80% annually in the next three years.

Like YouTube and major video vertical players, Tudou boasts huge traffic: it currently has a massive 200 million monthly unique visitors per month. While monetizing the traffic by advertising has quickly become a proven business model, it may not be enough.

Therefore Tudou is kicking off its made-for-Internet original web productions, broadening its content offering and deepening long-term competitive strength. We are paving the way to create a made-for-Internet content ecosystem that signals our site’s ambition to create a new alternative model outside of network television companies’ business and operational systems, with a new audience watching new media online.

Starting in 2010, a number of online video websites in China announced different kinds of content initiatives via relatively simple approaches such as partnerships or funding. Tudou is choosing a more sophisticated and resource-consuming route, building its own production pipelines and managing the four key pillars: production, distribution, broadcasting and monetization.

Ahead of the Geeks On A Plane tour to Asia CNNgo.com interviewed – as they call it – 5 of China’s biggest geeks. I was one of them, so I guess now I am officially a geek. The other people interviewed for the article are gaming guru Frank Yu, Youku consultant & rock star Kaiser Kuo, Tudou CEO Gary Wang and Qifang CEO Calvin Chin. It’s a small world in China, because we all know each other.

In the interview I mention the geek project that gets me most excited: an investment in a still-below-the-radar and not-yet-launched start-up called United Styles. Probably more about that in a few months when they plan to launch, but I can now already say that they have the potential to disrupt the fashion industry.

Over the past week we had a site takeover ad campaign for Miffy on game.com.cn and xiaoyouxi.cn. I wanted to share the screen shots before the campaign goes offline tonight. The whole homepage was Miffy branded during the takeover, meaning that look and feel was changed into Miffy style.

After opening the homepage you would see Miffy floating in a basket with balloons in our A1 location (left corner) with several kites on the left and right sides of the screen. Then suddenly the basket floats out of the A1 location onto the screen and also kites now start to fly over the games. Reactions from our audience were very positive, they liked the design and a lot of them clicked through to a special Miffy page on game.com.cn to play a Miffy game (the game will stay online after the campaign is over).

This was Spil Games’ first site takeover campaign in China, but because of the positive reactions we plan to do more innovative campaigns in the future. Thanks to the team at the Energize Shanghai agency and especially Rogier Bikker for working together with the Spil Games Asia team on this campaign.