Last week I received a call whether it would be possible for me to give a presentation at Tudou to Mrs. Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission and in charge of the EU Digital Agenda. Of course I was honored and I immediately invited her to visit the Tudou office.

Mrs. Kroes came to visit us this morning with a small EU delegation and several journalists. We started the visit with a tour around Tudou’s headquarters in Shanghai (Tudou has 2 offices in Shanghai and other offices in Beijing, Guangzhou and Chengdu), during which it turned out that she knew a lot about my background already. I assume she was briefed well before the visit, and I am sure my blog and Twitter made that briefing a lot easier!

After the office tour I gave a presentation about what Tudou is and how we are different from video aggregators like YouTube or local competitors. We also talked about the Internet in China and how that is often more innovative than the Internet outside China. We talked (of course) also about online games and from there we got to the topic of micro payments. In my opinion China is ahead of the EU in this respect, and a good micro payment system (for very small transactions, say 1 or 2 Euro cents) will be beneficial for for example the transition from traditional media (like papers) to new media.

I also mentioned that I think that traditional TV stations have no future if they do not quickly change to stream to online channels as well. In China TV audiences get older, poorer and less educated compared to online video audiences. What’s happening in China will also happen in the EU, just a few years later.

When the presentation was over there was a photo opportunity for the journalists outside the Tudou office, before Mrs. Kroes had to go to the airport for a flight to Europe. We at Tudou enjoyed hosting Mrs. Kroes and discussing about the Internet with her. Too bad there was not enough time to go into details, but maybe there will be an opportunity for that in the future.

A set of all pictures of Neelie Kroes’ visit to Tudou can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chijs/sets/72157623952471285/

Next week Geeks on a Plane will once again visit Shanghai, and there is a great line up of entrepreneurs, VCs, journalists and bloggers. During the last visit in June 2009 I gave a talk to the group at Spil Games Asia and Gary did a Lunch 2.0 talk at Tudou for them.

This year I am not sure what my exact obligations are, I think I promised Christine Lu to do a presentation (but I can’t locate the email anymore, we probably communicated by Twitter – help me out Christine…) and I will be on an angel investor panel listening to pitches with a.o. William Bao Bean (FastPitch on Monday night). Due to a very busy business schedule I won’t be able to join any other events (well, maybe drinks one night) or fly to other cities with the group, which is a pity.

The Geeks on a Plane tour is sold out, but you can still get tickets for individual events. Check the website for more details: http://geeksonaplane.com/

It’s a busy period for journalists in Shanghai, because of the Expo they all want to file stories about business in China. On Tuesday the Dutch Crown Prince will be here, so Dutch media all need to finish their Expo stories by then.

Normally I do the interviews at Spil Games Asia, but because it’s Sunday I decided to take some at home. Scott was luckily relatively quiet, and Elaine slept through the whole episode.

The pictures were taken during a TV interview in my study with Dutch journalist Marije Vlaskamp for RTL Z. I also did a radio interview (BNR, Dutch business radio network) and one for newspaper Trouw.

Adobe spent some major money today on ads to tell the world about its dispute with Apple. Not only appeared an ad below almost every tech related post in my Google Reader, but on every TechCrunch post that I clicked on in my RSS feed a pop-up ad from Adobe appeared. I did not even know that pop-up ads still existed outside China, and I certainly had not expected TechCrunch to sell them. I guess they felt they would get away with one like this, and they were right – I even blog about it now…

In case you don’t follow the tech news as much as I do, in short the background of the story is that Steve Jobs does not allow Flash to run on its iPhone/iPad platform. It does not even allow original Flash applications to be changed to iPhone/iPad apps. Adobe, the owner of Flash, is not amused of course because a significant part of their business is at risk: Not only will it hurt their CS5 sales (that can among others be used to port Flash to an iPad app), but worse is that because of Apple’s stance more and more platforms are now announcing support for HTML5.

This press release went out earlier today and I decided to put it on my blog as well. This is another great milestone for Tudou. During the last World Cup I could not have imagined that we would ever send a Tudou crew to a football World Cup to shoot our own programs and stream all matches on Tudou!

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Leading online video licensing deal with national broadcaster CCTV to serve young, sports savvy audience in China
(May 13, 2010 – Beijing, China)

While the world

Today I checked out the new PressReader app on the iPad, and I was totally sold on it! It is so cool, this app *might* be the future of media and just having this app justifies buying an iPad for me.

Downloading on the iPad goes very fast

PressReader is a website with an app that lets you read 1500 newspapers and magazines worldwide on your computer, your iPhone or your iPad. You pay USD 0.99 per newspaper, or you can have a 1-month subscription for USD 9.99 that allows you to download 31 newspapers (you can download whatever your want, so you’re not stuck with a subscription to just one newspaper, you can download a different newspaper every day if you’d like or download several ones on one day), or a USD 29.99 one-month unlimited download. Compare this price to what you pay for printed newspapers!

Overview of all sections of newspaper

How does it work? Very simple, you register online or on your iPad (I already registered online a few years ago when I first found the website, and then just signed in on my iPad). Set up your favorite newspapers and download the ones you want to buy. If you are a new member you can download the first 7 papers for free (I think, I had to pay for my papers because I’m not a new member). You can also read the front page of every newspaper for free if you go online.

Click on title for one column view

Downloading is quick and easy, within a minute you have the paper you want on your iPad. You can see the whole page, but in order to read the article you have to either zoom in (by pinching) or you double click the article and a pop-up appears. Not in the mood for reading? Click the audio button and the iPad reads it for you. That not only works for English, but also for Dutch (and therefore likely for most other languages). You can swipe from page to page, or you click on the menu button to get an overview of all sections of the newspaper. It’s so easy that everybody will understand it without needing a manual.

Pinch to zoom in or out on part of the article

I am totally sold on this application, but there is still one downside: PressReader does not have all newspapers. For example I did not find the New York Times (yet?). However, other papers that were in there are for example the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Also a large number of local US newspapers were in the selection of 178 US papers and magazines. For Holland my favorite paper NRC Handelsblad was in there (I already have a subscription for that on my iLiad) and furthermore the Volkskrant. You can find papers from almost any country in the world, most have at least 2 or 3 local papers and some have a lot more (New Zealand has 92 papers, Australia 168 and Canada is the winner with 277 papers).

# of newspapers per country

If I would run PressReader I would probably go one step further, and also sell articles per piece. I believe that may eventually be the real future of “print” media: being able to pay a very small amount for the articles that you want to read (say USD 0.05 or 0.10 per article), and -important!- you should not have to go through a payment process but just press an “ok” button.

I am very happy that I found this app and I think I will spend quite some money on PressReader in the future. It works great, it looks great and the price per paper is less that a dollar. Why did TechCrunch not write about this yet? Spread the word!

Spil Games Asia is looking for an experienced manager for the role of Chief Operating Officer for its China operations. You will be part of the Management Team of Spil Games Asia in Shanghai

Tan Yuan Yuan, China’s most famous ballet dancer (and incidentally also a personal friend), made it into the doodle on Google’s homepage today! The doodle depicting the Google logo was created together with the San Francisco Ballet for Tchaikovsky’s 170th birthday.

Very cool for Yuan Yuan and her dance partner Tiit Helimets, hundreds of millions of people will see her in action there today.