Ho-Pin Tung, China’s A1 driver, delivered a spectacular result this weekend in Sydney, Australia. In only his 3rd race for China he managed to finish 3rd in today’s feature race. Ho-Pin, congratulations from the whole Spill Group team for this fantastic result!

Ho-Pin’s podium finish was also the first ever for China, so this is really a big achievement and I am sure this will make Ho-Pin even more popular here. Nice to know is also that the Dutch-Chinese driver managed to overtake the car of The Netherlands on the 22nd lap, taking away a Dutch podium finish. The next A1 race will be on February 25 in Durban, South Africa.

It is suddenly getting spring in Shanghai. We were having sunny days for over a week already, but it was still quite cold. Yesterday the thermometer suddenly shot up. Officially it would only be 12 degrees Celcius, however my wife told me the car showed 18 degrees around lunchtime. At that time I was riding my bike with Gary, and it indeed felt quite warm. The gloves I was wearing were totally unneccesary, and I took off my shawl almost right away.

Gary and I drove to Sheshan, to have lunch with his girlfriend and my wife at Le Meridien. The ride took us a bit longer than planned (we arrived at 1:30 PM instead of 12:30 PM), but luckily lunch was served until 2:30 PM. While enjoying a beer I realized my face was hurting a bit, and it turned out I was sunburned from the ride. I guess I should be outside more often, I am not used to being exposed to a bit of sunshine anymore.

The warm weather will continue until the middle of the week, after that the temperature will drop again. But by then I’ll be in Amsterdam where it is colder anyway.

Competition is China is much harder than competition in Europe, and often unethical methods are used. A market leader like Tudou.com is therefore likely to be the target of actions by competitors to make the site or company look bad. Normally people just spread rumours, but that is something we can live with. But sometimes more distasteful actions are used, and right now someone is trying to do this (I won’t name them here). They are trying to make it look like Tudou is trying to increase its Alexa ranking by methods that are not allowed, so that Alexa wil delete Tudou’s data from its system.

Gary wrote a fierce blog post about this, which I will summarize using some of his (translated) quotes: “It is a stupid method, not only is it not so easy to mislead the brains behind Alexa, but the issue can be settled with Alexa or Amazon easily if we explain them the situation. Stop playing with fire, otherwise you will get burned sooner or later. It’s a small world, and we are dealing with the same group of people every day. Nothing is secret in this market. And I will take revenge: eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Don’t mess with us.”

I think they will get the message, and hopefully will be smart enough to refrain from taking any actions against Tudou.com

This weekend Gary and I started our outside mountain bike training for Tibet. After we had bought some great bikes two weeks ago we had been too busy to go for a ride, but Saturday afternoon we gave it a try. We drove for about 3.5 hours, starting in Xujiahui, all through Puxi, crossing the river by ferry and then a loop through Pudong and back to Hongkou and Puxi by another small ferry. We did not drive fast, so it was not very tiring, but it was a nice distance for a first time. I feel that riding on the road is much easier than riding on my home spinning bike (I already do regularly to get in shape for Tibet), probably because at home I ride in much higher gear and ride more quickly.

After riding back to Puxi we ended our bike trip in the Tudou office where we played Wii for while. We started with a game of tennis, followed by baseball, bowling, boxing and golf. I like tennis and bowling best. Baseball is too difficult for me, I missed almost every pitch that Gary made! And golf is fun until you get on the green, because I was not able to get the putting right. It’s a matter of technique I suppose, and I probably need to get a bit more practice.

At night we had a party at Chris Pan’s place, which turned out to be more like a network event. Almost every conversation I had was about work… But there was one notable exception, and that was with Thor from ENO. His wife (who works at Electronic Arts / Pogo) had told me once that he had also done the Lhasa – Kathmandu bike ride, so we had a nice talk with him about that (until Chris interrupted by introducing us to another person we should really meet for our business). Thor’s comments made me a bit worried though: they had lots of trouble with their bikes because of the bad roads, and he was telling they sometimes woke up grasping for air in the middle of the night. According to him the trip is more a mental challenge than a physical one.

Although Chris’ party was more about networking (I ran out of business cards, I normally don’t bring a pack to a party) it was still fun. Chris even organized a girl who gave free massages in his bed room (no kidding)! And it was amazing who all turned up: lots of media people, VC’s, and many beautiful and well-dressed women! I wonder where they all came from – I did not talk to most of them 🙂 Sam Flemming and Sage Brennan were also there, and we even met Tudou-competitor Mofile (the founder told me he is not a competitor, and agreed that they are really more of a file-sharing company). Some pictures of the party taken by Chris can be found here and a list of all participants backgrounds I found here.

Sunday I woke up with muscle ache from playing the Wii games. No problems because of the bike ride, but my arms felt sore from the boxing and especially tennis. It seems Wii is really a good way to get in shape! When I went to the gym on Sunday night I therefore decided to skip the weights, and only do a run. I did a one-hour 11.6 km run, with a great 1980’s playlist on my iPod (think Spandau Ballet, Billy Ocean and Culture Club). A good end of a sportive weekend!

Chinese statistics are never very reliable, but what happened to China’s divorce statistics really makes you wonder if anyone is thinking about the scientific methods used in the calculations. Fons Tuinstra’s blog was the first place where I read about what had gone wrong in China’s statistics bureau.

A Chinese marriage expert Xu Anqi, was doing research when she noted in a United Nations yearbook that the divorce rate in China was the highest in the world. This intrigued her, especially because she was looking at figures for 1993 when getting a divorce in China was not yet as common as it is now. But she soon found the reason: China had been miscalculating the figure. Instead of calculating the ratio of divorces by the total population, China had calculated how many people divorced as part of the total population. Because one divorce includes two people, China’s reported figures were twice as high as they should have been. The mistake has been made for almost 20 years, since 1988.

Our apartment may have been new when we moved in last year, but it still had a lot of problems. I wrote about this once before, and also since then we have had a lot smaller issues. There seems to be something at least every other week! Typical of Chinese-quality apartments, I know that, but it is still a nuisance. Especially when you realize this is a high-end apartment, where you expect that these things would not happen all the time. Last night we once again had a problem.

On Friday night my wife and I decided not to go out, but spend a night at home watching a movie (does not happen often anymore, we are both too busy) and eat and drink some nice food. So my wife went to Carrefour and bought among others french bread, croissants, different cheeses, a tin of caviar, salmon, and a bottle of champagne. I went out to buy a few DVD’s (The Holiday, Click and Blood Diamond), and we sat down in front of the TV around 9 PM.

But suddenly we realized it had become a bit chilly in our apartment. I checked the temperature, and that had dropped to 18 degrees. My wife then went outside to the waterheater and she noticed it was not working. Because we have floor heating that uses hot water, the heating system did not work anymore either. We restarted the system, but that did not help. We pushed different buttons and turned valves, but nothing seemed to make a difference. So finally we called the repair service, but they were fully booked until Saturday afternoon.

Luckily we still have an airconditioning system that can also heat, so we turned that on. We had not tried it before, and were glad at least that worked. Within a few minutes the house was warm again. I was a bit worried about not having hot water (I hate taking a cold shower in winter), but it turned out that we have two water heating systems, so that you can take a shower in different bathrooms at the same time. We found that the one that controls the heating is a different one from the one that regulates the water temperature in our main bathroom, so at least there we have hot water.

We still had a nice – and warm – evening, but it is annoying that these things happen all the time.

It’s lunch time now, but once again my daily newspaper has not arrived. I used to quickly scan the Shanghai Daily every morning when having my first cup of coffee. But lately the paper is arriving later and later, and it sort of has become an afternoon newspaper. We checked what was happening, and were told that they have a distribution problem. It will be at least another week before this will be solved (read: likely next month the paper will still be late). I am not sure if this is only a problem in my area (Xujiahui) or in bigger parts of Shanghai.

The Shanghai Daily is very lucky that there is no competition from other English newspapers (The China Daily is no real competition as they are still stuck in the 1990’s, mainly copying the Party’s press statements and adding posts from weblogs without even giving credit to the author), because in a more competitive environment they would have lost most of their readers a long time ago. But if they continue their delivery like this I might as well consider a subscription to the South China Morning Post. This HK newspaper is maybe not as good as it used to be, but at least it has decent reporting. It arrives around 4 or 5 PM on weekdays, so not much later than the Shanghai Daily right now. I hope the SCMP will be available in an iLiad format soon, so that I can read it in the morning already. Amy Gu, if you are reading this, is this wishful thinking? Maybe you can bring this up with the SCMP management, it can potentially gain your paper a lot of additional readers – and fame by being one of the first papers to offer this format.

Yesterday Chinese race car driver Ho-Pin Tung visited Spill Group Asia‘s office, and of course we took the opportunity to take a picture with the game.com.cn team. Ho-Pin, who won the German Formula 3 series last year, was in town for an interview with Shanghai TV. He is now China’s A1 driver, and had raced in New Zealand over the weekend (where he scored 2 points for China). Next week he will fly to Australia for the A1 race there on the weekend of 3-4 February. Ho-Pin Tung is doing PR work for Spill Group Asia, and we have some interesting cooperation plans. I’ll keep you posted.