Today it is exactly three years ago that Tudou.com went live! (See also this blog post that I wrote about Toodou – the former name of Tudou- on April 15, 2005 on my old weblog). “Only” three years I should probably say, because more has happened in these 36 months than what happens to most companies in 10-15 years. It was a great 3 years though, something like a big roller coaster that started to go faster and faster once it was set in motion. A roller coaster with ups and downs, like every start-up, but mainly ups.

Because of this there will be another Tudou Party this Friday in our office, the biggest one so far (at least if I look at the budget for it 🙂 Expect a combination of cool DJ’s, lots of drinks (Absolut vodka is a sponsor I heard) and hot dancers. If you have been involved with Tudou over the past years, or if you consider yourself a good friend of the company (or of mine), get in touch with me for an invitation.

The weekend after that (April 26-27) will be the first Tudou Film Festival on the Moganshan in Zhejiang province. We already had a film festival planned two years ago, but never found the time and resources to pull it off. Our three-year anniversary is a good occasion. The Tudou “Oscars” will be awarded in many categories, among others Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Documentary, Best Cartoon and Best Script.

The voting for the winners will depend for 50% on online votes. You can still vote here for the shortlisted films. The other 50% depends on a professional jury, consisting among others of famous directors, people from the media and advertising world (including Kaiser Kuo), journalists and even professors from films schools in the US. If you vote online you will have a chance to win a trip to the award ceremony on Moganshan, but you can also go there yourself (you will need to register here). It promises to be a great weekend in one of the most beautiful places in China. Good luck to all the nominees and see you on the mountain!

A couple of weeks ago Christine Lu from the China Business Network visited Shanghai and Beijing, and during that visit I met her for the first time. First during the geek dinner at Moon River Diner in the New Factories, and two days later for lunch and an interview. The interview was used for a Harvard conference that took place in late March, and she now also posted it on the China Business Network.

During the interview I talk a bit about Spill Group Asia (how it started, my strategy for the future), but also about foreigners vs. Chinese running companies, the role of guanxi and I give some advice to people that want to set up a business in China.

Last Friday the Chinese embassy in The Netherlands announced new visa regulations, regulations that took effect immediately and should take effect in the rest of the world tomorrow. The biggest changes are that a tourist visa has a maximum validity of 30 days (or according to some sources 20 days) instead of maximum 3 months before. Furthermore, much more information than before is needed (hotel reservations, flight details). Also for a business visa much more information is needed. For both visa types no new multiple entry visas are given, the maximum is now a double entry visa.

Just before that, the regulation for F-visa’s was changed as well. In the past interns at Spill Group Asia came to China on a tourist visa, that was changed to an F-visa during their first week here. But that’s suddenly not possible anymore. One intern had bad luck, we had to postpone his internship until after the Olympics, when things likely will go back to normal.

It looks like these measures are directly related to the protests outside China against the Olympics. I assume the country is trying to reduce the impact of protests during the Olympics by being more strict on who can come in. It’s a pity, I initially hoped that there would be visa-upon-arrival policy during the Olympics, but the protesters now led the government to make the rules even more strict.

The protesters probably have no idea that their protests have the opposite effect of what they think that they will achieve, as most Chinese feel the outside world is treating them unfairly and only become more supportive of the government. As Paul Midler writes in his blog “The unintended consequence of global protests is that many Chinese will feel more emboldened to display extreme national pride. While China was inclined to hide its jingoistic nature so that it could play host, protests have struck a nerve and the world may have unwittingly triggered a we’ll-show-them-attitude”.

Things have changed so much since China was awarded the Olympics in 2001, I personally think this country completely deserves a successful Olympics. The protesters have no idea what is really happening here, and as I said here before most of the foreign press are the reason for this. As a Dutch journalist told me recently: positive articles just do not get published or are put in the back of newspapers, only negative ones make the it to the front page. The Chinese press may be censored, but the past weeks have taught me that the foreign press is not much better. The difference is that people all know this about the Chinese press, but don’t realize it about the foreign press.

Anyway, the new visa regulations will likely mean less tourists and business visitors to China, but I think China does not care too much. It knows that nowasdays the West needs China more than China needs the West. In the end it is the foreign tourists and business men that will be affected most. Although I should also not overrate the changes, because they are not that big, it’s just more of a hassle to get the visa. And as one commenter said on the China Herald, the Chinese visa rules are still much less strict than the regulations the Dutch have for visa for Chinese. I fully agree.

Last week 3G connections finally became available in some cities in China. However, not the regular 3G standard that works on my Nokia phone, but the home-grown TD-SCDMA standard. This means I need to buy a new phone in order to have a high-speed mobile internet connection, which is a bit of a hassle. But that’s not all, because for some reason China Mobile decided that you also need to buy a new telephone number starting with 157. Great… Then I would need to have two phones and two numbers to carry around with me. I decided to wait a few days and ask others for their first impressions.

Well, according to the Shanghai Daily the first experiences are not very good. Main problems are that there are currently only 6 models on the market that support the “Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access” standard, and most of them are not working that well. Low battery life is one complaint, and some people had to replace their new handsets because even some of the new ones could only handle 2G connections. And during a China Mobile demonstration of video calling, callers could clearly see each other – until one of them moved. Not what you expect when you buy a phone for that purpose.

Next to that the signal seems to be quite unstable. The signal should be available everywhere within the Outer Ring Road, at the Formula One circuit and along Metro lines, but that is not yet the case. I assume they wanted to roll out the service too quickly, and this will get better in the next couple of weeks. Better models should become available later this year, among others from Dopod. Out of the current 6 models only one model looked OK to me, the ZTE U980. But at RMB 3800 it’s extremely expensive, I got my iPhone for that price in China with much better specifications (but no TD-SCDMA). Being a gadget freak I actually almost bought the ZTE this week, until I was told that it does not switch automatically to 3G if the network becomes available (or the other way around). With the current crappy signal I think I’d better wait a few weeks, instead of being a guinea pig for China Mobile.

I hardly ever watch TV, I find it a waste of time and prefer to spend that time doing more productive things. One reason for this is that Chinese TV sucks, it’s low quality mass entertainment that does not really fit what I would like to watch. The few times a year that I do watch TV I normally turn on our illegal satellite receiver, to watch one of the 50+ satellite channels (mainly Philippine, Japanese or Hong Kong stations, but also Deutsche Welle, BBC, CNN and some documentary channels). But there is a chance that might be over soon.

In China only high-end hotels and residences with more than 80% foreigners are allowed to receive satellite TV. However, just in Shanghai there are already 300,000 satellite dishes, almost all of them illegal. Today the Shanghai Daily mentions that there is a crackdown going on to get rid of all these dishes. The goal seems to be that by the time the Olympics start people can only rely on good old CCTV to watch sports. According to the article, the authorities sent more than 11,000 property management companies a notice to take down satellite dishes.

Not sure if this is just rhetoric or if the government is really cracking down on illegal TV. In my compound I did not see a notice yet, even though almost every apartment has its own satellite dish. Also the wording in the newspaper gives me the idea that this may not be too serious: According to a spokes person people have 3 months to dismantle their receivers, but he added “Dismantlement is not our final target. The administration still hopes satellite owners realize their illegal action and remove them voluntarily.” Sure, so people can only watch all Chinese channels? Welcome to the real world.

The past week I spent with a senior Dutch delegation of IT and new media executives that visited China. I organized most of the company visits in Shanghai and Chengdu, and of course I also made sure that we had a good evening program. Already a year ago Marco Derksen (Marketingfacts.nl) had talked to me about organizing a trip to China, and last September during the PICNIC conference in Amsterdam the topic came up again. Marco, Vincent Everts and myself then started to develop the idea and in November we had decided on a date and a rough program. We aimed at about 15-20 participants, but eventually ended up with 42 people. Mainly founders or CEO’s of companies, but also people from the Dutch media, universities and some investors. A high-level group with high-level expectations, so I did my utmost to make it a success.

The last weeks before the group arrived were not easy, because the Shanghai office of a German event agency that I had hired to help with the organization failed to deliver results. One of their German expats who was in charge of the project totally messed up, so I basically had to take control of the project next to my daily work. The event agency eventually replaced the young German man with some great, hard-working local employees and avoided a disaster by doing so. But it caused me quite a bit of stress both in the days before the trip and during the trip itself. Eventually most things were sorted out, but it cost me a lot of sleep. I will have a word with the head of the event agency this week about what happened. As for the German employee, I would be very surprised if this will not have consequences for him and I will certainly make a recommendation on what to do with him. The event agency is actually pretty good, but this kind of employees are a real danger for a company, especially when they are so smooth-talking that nobody realizes what is really going on.

The group arrived in Shanghai on Sunday morning at 8 AM and spent most of the day walking through Shanghai. We visited the Bund, Yuyuan, Xintiandi and part of the French Concession (all on foot of course), and were back in the hotel by 5 PM for a cocktail reception with Mr. Eric Verwaal, the Dutch consul general. After the reception he gave a very interesting presentation on the history and economic development of China. It was a pity that for some participants the combination of jet-lag and a couple of beers plus the high temperature in the room meant that they could not manage to stay awake during the talk, they missed some good insights. Next time it’s probably better to first have a presentation and then do the cocktails. At night we had dinner with the sub-groups (the group was divided in 6 sub-groups that focus on one area, mine was (not surprisingly) online games). By 11 PM most people were completely exhausted and dragged themselves to bed.

On Twitter I noticed that Vincent Everts continued to work until at least 2 AM on the first of his videos. He produced a whole series of them, and most of them can be seen here (in China you will need a proxy). Several were also published on sites of major Dutch media, such as De Telegraaf, het Financieel Dagblad, Webwereld and nu.nl. Lots of exposure for the trip, but not much sleep for Vincent because of this. Because most of the participants are highly active on the internet the whole week articles and blogs appeared in Dutch media, and there were lots of tweets on Twitter (backchannel keyword Chinareis) and pictures on Flickr (tag: Chinareis).

Monday and Tuesday we mainly had company visits in Shanghai. We divided the group into 3 tracks, so people could decide where to go. We tried to make each track equally attractive, but that was not easy. Some of the many companies that we visited on Monday and Tuesday included CIC, Ubisoft, JWT, Philips, iResearch, CEIBS, Tudou and Spill Group/Zlong Games (there Thijs and I even gave presentations to two groups). Tuesday night we organized a network dinner at Three on the Bund where a total of 73 people participated. Wednesday was a travel day, but in the morning we arranged a visit to the Lenovo plant in Shanghai for one half of the group and a visit to Shanghai Media Group for the other half. In the afternoon we traveled to Chengdu.

Thursday was a company visit day again, with an introduction by the Chengdu Hi-Tech Zone government and 9 company visits (among others Shanda and Plenware, but also the EU China incubator center). This was followed by a tour of Sichuan University, where the participants not only saw the campus and the classrooms, but even got to take a look at the dorms from the inside (which was a shock for some). At night we had the Chengdu network dinner, where the basis for some business deals was made.

Friday was Qingming Festival in China, which this year for the first time was a public holiday in China. Company visits were therefore not possible, so we organized a seminar where a venture capital firm and two start-ups (CallMe and Yawaa) got to present. Then the local government gave a presentation, followed by a presentation and live demonstration of Pioco (bluetooth media) in the main shopping street in Chengdu. The afternoon was even for me a bit of a surprise. Steve Chao, Pioco’s CEO, had organized it and he did an excellent job. We first drove to Dujiangyan where we were guests of honor at the “Water Release Festival”. Actually, this is a once-a-year performance, but the mayor arranged that the impressive performance would be done one more time especially for this group! We were very honored of course.

After that we went to Jiezi, a small village, where the group could stroll around. A local TV crew filmed us during the whole visit. We wer
e the only foreigners as this part is apparently not open to foreigners at the moment, and Vincent Everts and I were asked to do an interview with them (“Will you tell the people in Holland about Jiezi?”). The last part of the visit was to Mt. Qingcheng, the birth place of Taoism. To our big surprise, we were received by the head of the Taoist religion and she (yes, the head is a woman) showed us around the temple / monastery where she lived. She also invited us for tea in a place where normally high officials are received (the proof were the pictures on the wall of Chinese leaders sipping tea with her in the same room). It was a magnificent place to be, and most participants (including me) were quite impressed. I knew that Steve has excellent connections, but the afternoon program was better than I had ever expected.

At night we had farewell hot pot dinner where I received lots of presents (including a great book by Al Gore and an iPhone – thanks guys!), followed by a night on the town in club One. We actually spent every night in bars and night clubs, and because of that I did not get too much sleep (on average less than 4 hours a night). But that did not matter, it was an excellent week, where I got to know many new people and where the group hopefully got a better understanding of what is happening in China. That last part was one of my main objectives for organizing this trip. I love China and its people, and (as I said before) I feel the foreign media does not do the country justice in its reporting. It’s not so black and white as many people seem to think, and I hope a lot of people in the group realize that there is more to the China story than you read in the average foreign newspaper.

Yesterday was Scott’s 3-month ‘birthday’ and today he will take his first flight ever. He will spend a few days in Beijing with my wife, visiting family and of course to celebrate his 100-day anniversary (bai ri, we will organize a party for that).

Just now I was looking at his ticket and noticed that he will travel first class on his first flight! Wow, I think I was in my late twenties before I took first class for the first time – and that was only because of a free upgrade. Not that he will notice much, but my wife assumed it was easier with a kid in first class than in a crowded economy class. They will be on a B747 with a new first class lay-out, so not the crappy ones you often see on Chinese airlines. Enjoy the flight Scott, I will miss you next week.

Picture: Race car driver Ho-Pin Tung came to visit Scott this week, after his GP2 races in Malaysia

Last night I went to Hongkou stadium with several Spill Group colleagues to watch a football match between North Korea and South Korea. Not just a friendly match, but a World Cup 2010 qualifier. The original plan was to hold the match in Pyongyang, but the North-Korean government did not allow FIFA to flag the South-Korean flag nor to play the South-Korean National Anthem. So the match was moved to Shanghai, which was a good thing for South Korea, because there is a huge population of South Koreans in this city.

We did not have tickets for the match, so decided to go there a bit early to the Hongkou stadium and get some tickets on the black market. We underestimated the traffic jams, however, and arrived exactly 3 minutes before match time at the stadium. That turned out to be a lucky thing, because the ticket scalpers that still had tickets were very anxious to sell them – better a low price for a ticket than nothing at all. We managed to get VIP tickets that normally cost RMB 1000 for RMB 200, which seemed reasonable to us.

However, now the problem was to find the entrance. The ticket said gate 4, but at gate 4 the guards sent us to the next gate. And at the next gate they sent us back to gate 4. Then they told us to go up, so we walked up the stairs. But no, there they told us to go down again. It would have been funny if the match had not started yet, and I got pretty angry at the guards. Finally one of them said he knew how to get there and he would walk with us. Because we were in a hurry we sort of forced him to run with us. I asked him which gate we would have to enter, but he just pointed with his hands that we had to move ahead. Well, the end of the story is that we ran all around the stadium and ended up at the same location where we had started.

Now I was really pissed at the guy. The match was in full swing and we could not see it despite our high-end tickets. I made some angry remarks that I won’t repeat here, and went off to find a more knowledgable guard. Finallly we figured out that we had to go to down to the parking area, and take an elevator from there to our stands. We missed the first 15 minutes of the game because of this, but luckily nobody had scored so far.

Actually, nobody scored during the whole match, but it was still cool to see two teams that are technically still at war fight each other. Most of the audience consisted of South Koreans, but the DPRK had one section of the stadium filled up with its citizens. Despite their relatively small number they still managed to make a lot of sound when their team had possession of the ball.

Koen Bekkering, an intern at Spill Group Asia, got tickets in the middle of the South Korean crowd, and to our surprise we found out he was standing right below us. We watched him wave the South-Korean flag with the Koreans, and even wear a South-Korean t-shirt. Of course he had no idea we were watching him.

It was a nice match: the level of game play was not super, but the atmosphere in the stadium was great. I learned a couple of South-Korean football songs – well, at least the tune of them, no idea what they were realling singing. And our seats were fantastic, which also helped to enjoy the game of course. A good beginning of a nice evening, because after that we went out and some of us did not get home until 3:30 AM or so!