Last night Tudou.com organized a Christmas Party in its Shanghai office. The first part was a buffet dinner with lucky draw, for staff only. Some very nice prizes were given away, among others 2 iPhones and a 24 inch flat screen. At 8 PM the party itself, themed Fire and Ice started. This time it was a smaller party than usual (just for staff and some invited guests), therefore I did not blog about it in advance. The next party (in March/April) will be open to the public again, and that promises to be a huge one. Keep checking my blog if you want to join.

The party featured some big pieces of ice, that were meant for sculpting. However, people mainly used it to cool their drinks and put candles on it, so that did not really work. The combination of candles on ice, surrounded by bottles of wodka, rum, baijiu and of course beer looked kind of cool. By the end of the night the ice started to melt, so around midnight we had to remove the remaining ice in order to avoid the creation of a Tudou office swimming pool. The party also featured some acrobats, doing among others juggling and hoola hoop tricks, and of course lots of amazing somersaults. Quite amazing what humans can do, especially when they do it a few meters away from you.

Several of my Spill Group Asia colleagues attended the party as well, and of course my Dutch friends Gemme and Bouko (I don’t think they ever missed a Tudou party!). William Bao Bean and his wife Lisa also dropped by, just like musical star and internet entrepreneur Robert Vicencio. Even my wife showed up, even though she can hardly move anymore because of her pregnancy. She planned to only stay 30 minutes, but I think that she stayed at least two hours.

A nice and relaxed evening, talking to friends, dancing, watching some entertainment and drinking a couple of beers in a nicely decorated environment. Most of it was filmed, so I assume the footage will be on Tudou soon. Thanks to Evodia and her team for pulling this off in just 3 days!

My dad wanted to buy new running shoes, so I took him to Grand Gateway where all the major sports brands have retail stores. Last year he also bought a pair here, and we first went back to the same store. He found the shoes he wanted, and asked for size 45. A normal size in Holland, but apparently a bit on the big side for China, because the store did not have any shoes above size 44. So up to the next store. Here they told us that they have size 45, no problem. So we looked at several models, and decided on a pair. The shoe saleswoman then went to get the shoes, but the result after 10 minutes of trying to find them: Mei you (we don’t have them). We asked if any other models were available, but it turned out that the lady had been wrong and that also this brand only had shoes up to size 44.

All other stores we went to had the same story, except for Reebok. There the sales girl told us they even have size 46. Great, so we once again decided on a model, and she went to get it. Five minutes later she came back – without shoes. She then told us they only have shoes up to size 44… I asked her why she had just told us that they carry up to size 46. Her answer: “I did not say that…”. I left it at that, her colleagues were standing around her and she probably did not want to lose face. After almost one hour we ended up without running shoes. Strange enough my dad had no problem buying shoes a year ago, did something change?

Friday night alumni of my alma mater Universiteit Maastricht in Shanghai had their first annual Christmas dinner. A couple of years ago I was the only (or at least one of the very few) alumni living in Shanghai, but now there are at least 15 former students working here. Mainly because Shanghai has become quite attractive to work (high quality of life & great entrepreneurial environment), but also because the university has grown quickly over the past years. Maastricht is Holland’s youngest university, and the faculty of business and economics was only founded in 1984.

The university is probably the most international in Holland, and already when I studied there most of my classes were in English (instead of Dutch, like most universities in the Netherlands). Also, the percentage of foreign students has increased a lot over the years (including quite some Chinese). Many of my friends have actually ended up working abroad, either as entrepreneurs or as (top) managers for multinationals.

Universiteit Maastricht is actively promoting its overseas alumni networks, and they even offered to sponsor the Christmas dinner. I think such a gesture is very nice, I am not aware of any other universities that sponsors Christmas dinners for their alumni in Shanghai. And that’s actually the main reason why I decided to blog about the Christmas dinner, I think it’s great they do this.

The dinner itself was of course a nice event, sharing some memories about student life in Maastricht, and discussing a lot about the life and business in China. We started off with gluehwein and beer in Cotton’s, and then had our dinner in Spanish tapas restaurant Azul. We ended the evening in Sasha’s, where we took some pictures for the university magazine. But the quality of the pictures was not too good (never use the camera on an iPhone in low light conditions), so I don’t think they will get printed 🙂 Amiek Krakers, thanks for organizing this evening!

This week innovative media company Pioco organized a Christmas party for its business relations in Shanghai. Normally Christmas parties are all quite similar, a speech, a couple of drinks and some finger food in a bar or hotel. But Pioco is an innovative company, so also their Christmas party was innovative. They called it Christmas Legato. The invitation described it as follows: Christmas Legato will deliver unconventional seasonal messages all in a unique and lavish Gothic atmosphere, which pushes back previous boundaries of romance, warmth and visual impact. Honestly, I had no idea what to expect.

The event took place on the Bund, in the small port at the Huangpu Park that was built for and used by China’s president Hu Jintiao. Through guanxi (good relations) the fast growing company was able to use this location for a few days. The Pioco team built a black tent over it, so the actual party took place right above the river! Pioco’s CEO Steve is not only an engineer, but he actually earned his university degree as an architect. That combination probably led to the design of the tent, because just that already was quite spectacular. You walked down to the river level through small slightly illuminated corridors covered with mirrors, after which you entered a open space with as stage in the middle. The whole place was surrounded by black curtains, so you quickly forgot where you actually were.

The crowd consisted of about 200 guests: clients, friends, partners, media agencies, reporters, celebrities, famous models, government officials and of course company staff. While enjoying a nice glass of wine and some excellent food a very special show started. Beautiful models in extravagant costumes combined with unusual music, quite amazing. I later heard that all models were flown in from Taiwan especially for this show. Because Pioco is a bluetooth media company during the show several bluetooth messages were broadcasted, with among others animations of the show. Steve told me later that he had composed the show himself, inspired by among others the movies “Lord of the Rings” and “Eyes Wide Shut”.

At the end of the show all guests toasted with champagne, while a singer performed a Christmas song. Snow machines started to blow snow over the audience, and soon half the place was covered by real snow. At that moment the curtains opened on the riverside and the beautiful lighted skyline of both Pudong and Puxi was in front of us. But not for long, because one of the advertising ships (ships with 20 meter TV screens on them) appeared in front of the harbor showing themes from the Christmas Legato show. Very impressive!

I stayed around for a while with Peter (Spill Group‘s CEO, who had just arrived in town that morning), talking to some friends, investors and business partners that I met at the party, and enjoying a couple of glasses of champagne. This was a very special event, and Pioco put the bar very high for other companies’ Christmas parties – or for their own future parties. Great job Steve!

Normally I am one of the early adopters of new internet services and technologies, but Twitter was an exception. I first came across the service in mid- to late 2006, but did not really believe in it at that time. The main reason was probably that I did not know many other people who were using Twitter, and I did not see the added value yet. Only on June 8, 2007 at 2:05 PM I sent my first Twitter message into the world to give it a try. And I was convinced pretty quickly: Six months later I have posted 1001 messages, I am following 65 people and 105 people are following me. That’s not a lot by the way, the number one is probably fellow Dutchman Erwin Blom who managed to write over 15,500 tweets over the past 12 months!

In case you don’t know yet what Twitter is, the best way to describe it is as micro-blogging. Basically, you can send a short message to all your followers (they used to be called friends when the service launched), with a maximum of 140 characters. So you are forced to keep your messages simple and short, or to use more than one Tweet (= a twitter message). People use Twitter to tell others what they are thinking, to ask questions or to comment on what they are doing. Sometimes whole discussions start, or people are live commenting on TV programs or sport matches. I mainly use it to describe what I am doing, focusing on private life and less on business, and I occasionally join a discussion on Twitter.

The nice thing about Twittering is that you can do it everywhere. Most of my Tweets I sent from my mobile phone over the internet. You can also use SMS for this, but that’s way too expensive from China. Whenever something happens you can immediately inform others about it, unlike with a blog post that I normally write on my laptop (I can of course write a blog post on my phone, but that’s a hassle). Therefore the content of my Twitter feed is very different from my blog. Twitter normally only shows what I am doing (very descriptive), my blog also has descriptive posts but combines that with an opinion about these things. On Twitter I hardly ever give my opinion, there is just not enough space for that in 140 characters.

I mainly Twitter on weekends or on weekday nights. I do not very often send Tweets into the world during working hours, I guess I am too preoccupied with other (=more important) things.

To me Twitter is fun, a new way of expressing yourself, of getting to know other people and for other people to get to know you. Several of the people that I follow on Twitter I have never met in real life, but if I would meet them I would probably know them better than many of my real life friends. During PICNIC07 I met several of my followers, and it’s interesting to see how quickly you can connect, because you basically already know each other.

Some people start blogging less because of Twitter, but I think for me there is not a direct relationship. I might not post about some things because I already twittered about them, but generally I don’t think the number of posts diminished. Twittering is something that you do quickly, you can write a tweet in 10 seconds. A blog post normally takes me an average of 15-20 minutes. You think about a blog post before you write it, a tweet is just a line that you send into the world.

People sometimes ask me whether I don’t care about privacy when they read my Tweets. Honestly, I don’t believe in privacy anymore. The world has changed over the past 10 years, and most kids that grew up with the internet put their whole life online on MySpace and Facebook. People of my generation (I feel old when I write this, and I am only 35) seem to be more conservative, except for the ones that also ‘live’ on the internet. Interesting, the most active Twitterers are normally people who run their own business or work for smaller web-related companies. I don’t know many people working for multinationals that have an active Twitter feed, they literally live in a different world (and that’s why many multinationals will have a hard time to stay competitive in this changing web 2.0 world , but that’s a different story). And to come back to privacy, only the things you want to share you post online. Some people go a bit further than I do, however. Take a look for example at this x-rated Tweet from one of my followers!

I like Twitter, and hope it will keep on growing as a service. It’s not for everybody, just like blogging is not for everyone. But it’s much easier to keep up your Twitter posts, than to keep writing a blog over a longer period of time. If you want to check out Twitter go to Twitter.com and set up an account. If you want to follow me, go to http://twitter.com/marcvanderchijs and click on the follow button. And of course you can also read my latest Tweets on the right hand sight of my blog. Happy Twittering!

Tudou.com has started encoding all its video files to the H.264 format. Tudou is the first video site worldwide that is adapting to this standard on a large scale. This is technically a very significant step, that will mean a further improvement in the user experience.

H.264 means that the images in video files will be much clearer. Especially in videos with fast moving images such as sports footage, or rich images like scenaries you will see a huge difference. Tudou can now streams clips in a quality that is similar to TV quality.

In order to watch the video’s in the H.264 format, users will have to upgrade to Flash version 9. If they have an older version they can still watch every clip in the flv format.

Although most Chinese do not celebrate Christmas (most even have no idea what it is about), Shanghai’s retail sector fully embraces the event. Christmast decorations and christmas trees are popping up in most restaurants and shops, and all shopping malls have turned to Christmas music already.

On Sunday afternoon I walked by Times Square on Huaihai Lu when I came across this HUGE christmas tree. The workers were decorating it from the inside (it is of course a fake tree), and they were almost finished when I was there. Only the top part was still missing. It looked quite impressive already, and I can imagine that it must be even better at night. I will take some pictures if I drop by again in the evening one of these days