I am sitting in the front row of the upper deck of a KLM B-747 from Shanghai to Amsterdam, while listening to an 80’s playlist on my iPod with a new pair of Sennheiser NoiseGard headphones (great for intercontinental flights, because the noise the plane makes is filtered out). As regular readers may know I stopped flying business class after I turned entrepreneur, but every now and then KLM still upgrades me (thanks to the Elite status that I still have). Normally this happens while checking in or when you enter the plane, but today they came to me right after take-off with the question if I would mind to change into a better seat for the remainder of the flight. I did not mind.

I assume they normally upgrade when the economy class is overbooked and there are still a few spaces left in business. But maybe it is also some kind of marketing trick to lure you back into sleeper seats on your next trip. If that is the case the airline certainly had a small success today. The flight is almost over (we are above Sweden while I write this) and I feel fitter than ever after a long flight. Not only did I have a good rest, but I also worked a lot, caught up on all my RSS feeds (good that Google Reader also works offline), watched a movie and read two thick Dutch Saturday newspapers.

Business class is still way too overpriced I feel, because the price difference on an intercontinental flight covers the monthly salary of one or two additional employees. Those are things that count when you run a business instead of when you are a small part of a big multinational. On the other hand, I now always take day flights when flying to Europe. That means it costs me a full working day (even though I normally try to use the weekend to fly), but if I would fly business class again I would probably opt for a night flight. It would be possible to leave the office in Shanghai at 9:30 PM, drive to the airport, take the Air France midnight flight to Paris, change planes there early in the morning and arrive fresh in our office in Hilversum at 9:30 AM. Putting a value on me being in the office instead of being in a plane is a bit arbitrary, but likely the balance would be for me to keep flying economy. So I probably won’t do it in the near future, but at least KLM made me think about it. So, if this is a marketing action: smart move KLM. Feel free to upgrade me again!

In April/May this year Gary, my dad and myself rode mountain bikes from Lhasa in Tibet to Kathmandu in Nepal. Two camera men (Wang Peng and Zeng Jie) shot the whole expedition, and are now making a one-hour documentary about it. They put a 5-minute trailer on Tudou.com, that has been watched by almost 30,000 people already in the past 2 days. Comments range from people saying that we have too much time and money, to others expressing their disbelief that an old foreigner (sorry dad!) can do this. Most are very positive though, and respect or even admire what we have done. Glad the extremely exhausting trip is over, but it’s nice to watch part of it again while sitting in the sun with a cool drink.

Note: the video is hosted on our servers in China, therefore watching it outside China may be a bit difficult sometimes due to the Great Firewall. Pushing the pause button and waiting for the video to load in the background is normally a good solution.

Last week Tuesday my wife and I went to see the musical Mama Mia! in the Shanghai Grand Theater. A few years ago you had to fly to Hong Kong or even Europe to see a decent stage performance, but things are changing. In the past 2 years we have seen among others the Phantom of the Opera and the Lion King in Shanghai, both performed by the similar casts that also do the West End or Broadway shows.

It turned out that we were lucky, because the next day’s show was cancelled due to an illness of one of the leading actresses and both of her substitutes. They even had to fly in somebody from London in order to ensure the performance of the show on Thursday. According to the Shanghai Daily this was the first time ever that they had to cancel a show!

Mama Mia! tells the story of a young woman who is getting married on a Greek island, where her British mother runs a small hotel. She does not know who her father is, and finds out through her mother’s diary that there are 3 possible fathers. She decides to invite them all to the wedding, hoping to find out which one is the real one. I won’t tell you the result, but the story has an interesting twist.

The musical is based only on ABBA hits, and they have been used in the story in interesting ways. Only occasionally part of the song texts were changed, but most of the time the writers were able to fit the songs in quite well with the story line. Because of the music and the love stories, it is a typical ‘feel good’ musical. I really enjoyed it, which has the side effect that I always start to get new business ideas (but I cannot write them down during the show). This always happens to me when I watch a good concert or show (or when I run on the treadmill for a long period of time), and it’s a good measure of whether I enjoyed the performance it or not.

I had the idea that the Chinese audience did not know most of the songs, but they still seemed to like it. As usual there were Chinese ‘subtitles’ on both sides of the stage, so non-English speakers were able to comprehend the story as well. Only during the 3 extra songs after the show was over, people started to clap along. A few foreigners even started dancing on their seats, but nobody else dared to follow.

The show will run daily until August 2. Tickets are available online and range from RMB 200 to RMB 2000. Most of the cheaper tickets are sold out long ago already, however. After Shanghai the show will move to Beijing, where they will play at the Poly Theatre.

The rainy season is officially over in Shanghai, and it’s now becoming seriously warm. Today’s temperatures should reach 38 degrees (>100 degrees F), and overnight it will not go below 30 degrees (86 F). Luckily we have air conditioning everywhere, and except for the 10 meter between my parking space and the office entrance I should be cool the whole day. At least that’s what would be the case outside China. Because yesterday the building management came to our office to check our air conditioners. Not to check if they were working properly, but to make sure the temperature was set to at least 28 degrees (82.4 F). It seems they decided that 28 degrees is cool enough to work, and that putting it lower only costs more expensive energy. He also told us that for our game.com.cn office space (200 sqm+) one airconditioner should be sufficient (we now have 4 or 5 to cover the whole space), but that he could not enforce that.

So now we working in a 28 degree office, a lot better than the hot and humid air outside, but a bit too warm for me. Problem is that we cannot say no to this, because our office is located in an incubator center and the rent is heavily subsidized by the government. What I do now is that when it gets too hot I close my door, put the air conditioner at 22 degrees and the highest wind speed and leave it on for 10 minutes. Then it’s OK again for at least 1-2 hours.

I am not sure where the 28 degrees limit came from, as far as I know the official lowest temperature for hotels and shopping malls is 26 degrees. And Marcel Ekkel told me yesterday on Twitter that for Hong Kong the official inside temperature is 25.5 degrees. That seems more reasonable to me.

A few days ago we took a picture of all the staff of Spill Group Asia and our game development company Zlong Games. The company has grown tremendously in the past 18 months (I started Spill Group Asia in January 2006). It’s fascinating to be in the internet industry in China right now, and experience hands-on what it means to be in an exploding business in the most booming economy on earth. Hard work, but lots of fun in a very dynamic business environment.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project just published a report about the fast growth of the internet in China. The study describes who the new users are, and what the consequences are for China in general and its relations with the outside world.

The research project also raises the question whether Chinese will be the lingua franca on the internet in the future. Something I do not believe in, I believe there will be a Chinese language internet and a non-Chinese one that are not very much integrated (quite similar to the current situation). If you are interested, the report can be downloaded here.

I also wrote an article about the research with my personal views on several of the points that the report focuses on. I posted it early this morning on Marketingfacts.nl (note: the article is in Dutch). Ogilvy’s Kaiser Kuo put his thoughts about the report in a blog post as well, his ideas can be read here.

Yesterday I was on a China Eastern plane from Beijing to Shanghai. When the captain made his usual announcements he made them in English first, instead of in Chinese. When I listened to him I realized he was not a Chinese but a foreigner (judging from the accent from a Middle-Eastern country). That was a first for me, I did not know that Chinese airlines started to hire foreign pilots.

Coincidentally, this afternoon I was having lunch with a business friend when he told me that he was on a plane from Changsha recently, and that he was very surprised to find out that the captain was a foreigner as well (from South-East Asia). It seems China Eastern started to do some serious recruitment overseas.

I hope for the pilots that they carefully read their contracts before signing them, because the contracts of Chinese pilots often contain clauses that make it almost impossible to quit. Originally these contracts were meant to protect the pilots from unemployment (they get a job for life), but now this is used against them: they cannot be fired, but they can also not leave the job for private reasons.

Last year there was a case where a pilot tried to resign from China Eastern to start working for one of the new private airlines. He was sued by his former employer and asked to pay 1.5 million USD. The court finally ruled that he should pay around USD 200,000 in compensation to the airline – effectively 3 times his yearly salary in his new job.

The reason that airlines do not want to let pilots go is simply because there is a major shortage of aviators in China. The aviation industry is booming, but the flight schools and the military (where many pilots traditionally come from) are not able to supply enough young pilots to fulfill the demand. It seems that they have now finally decided to let foreign pilots in. A smart move, but potentially a dangerous one as well: I am sure the pilots do not speak good Chinese (the Chinese announcement on the plane was made by someone else for example), and I am also quite sure that at least some of the air traffic control staff is not fluent in English.

Spill Group Asia, the online gaming and game development company that I set up last year Spill Group, and online video site Tudou.com both keep on growing very fast. That is also one of reasons that blogging is a bit light at the moment; others are that my internet connection at home is not working, so late night blogging is not possible, and the fact that I just spent a few days in Beijing in a hotel with only a dial-up connection – not good if you have a MacBook Pro that does not support this anymore…

Game.com.cn, currently our leading Asian gaming site, now has over 300,000 unique IP’s per day and about 6 million pageviews per day. As a comparison, around Chinese New Year (mid-February) we were still at 100,000 unique IP’s. According to iResearch game.com.cn is now the 4th biggest gaming site in China, and my aim is to be in the top 3 within a few weeks.

Zlong Games, the game development subsidiary of Spill Group Asia, also goes very well. The company has grown to over 50 artists and programmers, and will now be ‘split’ into two parts: the serious gaming division will be rebranded Seeriously and for the casual games we will start using the brand name GameDino. GameDino.com will feature all games that Zlong has built. Flash games can be copied for free from there, and downloadable games can be bought there (test versions can be played for free).

I have been working on a strategy to do more with multiplayer games, and soon we plan to launch this in China. Exact details we don’t know yet, but we might work with, or take over, an existing Chinese company (we found a very interesting one already). Next to that we also will focus more on India. In two weeks I plan to go to Mumbai to meet some companies there to see how we can work together. Interesting but hectic times!

In terms of numbers Tudou.com is doing even better than Spill Group Asia, after the USD 19 million C-round was closed a few months ago the site keeps on growing very fast. According to another iResearch report Tudou now has a 47% market share in China, based on time spent on video sites. In June we streamed 1.2 billion films on the site, and in July the clip views are up to 60 million films per day. Tudou also introduced its innovative advertising system earlier this month. Personally I think it looks very cool, and actually makes the site even nicer. If you want to read more about it check among others Kaiser Kuo’s blog post or this article in the Hollywood reporter.