Today I went to the Shanghai Auto Exhibition during lunch. As a former DaimlerChrysler employee (and currently also freelance reporter for Dutch car magazine Autovisie) I still am a big fan of cars, so each time there is a car exhibition I try go there. The problem with car exhibitions in general, and the Chinese ones in particular, is that it is always extremely busy. But because today the event was only open to the press I could walk around relatively quietly and take a lot of pictures (thanks to DaimlerChrysler for giving me a press day entrance card). The event seemed even bigger than the last ones I have been to, and today’s newspaper confirmed that. The 2005 edition had 1036 car & parts manufacturers, this edition has 1300 exhibitors, and the space increased from 120,000 sqm to 140,000 sqm.

The most interesting thing during this show was to see the quality increase in Chinese vehicles. Of course there were still a lot of low-end cheap Chinese cars, but several manufacturers are moving up very quickly. Especially Brilliance and Chery are doing a good job, with some excellent designs. Others are also making nice cars, but a lot of their vehicles seem to be copies of foreign models. Especially Mercedes-Benz seems to design cars that people like to copy, see also some of the pictures from the Auto Show that I posted here. Another thing that has changed is that there are more and more foreign models standing next to the cars. This used to be only good-looking Chinese women, but now many brands (especially Chinese) flew in foreigners to perform this job.

I had lunch in the Mercedes-Benz VIP area, where I met several former colleagues. That’s always one of the things I enjoy most at these shows, meeting old friends and catching up on how things are going in the company. Being an entrepreneur is great, but being part of a multinational also used to be nice. Especially when you work longer for the company and get a bit higher in the organization people all know each other, it’s a bit like a circle of friends. Most of my friends who are still there have now moved on to senior management positions and several of them are now actually CFO of DaimlerChrysler companies. I also met Wang Ning again after a couple of years, he is now in charge of the commercial vehicle division in China. He just started this job last month, but knowing him a little bit from years ago I think he is the right person for this job. Good to see that DC is more and more localizing its senior management positions, that’s in my opinion necessary to win in China. Also at the Volkswagen exhibition area I met some former colleagues, among others Li Bing (who changed his name to Kevin Li), and who is now a director for Volkswagen China. Many ex-colleagues have moved from DaimlerChrysler to other automotive brands, but not many of them have moved to other fields of business. It’s a small world in automotive China.

Too bad I could not stay very long, because there was still a lot of work waiting in the office (due to the upcoming Tibet trip). Due to all the traffic jams – the negative side of all the new cars in China – it took me almost 1.5 hour to get back to the office. Luckily I had decided to take a taxi and not to drive myself, so I could work a bit in the back seat of the car.

Virals are interesting. Over the past 2 weeks a Tudou clip with an extremely difficult (actually almost impossible) level of the classic game Super Mario became very popular. For the first time not only in China, but also on the English language internet the clip was sent around. The 23 (!) minute clip has been watched 668,000 times already, without counting the views of copies that were re-posted on the site.

Now there is a second clip featuring Super Mario, that was made as a present for Tudou’s 2nd birthday and the closing of the C-round of funding. Super Mario is the personification of Tudou as you will see, the other Mario’s are the competition. After our A-round the competition increases, after the B-round there is a lot more competition, but now at the C-round many competitors have given up.

One of the things Esther and Doris provided us with for the bike trip to Tibet, is a huge amount Hongjintian. I never heard about the product until yesterday, it is a Tibetan herbal medicine that should prevent altitude sickness. I am always a bit skeptical about taking medicine, so I did a Google search. There are not a lot of pages about it, and there is not even a Wikipedia entry yet (quite unusal nowadays), but it turns out it can be quite effective in treating altitude sickness. It also has one very interesting side effect: if you take the medicine your alcohol resistance will be higher (your can drink more before you get drunk).

Over the past days I have read a lot of English language articles about altitude sickness and hypoxia (deficiency of oxygen in your body), but none of them mention Hongjintian. Some advise to take Diamox, but this can have some serious side effects. Is the Hongjintian medicine not known outside China, or is Tibetan medicine not (yet) accepted in the Western world? It is possible that this product might not even be readily available outside China. I found one site with an abstract describing recent medical research with 200 people that were treated for acute mountain sickness. 67% of them either recovered after taking Hongiintian and an additional 30% improved. Not sure how reliable this research is of course, but it sounds almost too good to be true. Anyway, I have started to take the medicine (6 pills per day), and will take it for the next 3-4 weeks until we leave the Himalaya.

Six days to go before we are off to Tibet, very exciting. Today I got all my clothes for the trip. Long thermal underwear and a thermal shirt – both can be worn for 7 days without a bad smell according to the sales person at the outdoor shop… Well, I don’t plan to try it out. I am now wearing my waterproof mountain shoes with special socks. Feels quite comfortable. Also we have our sleeping bags, that should be good for temperatures until around -20 degrees. We will need it, part of the trip it will be even colder according to the Tibetan agency that helped us to organize part of the trip.

The freezing cold will be one thing to overcome, but altitude may be even more of an issue. Marcel Ekkel sent me some information explaining altitude sickness and how to avoid it. Basically you should not fly or drive to an altitude over 3000 meters (you should hike up from there to slowly adjust to the altitude), but we are flying into Lhasa (3650 meter). Then you should refrain from too much physical exercise (great news if you do a bike trip) and not climb more than 300 meter per day (our ‘worst’ day has a 600 meter increase I think). Well, we want adventure, so that is what we get.

This is also a good moment to thank the the Shanghai organization team (mainly Gary’s assistant Esther and my assistant Doris). They did an excellent job, preparing the day-by-day trip schedule, organizing visa’s and Tibet travel permits, and getting all the flights and other logistical things organized. It cost them many weeknights and even several weekends. Thanks for the hard work ladies, without you this trip would not be possible! From now on we will have to do the hard work ourselves – on our bikes.

Tudou.com today officially announced that it has closed its C-round of investment. Next to our current investors (IDG, Granite Global and Jafco Asia), three new venture capital firms have invested in this round. These are General Catalyst (USA), Capital Today (China) and the Korean VC fund KTB. Partners from General Catalyst and Capital Today will join the Tudou.com board.

Tudou started exactly 2 years ago, and had two other rounds: a 500,000 USD angel round in 2005 and a 8.5 million USD B-round early 2006. Currently Tudou streams about 25 million video’s per day, and users upload on average 20,000 video’s every day.

The video can also be streamed here: http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/6pxjtVKxoAU/%E3%80%82

In case you can read Chinese here today’s press release:

????? (2007?4?16?)— ??????????????????????????General Catalyst Partners??????KTB??????????????????????????????????????IDG?????????????

2005?4?15????????????????????????????????????????????2500?????????2?????????http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/6pxjtVKxoAU/?

“????????????????????” ????????CEO????“?????General Catalyst?KTB???????????????????????????????????????????????????????”
??????????????????????????????????????????????????????

????????????General Catalyst?David Orfao?????????????

Last night it suddenly started to rain, meaning that the Tudou party had to be an inside-only party instead of a rooftop event. Several people also SMS-ed me that they could not make it because of the rain (as usual hardly any taxi’s available when it rains in Shanghai). That was a pity, but it was still fun event with lots of friends.

I met among others two former colleagues from Mercedes-Benz Indonesia (Jorge and Evelyn), where I did a project in 1996. I had not seen them in 11 years, and it turned out that they are now working in Shanghai. Nice to get in touch again.

The party started with a short video of Tudou’s 2-year history and birthday wishes from Tudou colleagues, followed by a short speech by Gary. After that a Filipino band started to play both oldies (80’s and 90’s songs are called oldies now I was told) and some more recent songs. Robert Vicencio also did a short guest appearance (thanks Robert!). Tudou’s Wii was connected to a projector, and people played the whole evening. Thijs turned out to be the tennis champ: it was his first time to play on the Wii but he beat everyone else.

Lots of picture of the party can already by found on Flickr. Just click here to find them.

I have been doing lots of sports over the past 3 weeks to get in shape for the upcoming Tibet trip. We are leaving in 10 days to Lhasa already, so it is now really coming closer. I am looking very much forward to it, although to be honest I am also a bit scared. The distance, altitude and expected cold weather high up in the Himalaya are not going to make it an easy ride. But I am glad we made the decision to go. Some things you just have to do, and as most people who know me will probably confirm, I like a challenge.

There will actually be four people riding. Not just Gary and me, but also a reporter from Shanghai TV and now my dad also decided to join. My father is always in a pretty good shape, and although he did not train much specifically for the trip, I think he is likely the one who arrives first on the top of the mountain passes.

Not only did I do a lot of sports (over 1 hour per day on average), but I also live a much healthier life. I still put in as many hours at work, but I eat a healthy diet (no french fries or fast food, but mainly rice, noodles and vegetables) and I completely stopped drinking alcohol a few weeks ago. Well, almost completely. I had one beer during a dinner with Gary and Kaiser Kuo last week, and one with Gary this Thursday because we had something to celebrate. And tonight will probably be the first Tudou party that I will clearly remember the next day 🙂

I feel great actually, I sleep much better and feel I have even more energy at work. I am in a better shape than many years before. And I automatically lost quite some weight as well. I got some suits tailor made a few weeks ago, but the pants are suddenly all one or two inches too wide.

In fifteen minutes Gary and I are off to Sheshan to do some bike riding. One of the Tudou VC’s will join us, so I am looking forward to test how his shape is. He should be pretty jetlagged, because he just arrived from Boston with a long delay (his plane had to make an emergency landing). He therefore even missed our “Friday the 13th” board meeting yesterday, but at least he is in time for our big party tonight :-). And I just heard that one of China’s most famous bloggers Keso is also gonna join us to Sheshan, so it’s going to be a fun afternoon.

I saw an interesting job ad in the newspaper just now from Pioco. It reminds me a bit of the cryptic ads that Google used to have, although Pioco’s riddle is much easier to solve. They are looking to fill several positions, among others an account executive, a channel manager, an executive secretary and several engineers.