After spending almost two weeks abroad, it takes a bit of time to get used to some of the negative aspects of living in China. It started with a motorbike that I almost hit last night, when I drove back from work. I was a bit tired (I did not sleep much on the overnight flight to Shanghai) and it was dark and foggy outside so it was difficult to see things clearly. Suddenly a motorbike without lights crossed the road right in front of me, and I had to swerve to the right in order not to hit it (luckily there were no bicycles next to me). I wonder what was in the person’s mind, my car lights were on and I was driving at a normal speed. I know that in two days time I would not even write about this anymore, because it happens all the time and then I am used to it again.

At home the reception of my mobile phone was almost zero, and even standing close to the window made making phone calls a nightmare. Generally, you have good connections in China on your mobile, but living on the 37th floor is the culprit. Sometimes it’s fine, sometimes there is no connection at all. The management of our compound promised to install some piece of equipment to enhance the reception months ago, but of course that has not happened so far.

Then I decided to make calls using Skype, but that did not work well either. Not only because of China’s firewall, but also because of the still very slow internet after the Taiwan earthquake. Also many of the other sites that I visit regularly do not load, and even uploading my holiday pictures to Flickr was impossible. But luckily my blog is still working!

It’s all about expectations I guess. Now if I need to make a phonecall I use the fixed line or take the elevator to the lobby. And when I drive at night I just need to drive even more slowly at roads that are poorly lighted. The websites will be up and running eventually, just no new pictures on my Flickr account for the next couple of days.

But after being away for a short while, you also notice the nice things in life that you normally take for granted. When we arrived home from the airport around lunchtime our ayi was already waiting downstairs to help us carry the suitcases (she waited outside for an hour in the cold, because we had a delay – we tried to call her but we could not reach her). And when we came into the apartment, a nice lunch was already waiting for us. The fridge was full of fresh products, we did not have to go shopping ourselves. Overall I certainly prefer Shanghai!

Sitting in the business lounge at Amsterdam Schiphol airport right now using the expensive internet that Dutch provider KPN offers here (EUR 6 for 30 min). They should learn from many airports in Asia where internet is available for free. Even Shanghai now offers free wifi in the KLM lounge.

I still cannot retrieve my Spillgroup Asia email, so I checked my RSS feeds instead. And what is the first thing I read online? A China Eastern yet landed at Shanghai’s Hongqiao airport yesterday, and bursted 4 tires while doing this. The whole airport was closed for 5 hours because of their almost crash-landing. Not the first time this happens to China Eastern, in May last year they manage to burst 12 tires on one airplane. China Eastern has a horrible reputation anyway (remember their crash in Baotou two years ago, and I try to avoid it when flying.

I also came across an interesting article by Micah Sittig about the translation of movie titles into English. The latest James Bond (the first to be shown in China) is called Casino Royale. But because gambling is not allowed in China, it was renamed to 007??????, which Micah translates as “007’s War on Casino Royale”!

2007 will be the Year of the Pig according to the Chinese calendar, and Tudou celebrates that with a temporary change to its logo!

During New Years Eve and the first hours of New Years Day people in Holland sent a total of about 40 million SMS messages. I found that quite a lot of messages, on a population of a little over 16 million people. But then I saw the figures for Shanghai just now. Shanghai has about 17 million people, so only a few people more than in Holland, but during the same timeframe there were a total of 244 million SMS messages. That is 6 times as much! And this is just Western New Year, Chinese New Year (this year on February 18) is much more popular and will likely see an even higher amount of messages.

One week after the earthquake in Taiwan, the internet connections from Europe to China are still extremely slow. I have big difficulties connecting to Chinese sites (I am still in Holland), sometimes it works but often I get server time-outs. For example, yesterday I could read the Shanghai Daily online (after several days of server time-outs), but today it’s again not working. For me this is not a big issues, because most of the sites that I surf to are non-Chinese. But when you are in China the opposite problem occurs, when most foreign sites do not load or load very slowly.

I have the same problem with some of my email accounts. Spillgroup Asia’s email servers are located in Shanghai, and for days I was not able to check that email account. Finally on New Year’s Eve some mails were getting in, and yesterday I received the headers of all my emails. I scanned most of them quickly, and wanted to work on them today. But today the connection is much worse again, probably because more people are online sharing the same lower bandwidth. Now I can see all the titles of mails in my inbox, but when I click on the mails to read them the email client tries to make a connection with the server, which times out. This is actually worse than not being able to receive mails. I now see the mail that I want to read and/or answer, but cannot do it. This afternoon things got a bit better, and with a waiting time of several minutes I can read a mail (but there are still hundreds to read). Attachments are still impossible to open though, but at least I can ask people to resend it to an email account outside China.

I am quite happy that this earthquake occured during a less busy period of the year for me, and I was lucky to be in Europe when it happened. I will be back in Shanghai later this week, and hope the situation will have improved by then.

2006 was a great year, once again a year full of changes and opportunities, but also lots of hard work. I set up Spill Group Asia in January and did not expect that at the end of the year it would be a 35 person company, active in running game portals and in game development. The take-over of Zlong Games in September was successful as well, and we managed to get some big multinationals as clients over the past months.

Gary ensured that Tudou also kept on growing extremely fast, the average Alexa ranking over the past week was 258 (meaning that it is almost in the top 250 of websites worldwide, based on size). A lot of competitors started this year, some very well funded, but Tudou.com is and will be the number one video site in China. It is bigger than all its Chinese competitors according to Alexa, both in terms of ranking and total page views. Of course the 8.5 million USD investment helped a lot as well. My wife quit her job at Roland Berger this year and is now also active at Tudou, as VP and CFO.

China Bay moved to a new office again this year because our former office (the first floor of a villa on Weihai Lu) would be destroyed. The company is now located in an old renovated villa on Zhaojiabang Lu. I am not very active anymore in China Bay, because Spill Group takes almost all of my time, but I still work with some European clients on their China strategy. Very different from my day-to-day operational work in the internet business, but very interesting to work directly with clients as a consultant and help them to grow their companies here.

Privately Qi and I had our first wedding anniversary, which we celebrated in Guilin. Other travels (some partly for work) included short trips to Hong Kong, Macau, Italy, Monaco, Holland, Dubai, and a one day skiing trip outside Beijing. Also we tried to work a bit less on weekends, and spent some weekends outside Shanghai, among others in Nanjing, Hangzhou and Moganshan.

The plan was to ride a mountain bike from Lhasa in Tibet to Katmandu in Nepal, but this plan was postponed due to Nepali rebel action. Hopefully we will be able to do this 20-day trip in 2007. Other sportive highlights were scarce, although I did run another marathon, this time in Macau. Next year my dad and I plan to run the New York marathon in November.

And what will 2007 bring? I will certainly still be in Shanghai in one year’s time, and very likely still as CEO of Spill Group Asia. I expect the company to keep on growing, and would not be surprised if we will double in size over the next 12 months. We have some interesting ideas for game.com.cn as well, that I will write about once we launch them in about 3 months. Tudou will also keep on growing fast, I think 2007 will be the year that online video really becomes mainstream.

Privately, my sister will get married in May, so that means a trip to Holland for the wedding. As mentioned I hope to ride through the Himalaya this year, and I also plan to run in New York. My work load won’t reduce, but that’s something I don’t mind. I try to live a bit more healthy though, with more sports and more sleep. Of course combined with nice food and wine, no compromises there.

For all readers a successful, happy and healthy 2007. Xin nian kuai le!

As usual, this morning when I got up the first thing I did was to check my mail. But for some reason the server from Spill Group Asia timed out. That happens sometimes, so I was not too concerned. Then I noticed that none of my colleagues at SGA were online in MSN, and that is more unusual. I suspected that the internet in the office was down, until I noticed that some were online in Skype.

At the same time I started checking my RSS feeds, and quickly realized from several blog posts that the problems were caused by the Taiwan earthquake yesterday. Some cables on the bottom of the sea were damaged, and these were vital for worldwide communications. Strange enough at that time I did not see any US or European media reports yet about this problem, the blogs beat the press bureaus once again. Now the first reports finally start coming in, but it’s not even on the front page of Google News yet (and maybe it will never make it there, Google News is never that interested in foreign, let alone Asian, news). Repairs may take two to three weeks according to this article on Bloomberg.

It seems this earthquake is having a huge impact on Asia. Not only the internet in China is severely disrupted, but also the net in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and even Singapore. I talked to my colleagues, and heard that MSN messenger is not working at all (good for QQ messenger in China!). And when I try to go to game.com.cn or tudou.com from Europe, I cannot open these sites. Friends in China and HK are telling me that they cannot open most sites, that they cannot use email (except Gmail), and that the internet is generally very slow. This is costing tons of money, and I wonder if any insurance policies cover this (likely not).

I am surprised that such a “small” natural disaster can still have such a huge impact. I remember that something similar happened a few years ago, when a fishing boat tore apart one of these cables (also close to Taiwan if I remember it correctly). The Chinese internet was disrupted for days. At that time the internet was not so important yet for most people, but that has changed of course. I assumed this could not happen again, but it seems I was wrong. Who would be in charge of this? And what would happen if terrorists would damage a couple of these cables worldwide? Scary…

My wife (or Santa Claus?) gave me a very cool Christmas present. I was totally surprised when I opened the package and I had a printed version of this weblog in my hands! It is a hardcover book, printed on high-quality glossy paper with all weblog entries from September 24, 2004 until December 5 this year. All posts including pictures fill a whopping 554 pages. I am very happy with this, all my memories and ideas from the past 2 years in one book.

If you had asked me before I would have probably said that a blog is not interesting in printed version, but now that I have this book in my hand I would take back these words right away. It’s not comparable actually, in a blog you can click on links and add comments – it’s all interactive. But a printed version is different, you can flip through like a magazine which gives a totally different feeling to it. A lot of the posts I had totally forgotten about already, and it is nice to see how some ideas and thought have developed. I am extremely happy with this present, and have already spent more than an hour reading old posts and looking at pictures.

Of course this present gives me a new business idea right away. One that likely already exists: setting up an easy-to-use website where people can upload their blog (with interfaces for the main blogging tools/programs) and where they have to do the editing themselves (drag and drop, it should be so simple that everybody can do it). And then they can send it off to a printer in China, where it is printed within a week. Choice of hardcover or softcover, several types of binding, and for busy bees like many of us also a service where people do the design of the book for you (for a hefty fee of course). With the huge growth in blogs over the past years I think there could be a big market for this, especially for birthday or christmas gifts. I am sure this has been done before, but at least those sites’ marketing is not good enough, because I did not hear about them. So there seems to be a business potential. I won’t do it, no time for new projects, but maybe one of my readers would like to develop the idea and turn it into a (big) business.

Update: I just heard that there is already a Chinese company doing this, www.inker.com.cn. You can upload your document on the site and they print it for you. Not sure if this is the easy-to-use idea that I have in mind (you can download a ‘bookmaker’ tool on the site), they seem to focus more on printing novels and poems. They also do not have an English site, so whoever is interested in the idea might be able to team up with them.