Spill Group Asia launches unique online gaming portal

Youxi.cn offers the most popular games on an innovative platform. The portal is also the launching customer for ToodouAds, a revolutionary promotion tool.

Shanghai – March 17, 2006 – SPILL GROUP, a leading operator and developer of online gaming portals in Europe and Asia, today announced the launch of its new online gaming platform youxi.cn. The site offers all games that are currently most popular in China. Youxi.cn differs from other Chinese gaming portals in that it is free from disturbances like pop ups or moving banners and designed in a clearly structured way.

Youxi.cn is SPILL GROUP Asia’s first casual gaming website. The leading developer of online gaming portals approached the creation of youxi.cn with a new concept. With a dark blue background and the use of only a few colours, the design of the site is elementary. “Most Chinese websites are tiring for the eyes when you look at them: they consist of moving banners, blinking names of games and they are overloaded with information,” says Marc van der Chijs, CEO, Spill Group Asia. “Youxi.cn wants to be different. The design of the portal allows for a relaxing, pleasurable online gaming experience.”

The Youxi.cn launch coincides with the launch of a new promotion tool called ToodouAds. The tool was developed by Toodou.com, the leading Chinese podcasting and video website, and puts short videoclip ads in front of or behind clips that are viewed on the Toodou.com website. Those ads are clickable, meaning that users can click them and will then automatically go to the youxi.cn site. “We are very proud that Toodou.com chose youxi.cn as the launching customer for ToodouAds. ToodouAds is a revolutionary tool that does not exist anywhere yet,” says Marc van der Chijs. “With ToodouAds, many potential players will soon hear about youxi.cn and visit the platform. There, they can experience the gaming enjoyment that the site has to offer.”

Youxi is the Chinese word for game or gaming. The online portal youxi.cn features a wide variety of games like action and adventure games, MMORG’s (massive multiplayer online role-playing games), skill, racing and card games. A team of Chinese casual games experts carefully selected the games for youxi.cn, choosing only the best and most popular ones.

The design of youxi.cn makes it easy for users to find the games they like. The games are classified in different game categories. The top 5 most played games of each category are listed on the home page, all the rest is only one click away. Youxi.cn is free – gamers just need to visit the site and they can start playing right away. And because the site is published in simplified Chinese, the whole of mainland China can use it for some gaming enjoyment.

SPILL GROUP Asia plans to launch several more websites in the coming months, both for online and mobile gaming.

About Spill Group

The Dutch holding company SPILL GROUP was founded in 2001 and has subsidiaries in Europe and Asia. Its aim is to become the biggest source of the best games for PC and mobile devices. Currently, the company develops and runs more than thirty gaming portals in eight European countries as well as China, Malaysia and India. 1.5 million unique visitors a day look for gaming enjoyment on the SPILL GROUP portals. The portfolio contains 3.000 online games of all genres – skill games, casual games and fun games. The portals are kept simple and are specifically designed for every country. Those wanting to play a game do not need to register, but can start right away.

For more information on Spill Group, please visit www.spillgroup.com.

Company Contact

SPILL GROUP Asia

Marc van der Chijs

marc@spillgroup.com

Tomorrow Spill Group Asia will launch its first site in China: www.youxi.cn. And this caused me a bit of stress today because a lot still had to be done and many people wanted information at the same time. At 6:30 PM I realized that I was in 9 MSN messenger conversations at the same time, while 12 new emails came in within 30 minutes. Next to that I also had some phone calls. I am used to multi-tasking and like doing 3 things at the same time, but for me this was also an extreme situation. Coffee count until now: 7 cups. I think I need to go for a run later!

Lei Feng is an icon in China, although some people doubt he really existed. Born in 1940, he became an orphan after his father was killed during the anti-Japanese war and his mother committed suicide after being harrassed by her landlord. At a young age he joined the People’s Liberation Army and allegedly spent all his spare time and money helping the poor, old and needy. He died at the age of 22 after a telephone pole fell on his head (no kidding – someone drove a truck into a pole that struck Lei Feng), and became a national hero from his selflessness and noble-mindedness.

Chairman Mao Zedong then decided that March 5 would be a national Xiang Lei Feng tongzhi xuexi (Learn from Comrade Lei Feng) day. Suddenly many pictures of Lei Feng doing good deeds turned up, and also his diary was found and published. This year it seems that the Party wants to revive the Lei Feng spirit among younger people, because after 40 years it was suddenly announced that Lei Feng had a girlfriend (did he not write about her in his diary?). This of course led to quite some media articles about him. And according to the Shanghai Daily now there is even an online game starring Lei Feng (according to Xinhua published by Shanda):

To do good deeds, as many as you can, is the trick for passing each level in the online game. The game, so-called “Learn from Lei Feng,” has become very popular among many Guangzhou students as of recent. Hard work, a plain life and willingness to help others are the game’s themes, which is very different from most other online games. “For beginners, sewing and mending socks is the only way to increase experience and to upgrade,” said Jiao Jian, a six-grade pupil in Yuexiu District, quoted by the newspaper. “Every time you are promoted to a higher level, your clothes will become more average,” he said. “You have to do good deeds in order to upgrade, such as contributing and volunteering on building sites. The more you do, the better and higher you get. Thus boosting your reputation.”

The game also sets up tasks like a treasure hunt, which can be found in many online games. But the treasure here is a copy of Chairman Mao’s Collection, unlike the usual swords or jewels. “It’s a novel idea, very interesting.” Jiao said. He also said he likes to battle against the secret agents mainly. “Sometimes the enemy was very strong. The fight almost exhausted me, so I would go to talk with the Party secretary to replenish my vitality at once.” “As long as my experience, reputation, skill and loyalty satisfy the game’s criteria, I will win and meet Chairman Mao,” Jiao noted. “I still have several tasks to go through. I will ‘work hard’ and strive to obtain the Chairman’s autograph as soon as I can.”

It seems like a potential cult game to me, and through viral marketing it could even become a hit outside China. Not sure if there is an English version though.

I managed to get 4 tickets to the Rolling Stones concert on April 8, they were just delivered to my office!

‘I can’t get no satisfaction’? Well, I am pretty satisfied now.
‘You can’t always get what you want’? True, but I managed to get my hands on these tickets.
‘It’s only rock ‘n’ roll’ – good enough for me though!

Anybody else planning to go?

For the past couple of hours Google.com has been down in Shanghai. But not only that, also its adservers seem to have a serious problem: when opening a site with Google ads you get the error message that googlesyndication.com cannot be reached. Luckily Gmail still works, although it seems to be slower than usual.

Google.cn is working flawlessly, coincidence?

Update: (March 15, 8 AM) Google.com is working again in Shanghai, but all their adservers are still down. Maybe it was due to a misconfiguration of the Great Chinese Firewall? But why was only Google affected? And why not just Google.com, but also all the other country codes?

This morning I was as usual reading Dave Winer‘s blog Scripting News on my way to work. And I was surprised, very surprised, to read that he plans to stop writing his blog. Dave has influenced me a lot, even though I have never met him in person.

For those of you who don’t know him or don’t regularly follow his weblog, Dave is a software and internet pioneer. He is one of the very first bloggers (he started in 1994 with his first semi-blog), he invented XML-RPC, RSS (that is finally taking off) and OPML. He was the founder of Userland, and he is one of the people who together invented and developed podcasting.

Because of reading his blog I decided to set up my first weblog about two years ago (Shanghaied Weblog is my third weblog, the first two have since ceased to exist). And without him the idea of podcasting would have never be born, so likely there would be no Toodou.com.

Dave wants to stop blogging because the goals he had when he started blogging are now fulfilled. Also, he has become a public figure because of blogging and he wants some more privacy. To be honest, I don’t think he can stop blogging anymore. It’s too much part of his life to share his thoughts and ideas with the outside world. I enjoyed following his travels all over the US, and developed many new ideas because of his posts. It’s a pity this might stop soon. Thanks for the inspiration you have given me over the past years Dave, and good luck with your new plans!

Spill Group Asia is a fast-growing online gaming company with headquarters in Shanghai. We run and build online gaming webportals in China, Malaysia, Singapore, India and Australia.

We are currently looking to expand our team with a junior programmer/web designer and a senior systems engineer/programmer for our office in Shanghai (Xujiahui). Details of the requirements for both positions:

Function description Designer/Junior Programmer

• Functional design of sites, games, cartoons, logo’s
• Making banner materials and promotional content
• Broad experience with Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, Html
• Programming of applications for gamingwebsites with high trafficvolumes and dynamic web environments. Easily specified in per-project outline.
• Work on basis of schedules and deadlines
• Preparing work on basis of flowcharts
• Documenting work in English.
• Programming Skills needed: PHP/XML/HTML/MySQL/XSL/Object oriented programming.
• Competencies needed: Relative good writing in English, Flexible, Goal-oriented, a high drive to learn, responsible, deliver speed and quality.

Function description Senior System engineer/programmer

• Responsible for the structure of the server farm
• Giving guidelines to programmers regarding fine tuning to the Linux servers
• Engineering of server farm i.e. the ones in China
• Load balancing

• Committed to have the servers working 24*7
• Taking care for all internal systems and back-ups
• Broad experience with Unix/Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL
• Competencies needed: Good writing and verbal skills in English, Flexible, Goal-oriented, a high drive to learn, responsible.

Because of frequent communication with Europe and other Asian countries, only candidates that have good English skills will be considered. Spill Group offers a very competitive package in a great working environment.

Interested in becoming part of our team? Please send an email to amanda (at) spillgroup dot com or contact her by phone at 1376 430 3884. More information about Spill Group can be found on our corporate weblog.

Mid-December last year one of my companies (China Bay) received a notice from the landlord that we would have to vacate the building. The reason was that our office villa would be torn down to make way for a skyscraper. We would have exactly one month to find a new place and to move out. Well, that’s a bit short, and even if we had wanted to move we would not have been able to do so within a month. Finding a new place and renovating it already takes at least 2-3 months. So after some serious negotiations we could stay longer, because the rental contract that we signed does not allow them to just kick us out like this.

There were some more tenants in our building (we only rented the ground floor), and all have left in the meantime, so we have the whole place to ourselves now. Probably in order to motivate us to hurry up to find a new place, the developer put some nice red banners on the outside of our office (see picture). The message of the banners is that we should ‘support the relocation’. China Bay will probably have to find a new place soon, it’s a pity because the location is great and we spent quite some money on decorating the building on the inside.

At the moment Spill Group Asia also has its office in this building (renting some space from China Bay), but for this business I already found a new place. We will move to an office in the Jiaotong University Science Park (an incubator center). A great place for an online gaming start-up, surrounded by all other Chinese internet and software start-ups. I look forward to moving there, likely we can move in by April 1.