Interfax reports that from September 1 onwards all Shanghai mobile phone users will need to register with their ID card:

All mobile phone and Xiaolingtong (PHS) subscribers in Shanghai, new and old, will have to register their legal names with city authorities beginning September 1, the Shanghai Communications Administration and the Shanghai Public Security Bureau (PSB) said on Friday.

“We have tightened control in order to protect mobile phone users from malicious and fraudulent SMS (short messaging service) messages,” Hu Yonglong, Vice Director of the Shanghai Communications Administration, told Interfax.

Mobile phone and Xiaolingtong subscribers will now need to show their Citizen Identity cards and register their legal names when buying a new SIM card. Telecom operators will be required to confirm and register the legal names of new subscribers in a database.

Existing mobile phone and Xiaolingtong subscribers must registered their legal names with authorities at designated locations across the city within three months from September 1.

Let’s wait and see if it is just an announcement or if it will be really enforced. If it should be enforced I expect that people who use mobile phones for illegal activities will buy their numbers outside Shanghai, or will give poor unemployed workers a few kuai to register in their names. And also I do not expect the amount of spam SMS to reduce: I get about 3-5 per day, and most are from China Mobile anyway!

After lunch I had a wine tasting session to determine which wines to serve during my wedding. This is one of the nicest parts of organizing a wedding. We decided on two nice Bordeaux wines, a red 2000 Chateau Haut Dina and a white 2001 Chateau Bauvallon. During the tasting we discussed a few things about foreigners doing business in China, and the way they often look at the market (if every Chinese would buy one of my products etc.). Thomas Kaeppelin (manager of DT Asia, the wine supplier) then made a good remark: “If every second Chinese would drink a bottle of wine per day (like in France), there would not be enough wine in the whole world!”

Interfax posted this story this morning:

PowerNet Technology, a Chinese online gaming firm, has developed a new online game in cooperation with the China Communist Youth League (CCYL) named “Anti-Japan War Online,” which will begin commercial operation by the end of 2005, a PowerNet official said Tuesday.

“The game will allow players, especially younger players, to learn from history. They will get a patriotic feeling when fighting invaders to safeguard their motherland,” a PowerNet Project Manager, surnamed Liu, told Interfax.

The background for “Anti-Japan War Online” is the Japanese invasion of China during World War II, from 1937 through 1945. Players are able to play simulations of key battles, but will only be able to play as the Chinese side. Players will also not be allowed to kill other players in the game. In addition, fighting in the game between Japanese and Chinese soldiers will be shown only in miniature, so as to reduce the violence level of the game, Liu said.

The new massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) will begin internal testing later this August, with commercial launch of the game expected in 2005. The online game is based on PowerNet’s self-developed game engine.

The CCLY said in statement that few games on the Chinese market today generate a “national spirit” that can educate young players. As a result, the CCYL will actively partner with online gaming companies to jointly develop “patriotic” online games.

“‘Anti-Japan War Online’ is a patriotic online game that is both interesting and instructive, and can attract and guide young players,” Chen Xiao, the CCLY official in charge of partnerships with online gaming firms, told Interfax. “We will pay close attention to the authenticity of historical facts in the game.”

Interesting, anti-Japanese protests are not allowed anymore, but a game like this is sponsored by the government! I wonder how many people will play this game. Would they play it because they are patriotic? Or only if the game is as good as they other online games they normallly play? I guess the last reason is more important for the younger generation.

The first thing I normally do when arriving at the office is to make a big cup of coffee. Normally Sophie has already turned on the machine before I arrive, so the only thing I have to do is push a button and a minute later I have a large cup of steaming hot Italian coffee.

This morning I noticed that the coffee machine was still off. I turned it on, but nothing happened. I tried the computer nex to it, also not working. Ergo, a power failure in that part of the building. The office is located in an old villa (a sign over the entrance gate says 1903, but the National Heritage sign on the building says 1920), and this is the first time in 6 months that this has happened, so that’s not too bad.

I needed to make some copies, so turned on the copy machine, which is in a different part of the building. But instead of the ‘warming up’ message a huge amount of white smoke came out of the machine. Well, that was the end of the machine, 3 months old and ready to be scrapped. And it wasn’t even a cheap Chinese one. Definitively not a good start of the day.

Five minutes later two repairman came. Lots of loud talking as usual, but in the end they had no clue about what had happened, and blamed workers that had been redecorating our neighbour’s office the day before. So still no electricity, and because of that also no internet. So now I am writing this post at a Coffee Beanery outlet having a XL coffee and free wireless internet. My secretary will call me once the problem is solved, which I hope is within 2 hours, because then my laptop battery will be empty.

Sometimes it seems the world is really small. Look at what happened yesterday for example: I was riding in a cab with Gary, my biz partner for Toodou.com, when he got a call from a guy from the US that he would meet later that afternoon. Turns out I also met this guy a couple of weeks ago through an online business forum, and when he arrived in Shanghai the week before I had lunch with him and his wife. This was a total coincidence.

In the evening I went out for a couple of beers with Hugo Verkuil. Hugo arrived from Europe that morning for a short biz trip, but has so much energy that even though he did not sleep on the plane, he still was ready to go out. He is a friend from university who used to be with BCG, but just started a high-level job with Unilever. I picked him up from a biz dinner that he had to attend, and there I see a guy who I know from several years before in Beijing. This guy, Peter, used to be Chairman of Wall’s ice cream in China. Turns out he is now Hugo’s boss (head of worldwide ice cream activities for Unilever), who ‘lured’ him away from BCG.

Over a beer at New Heights I am talking with Hugo about Toodou.com and about Gary Wang. And yes, you might have guessed it, Hugo knows Gary. They were classmates at INSEAD 3 years ago. The world seems to be really small. Or is the international business circle so small?

The podcasting multimedia website that I co-founded last year is becoming extremely popular. With up to 700,000 page hits per day, and over 50,000 registered users (15 days ago it was only 30,000 registered users!) Toodou.com is exceeding the figures from its business plan. Lots of media attention, not only from blogs, but also interviews with magazines and newspapers. This morning we had a TV crew in our office that interviewed us and followed our work during a couple of hours. They will make two programs, one will be aired on Dragon TV as a part of City Beat next Sunday, the other one will be broadcasted on CCTV next month during TechMax. If I don’t forget about it I will put the exact times here later.

This weekend the internet speed was once again extremely slow. It started Saturday around noon, when I noticed that I got server timeouts on my Gmail account. This site normally works fine, even on busy times on the net, so when it is not loading on a Saturday afternoon something must be wrong. It turned out that almost half the (foreign) sites I tried to load did not work. Strangely, it was not the case that only European or only US sites worked, it seemed very randomly. I was planning to work on the organization of my honeymoon in the Philipinnes, but that turned out to be impossible, as also here about half the sites of hotels and resorts did not load.

I talked to a friend in Zhejiang province, and he had the same problem. So it seems to be something bigger than just my neighbourhood. And when my parents tried to call me on Saturday night they told me they could not get a connection to my mobile, and had to call three times to my landline in order to get through. Sunday afternoon things suddenly were back to normal again. I could not find anything on the net about it. Was anybody else affected or does anybody know what happened?

It seems the height of summer is over in Shanghai. Early this week still temperatures were still around 37 degrees, but not we are back around 30-31 degrees. I like the heat, but I also appreciate a bit cooler weather. Finally I can go for a walk at lunch time again, without having to take a shower afterwards and change clothes. In the evening it is actually quite cool (lower 20’s). I went running two days ago, and when I walked back from the gym at 10PM it was very pleasant to be outside. Normally I tried to be back inside asap because of the heat, but now I walked around my apartment block to cool off a bit.