The Find My iPhone app

When we were staying in the Legoland Hotel 2 weeks ago I could not find my iPad mini. I looked everywhere for it, but it seemed I had lost it somehow. I knew I had used it the night before in our hotel close to Disneyland, but I was quite sure that I had not left it in the room. I used to travel so much that I have a standard routine of checking my hotel rooms before checking out and I normally don’t forget anything.

Luckily I had the Find My iPhone app installed on my laptop, so I ran it to see where my iPad was. Turns out it was still in the Hyatt Regency next to Disneyland. I had not idea how I could have missed it and I questioned Scott whether he had hidden it somewhere. He had done that once with my iPhone: I thought I lost it in Whistler but he had hidden it in his playroom and had totally forgotten about it.

I remembered using the iPad before going to sleep the night before. I normally read the New York Times from the next day (that’s the advantage of living in the Pacific Coast time zone) and that’s what I did there as well. But I could not remember what I had done with it after that.

Hyatt Regency Orange County

I called the Hyatt Regency to check whether they had found the iPad, but they said the cleaning staff had not seen it and there was no iPad at lost and found either. I normally tip the cleaners well (also when leaving the hotel), so I hoped that they would hand in an iPad that they would find.

With the Find My iPhone app you can play an alarm on the iPad, but because it was quite late already I decided not to do that. New guests had checked into our suite already and I did not want to wake them up or scare them late at night.

The next morning we called hotel security again and they sent someone to the room. There were no guests present in the room, but the security person did not want to enter. He listened at the door while we played a sound on the iPad, but he said he did not hear anything. My app, however, showed that the iPad was still in the hotel and very likely still in our room (the app is quite accurate with the location).

I decided to forget about it, but when the kids were in bed at night I started to play the sound again remotely. From about 8 pm to 10 pm I played the iPad alarm every 15 minutes, but nobody seemed to hear the device. I put a text on the iPad screen as well, offering a $100 reward to the person who would find it (in case the cleaners had found it and had hidden it this may be an incentive to hand it in).

The next day we drove to Palm Springs. I could see on my iPhone that my iPad’s battery was draining quickly, it was below 10% during the drive and less than 5% after we arrived in Palm Springs. I had sort of given up on the iPad and wanted to remotely wipe all data and apps from the device before it would be completely empty. But right before I did that I decided to let the alarm sound one more time.

Three minutes later my wife’s phone range and guess what: someone had heard the sound and found the iPad! A woman from Florida had checked into our former room and heard a sound coming from the room safe. Turns out that the iPad had ended up against the back wall of the safe, and I had not seen it while emptying it. The safe had been closed the day before, so security could not hear the sound.

My iPad was found!!!

I was very happy, especially because I had almost given up on the device. I offered the finder the $100 reward, but she said she was not interested in that and was just happy that I had my iPad back.

By sheer luck my parents had just landed in Los Angeles and would drive by close to Disneyland the day after, so I gave them a quick call. They did not mind to make a short detour and picked up the iPad for me the next day.

When I installed Find My iPhone a while ago I didn’t really think the app would be very useful, nor that I would ever need it. But it turned out to be the most ‘valuable’ app that I have, because without it I would have lost my iPad.

I was thinking about changing my iPhone and iPads to Android devices because of Apple’s rejection of all Bitcoin wallets (I hate Apple because of this and think they made a huge mistake), but after this experience I have become a bit more reluctant to change. Does Android have apps like this? I assume they do, but do they work as well as Apple’s own app? I have tried to switch to Android several times already over the past years (and some of these attempts are recorded on this blog), but so far I always went back to Apple.

Interestingly, after losing my iPad mini and finding it back I started using it more frequently. When you don’t have something you suddenly realize the value of it. I mainly used it for the New York Times and occasionally for Twitter, Facebook or to try out a new game. But now I also put NextIssue on there (Netflix for magazines) and I synced my Spotify playlists with it. Last night I was on a flight from Vancouver to New York and spent half the flight reading magazines on my iPad while listening to Spotify!

If you have iOS devices and don’t have Find My iPhone installed, do it right away. It’s free and it just works!

Laguna Beach, CA

Last year we stayed home during Spring Break, but this year we decided to take the kids to a warmer destination. We decided on California, because it’s in the same time zone as Vancouver and the flights are relatively short.

Scott’s favorite part of the park was Cars Land

We flew to Los Angeles where we started our holiday with a visit to Disneyland California. The kids had been to Disneyland Hong Kong a few times, but this was their first time to the park in Anaheim. Disneyland California is quite similar to HK, but the kids loved it anyway. We bought tickets for both Disneyland and the California Adventure park next door, and we visited both parks.

I personally like the California Adventure better than Disneyland. I had been there a few years ago with my sister during a road trip in California, and since then the park had grown a bit and now also includes Cars Land (from Scott’s favorite Disney movie Cars & Cars 2).

Scott and Elaine with Mater

What surprised me is how many obese persons there were in the park. Not just overweight, but really obese, in the sense that many of them needed an electric scooter to get around the park. So many people were using these things that it almost became normal to ride on one. Good for them I guess, but it’s kind of shocking to me. This kind of obesity is still a typical American thing (mainly thanks to the food and sedentary lifestyles), but I see a trend towards it in Europe and in China (especially with spoiled kids in one-child families) as well.

Because we booked quite late we could not get decent rooms in the Disney Resort anymore, but the Hyatt Regency where we stayed turned out to be a good alternative. Most people stay there for Disneyland, and the suite we booked had a bunk bed for the kids in their bedroom. They loved it, but it was a bit hard to get them to sleep the first night. The kids also loved the outdoor pool, so even after a full day in the resort they still insisted to go for a swim with me.

Legoland California Hotel, Carlsbad CA

After Disneyland we drove along the coast on Highway 1 to Carlsbad for a visit to Legoland. There we stayed in the Legoland Hotel, which was a big hit with the kids. Not only was every room full of great Lego models, but there were Lego bricks to play with in the room and the kids had their own TV next to their bunk bed. Our room had a medieval castle theme, and the decoration was very well done. We had a room next to the pool, so the first thing Scott wanted to do upon arrival was to swim. If you plan to go to Legoland with kids you should consider to stay in the hotel, it’s next to the park’s entrance and your kids will be very happy.

Entrance of Legoland California

Legoland itself is very different from Disneyland. It’s a great park for young kids, but for parents it’s less interesting. Everything feels a bit less well maintained, especially after just spending time at Disney where everything is perfect. The attractions are not as good, but the park entrance fees are also a lot lower than Disney. For young kids it doesn’t matter, however, and Scott and Elaine had a great time.

With Scott in one of the Legoland rides

After the 2 parks we drove to Palm Springs where we stayed in a villa with a nice pool. Palm Springs is one of those places that you either love or hate. 10 years ago I probably would not even think of going there, but right now I love it. The climate is great, 350 days of sunshine and it’s always warm (except maybe at night during the winter months). While we were there temperatures averaged about 28 Celsius during daytime, which I find very pleasant.

Palm Springs, CA

My parents also joined us in Palm Springs and it was nice to have them around. The main thing we did during the few days there was relax at the pool, play with the kids and have dinners in good restaurants. Palm Springs and Palm Desert have some very good restaurants, actually better than the restaurant scene in Vancouver (which is already not too bad). When the kids were in bed my dad an I often had a nice bottle of wine at the outdoor fire place in the back garden.

After running with my dad

We compensated the food and wine with some running. I found a nice 11 km route around the airport where there were hardly any traffic lights or side streets. My dad an I ran it a few times and one morning even ran the loop twice. Because Palm Springs is almost completely flat running was quite easy there, very different from the hilly courses that I normally run back home in Vancouver.

Grace went shopping a few times with my mom. There is a great designer outlet close to Palm Springs and El Paseo in Palm Desert can compete with Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Lots of high end brands of course, but also a lot of nice galleries. We didn’t buy any art this time because Scott and Elaine are not big fans of galleries, but maybe we’ll do so in the future. The cars on El Paseo are great as well, there were more Rolls Royce and Bentley Convertibles there than I had ever seen before in one day!

My temporary office in Palm Springs

I also did a bit of work, and created my own office in the shade in a corner of the backyard. From there I had a good view of the pool where the kids were normally playing, but they would not interrupt me too often.

Malibu Beach at sunset

We flew back home again from Los Angeles and spent the last night there. In the late afternoon we walked around Marina del Rey and Venice Beach and later had dinner in Malibu, which has some nice restaurants and obviously great ocean views. It was a nice end of a great holiday!

More pictures of our holiday here in a set on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/chijs/sets/72157643198799293/

Bitcoin is far from dead in China and that was proven by the fact the Bitcoin exchange OKCoin just announced that they raised $10 million in a Series A round. I wrote an article on Coindesk about this, that I copy/paste below. The original article is here.

OKCoin, the exchange claiming to be China’s largest by trading volume, has announced a $10m Series A funding round.

The investment round was led by Ceyuan, one of China’s earliest venture capital firms, followed by Mandra Capital, VenturesLab and numerous high-profile angel investors.

Despite the nation’s recent crackdown on cryptocurrencies, it seems Chinese venture capitalists are still bullish on bitcoin exchanges and the currency itself.

Bitcoin in China

Back in November 2013, the focus of the bitcoin community was on China – the world’s hub for bitcoin trading. At that time, BTC China was the biggest exchange in the world, having managed to raise a $5m Series A funding round from Lightspeed Venture Partners (Snapchat, Nest). There were even rumours that a bigger round was in the works for the young company.

However, things change quickly. After the Chinese government began regulating bitcoin in December, trade volume plummeted and the world’s top exchange was no longer Chinese.

Local exchanges came up with creative solutions for customers to continue to buy and sell bitcoin, and players like Huobi and OKCoin claimed to pass BTC China in their daily trade volume, although these figures have been the subject of much dispute.

OKCoin has grown rapidly over the past few weeks and is now the biggest Chinese exchange, according to its CEO Star Xu. He claims the exchange’s current daily trade volume is approximately 50,000 bitcoins per day.

Interestingly, on top of that, the exchange allegedly trades 5 million litecoins per day. The company claims that at its peak it reached over 300,000 bitcoin and 13 million litecoin trades.

Future growth

Mr Feng Bo, founder and partner at Ceyuan, commented that he has a tremendous amount of confidence in the future of bitcoin and the continued growth of OKCoin:

“We are delighted to invest in the pioneer of China’s bitcoin exchanges; given the company’s leadership under Star Xu and his team, we know there is much more good news ahead.”

Ceyuan is a well-known fund with investments in successful Chinese companies like Qihoo 360 (NASDAQ: QIHU), Light in the Box (NASDAQ: LITB), UC Web andVANCL – among others.

Interestingly, Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper was involved in the round, as a partner of VenturesLab. He and his son Adam remain active in bitcoin-related investments, mainly via Adam’s Boost.vc incubator where Tim is a mentor. Tim also invested in OKCoin’s angel round.

OKCoin overseas

The investment in OKCoin will be used to expand the team, fund product research and development, further security enhancements, but also to expand OKCoin’s operations beyond China.

This a different strategy from the other Chinese exchanges and it may prove to be a smart move, given the current regulations in the state.

Mark Mai, VentureLab’s China partner, stated that as the regulatory environment in regions such as Singapore, the US and Hong Kong becomes clearer, it will open up opportunities for OKCoin to operate in geographies where it can offer maximized safety and protection for OKCoin clients.

Mai said that the growth of virtual currency is inevitable, and that many countries are coming to terms with the fact that they have to regulate these currencies, because their citizens are using them regardless.

He added that OKCoin welcomes oversight because he believes it will help the company to serve its customers better, allowing them to open up regulated bank and trading accounts so it can engage in third-party clearance and settlement.

All eyes will be on OKCoin’s global expansion in these uncertain times. Will the exchange make it as a large player outside China? Only time will tell.

 

A new cryptocurrency was created in February, the Auroracoin. It is comparable to Bitcoin (actually it’s based on Litecoin, but that would be too technical for this blog post) and on March 25 every citizen of Iceland will get 31.8 Auroracoins. For free. Just by using their ID number.

That in itself is an interesting experiment, because what will happen when everybody gets a small amount of a crypto currency? Will people start using it and create a second economy or will it not take off? When I first heard about it last month I did not really believe it would work but I still followed the coin a bit.

When Auroracoin was launched the value was very small, so 31 coins did not have a lot of value. But then something unexpected happened: people outside Iceland started to buy the currency before it was even distributed to the citizens of Iceland and the price shot up. Last Friday it was worth about $7 I think, so the total value of the 31 coins would be about $220. At that amount of money it would be likely that most people would claim their coins and maybe start using them.

But what happened over the weekend is unbelievable. The coin’s price exploded, and from $7 on Friday it is now worth over $66 per coin! (Update: while writing this post the price went up to $80 per coin!!!) That means that each person in Iceland will suddenly get over $2000 at the current market value. What might happen now, is that most people will sell the coins the moment they receive them and so the price will plummet. And of course traditional media will pick up the story saying that a Bitcoin experiment showed that people do not want to use Bitcoin.

Or something else might happen: maybe, just maybe, the hackers who created Auroracoin are just some very smart guys who created a hype to get rich quickly. The total value of the coins that they created last month is now worth over $700 million. Today over $17 million was traded, so they have a huge incentive to just forget about the whole experiment and slowly start selling their coins. They could earn a few million dollars per day over the next 22 days (until the coin should be launched on March 25). Not bad for a few weeks of work.

I am not saying that this will happen, but after the Mt. Gox disaster last week nothing surprises me anymore. It turns out that the name of the person that created the coin does not exist in reality. That does not mean that this is a scam, because Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s creator is also a pseudonym. Coincidentally Sathoshi holds about 1 million Bitcoins which as today’s market prices is alos worth about $700 million!

Let’s just say there is a big incentive for the creators not to distribute the coins and make themselves rich beyond belief. If they decided to do so, probably nobody would even be able to sue them. The perfect financial crime!

We will find out on March 25 whether the so-called Iceland airdrop will really take place. I personally think it will happen (I still believe that most people are intrinsically good), but I would not be surprised if the whole idea turns out to be a big scam.

Today Youku Tudou released its Q4 2013 results and the online video site is now officially profitable! It’s almost 10 years ago since I entered this sector, at that time I had not expected that it would take so long to reach this milestone. Although I have not been involved in the company for quite some time it’s still a nice feeling to see that the company is doing so well.

I dialed in on the earnings call a few hours ago and was impressed with how the company is doing and with their expectations and plans for 2014. The share price immediately reacted, during regular hours it went up by 3% and after the results were published by another 8.5%. Let’s see what will happen when Wall Street opens on Friday!

I am quite happy with this and from the pictures on Weibo I can see that the people at Youku Tudou are also celebrating this result in their office.

What’s the best way to quickly see what people on the Internet talk about right now? You can go to Twitter and scroll through your timeline to get an idea of what’s important, but your results depend very much on who you follow. It also takes time before you can distinguish between what’s important and what not. Twitter’s trending topics may be a better way to find out what’s going on, but there is a lot of noise there and some topics are covered multiple times.

Today a new app was launched in the app store, Current.ly, that solves this problem. I have been beta testing it for a couple of months already and I must admit that I love it. The app gives you a quick overview of what’s trending on Twitter right now, and you can even choose the country that you want to see the trending topics for.

The user interface is very well designed, so you can swipe from topic to topic and get all the information you want in just a few minutes. If you want to dig deeper into the topic you can do that with one click, if not you just go to the next topic. A great app for anybody suffering from information overload.

Current.ly was created by the team behind PeerReach, a company that I invested in about 2 years ago. Zlatan Menkovic and Nico Schoonderwoerd did a great job with this app, and I am proud of what the team managed to achieve with their limited resources. Congrats on reaching this milestone guys!

Give Current.ly a try, it may replace the way you consume some of your news. I am of course a bit biased (but I would never promote something I don’t like or don’t believe in!), but of the many news apps that I downloaded, this is one of the very few that I now use on a daily basis. You can either go the Current.ly website or you can download it from the Apple app store here.

It’s Monday lunchtime and it has been snowing non-stop in Vancouver since Saturday morning. Even at our house (which is close to the sea) there is a lot of snow and it looks great. Downside is that it’s hard to drive in this kind of weather, we don’t have a heated driveway so last night I could not even drive our family car up to the garage anymore.

Alfred, a long time friend from Holland, is visiting for a couple of days, so we decided to grab the opportunity and do some snow sports over the weekend. On Saturday we drove up to Hollyburn Mountain where we went snowshoeing. It was snowing hard it was not too cold, so perfect weather to enjoy the trails through the woods.

So far I had only done green and blue snowshoe trails, but this time we also tried some black ones. Because of the fresh snow they were not hard at all, just a bit steep at some places. The scenery was amazing with huge amounts of snow on the trees, and when you stopped it was completely silent. We were surprised that we hardly met anyone else on the trails, despite it being a Saturday afternoon. After the snowshoeing we had a glass of wine in my rooftop terrace hot tub, while it was snowing hard. We ended the evening at The Boathouse in Horseshoe Bay for excellent sea food dinner with local a Pinot Blanc.

On Sunday Scott had his weekly ski lesson on Cypress Mountain, so Alfred and I decided to go skiing as well. The snow was fantastic with a huge amount of fresh powder. Finally some of the black diamond slopes were open, so we tried some of them. Pretty cool to be skiing through the trees with your skis invisible under a thick layer of snow.

When Scott finished his lesson he also wanted to ski through the trees, so we took him on an easy trail. He loved it, despite his basic skills (he only had 7 lessons of 2 hours each so far) he was not afraid at all and had a great time. After that he was so tired, however, that he fell asleep in the car on the way back!

The snow was supposed to stop overnight, but this morning it was still snowing hard. According to the weather report it should have stopped snowing by late morning, so I decided to stay home until lunch time in order to avoid the snow and the traffic jams. But instead of less snow it started to snow even harder…

We kept the kids home from school today: the school sent us a text message at 6:30 AM that classes would start an hour later, and then our kids’ teachers advised us by email that the roads up the mountain were in very bad condition so that we should consider to keep the kids at home. That was turned out to be a good idea, because the heavy snow caused a power failure and parents had to pick up their kids before lunchtime already!

Driving was quite a challenge, especially because I did not put winter tires on my car and because the roads in our area were not cleaned or sprayed with salt. I like snow a lot, but I don’t mind if it would stop snowing soon. It looks great but when you live in a city with lots of hills it can disrupt life quite a bit. One thing is for sure, next year I am going to get winter tires for my car!

This afternoon I will pick up a friend from the airport, so at breakfast I checked Google to see what time the plane will arrive. Scott, who was eating his oatmeal next to me, wanted to see where the plane was at that moment, so I showed him the location of the plane on the KLM website. However, then I noticed that there was a difference in arrival time of more than 40 minutes between KLM and Google.

I assumed it was just a glitch that would be gone after refreshing the page or by just waiting 10 minutes, but that was not the case. It’s now about 5 hours later and both sites still show a different arrival time. Who should I believe? If Google is right I need to leave 40 minutes earlier than planned, but if KLM is right and I leave early I have to wait 40 minutes at the airport.

I normally use Google for arrival information and so far they have always been right, but because this is a KLM flight I would assume KLM’s information is more accurate. I wonder where they get their data from, I guess there should only be one feed for this information (the plane’s on-board computer)?

Update:  KLM’s information was right and Google was wrong, the flight landed at 2:22 PM. Good to know for the future. I still don’t understand why they give different arrival times though. Even after the plane had landed Google still showed 1:41 PM, and for tomorrow’s flight it now shows 1:49 PM, even though the flight has not even departed yet.