No comment, except that I should be a bit more careful in the future. It happened to me before with my first Android phone…

I published this article today on the Business Insider, the original is here.

Facebook is not only the biggest social network in the world, but it has also grown to become the biggest online game destination. People that did not play online games before, started playing them on Facebook when they saw their friends also doing that. Because Facebook does not develop the games itself, many companies were started to create content for Facebook. Some of these have even grown into huge companies themselves, such as Zynga that just filed for IPO.

Reading Zynga’s S-1 it becomes clear that the company relies almost completely on Facebook. The SEC filing says in the risk factors section: “Facebook is the primary distribution, marketing, promotion and payment platform for our games. We generate substantially all of our revenue and players through the Facebook platform and expect to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Any deterioration in our relationship with Facebook would harm our business”.

Most other social game companies face exactly the same problem, all their players are on Facebook, which is potentially a big risk. Likely Google+ will also add social games to its social network, and I am sure that Zynga and other developers will then try to get users to play their games on Google+ as well. But it’s not sure yet that Google+ will become as big as Facebook, or that people will use the social network in the same way as Facebook. So whether it will be a real alternative is still a big question mark.

Therefore game developers are looking for other solutions. Today’s Financial Times published an article about how leading browser-based game developer Bigpoint will now distributes its games on the Spil Games social game platforms. For Bigpoint this has the added advantage that Spil Games focuses only on games. As Bigpoint CEO Hubertz says in the article: “Facebook is not a gaming website. Their first interest is not that the user finds our games… but that users can communicate.”

Spil Games’ users go there with the primary goal to play (social) games, and the company also understands game developers better than Facebook does. As Mr. Hubertz notes in the FT article “the decision to tie up with SpilGames reflected that company

I spent the past couple of days on the Dutch island of Vlieland for a Spil Games company outing. I hadn’t been to this island in about 20 years and it was nice to come back here. The place had not changed much over the past 2 decades, something which is hard to imagine when you are used to the fast pace of life and constant changes in China. It’s a beautiful island with long white sandy beaches, high sandy dunes and even some forests on the island.

Because cars are not allowed here, it is a very quiet place. The tourists that vacation here normally come here for the silence and the slow pace of life. Although I prefer life in the fast lane over a place where not much happens, I liked being on this island. It’s literally like being in a different world – but luckily a world where they have wifi!

The Spil Games team traveled by private ferry from Harlingen to the island, which took us about 2 hours over the Waddenzee. The weather was nice and we had a couple of beers during the ride over the sea. About half way 2 yellow rescue boats appeared on the horizon and quickly approached our ferry. It turned out they were there to make our ride more exciting: we could board the open speed boats and go for a fast ride over the waves. Pretty cool, especially after a couple of beers. Not everybody dared to go on the fast boats, so some of us, including myself, did the ride twice. Very cool and totally unexpected to do something like this.

Upon arrival on Vlieland my kids and dad where waiting in the harbor greet me. They had taken an earlier ferry and were staying in a hotel at the other side of the island. Nice to see them here! The whole Spil Games crew got bikes and we rode them to our hotel, the Seeduyn beach resort in the north of the island. I got a great room with beach & sea view and felt right at home. After putting my gadgets and passport in the safe we went down to the beach terrace for beers and for a short talk by Gregory about the program for the 3 days. After that we had a big dinner followed by drinks while watching the sunset.

I was a bit tired, because I hadn’t slept much the night before (Elaine got up very early because of jet lag), and went to bed around 11:30 PM. Most of the Spil Games crew decided to go to Vlieland’s village and have a couple more beers there. The next morning I heard that many hadn’t gone to bed until 4, and some had only hit the sack at 5:30! I saw some of the pictures and realized I had missed a great party. You can’t have it all…

Anyway, I got up at 6 AM and seemed to be the only one awake in the hotel and maybe even on the whole island. I decided to go for a run. I had seen a map of the island the night before and found a nice route to run. I thought it would be about 10-12 km, a good distance to start the day. I started running along the beach, and after my GPS watch told me that I had run about 6 km I realized the route must be a bit longer than I had initially thought. I could either turn around or continue, and I chose the latter.

Close to where the Vliehors (a military area) began I took a path through the dunes to the other side of the island and from there I ran along the coast to the only village on the island. I passed by the hotel where my family was staying, but also there nobody seemed awake yet, so I crossed the island again back to the Spil Games hotel. When I was getting closer to the finish I noticed I would run about 20 km, so I decided to run another kilometer through the dunes and on the beach to make it a half marathon (21.1 km). The time wasn’t great (1 hr. 57 min), but considering the fact that a big part of it was on the beach and in the dunes it was not that bad either.

After a big breakfast surrounded by tired and slightly hung over colleagues we had to choose whether we wanted a sports or a nature program. I had done enough sports already so went for the nature program. That was a good choice because we did some very cool things, especially in the morning. We took the Vliehorst Express, a modified truck with open air seats, over the beach to the Vliehors military base. There some F16 fighter planes were doing exercises that we could watch. The planes came in from over the North Sea, dived down over the island, fired at some tanks and then took off again over the sea. A fantastic sight from very nearby. After we got clearance from the tower we were allowed to drive over the Vliehors to the most western part of the island.

The fighter planes were still coming in and two of them changed their course when they saw us and flew straight over our heads. Top Gun 2011! Very exciting to see these planes fly maybe 30-40 meters above you at full speed. I don’t think you will ever have this kind of opportunity in China – or in many other countries for that matter, Holland is quite liberal in every respect.

At the other end of the Vliehors we stopped to look at some seals that were swimming there. Some of them were really observing us, but none of them dared to come ashore. We were at the very end of the island, just a short distance from the island of Texel. It seemed like you could almost swim there, but the currents would likely take you out to sea, so not a very smart idea to try out. Next was a visit to the Strandjuttersmuseum, a small museum with items from stranded ships and other things that washed ashore over the years. Some pretty amazing things, but also some things I’d rather not see (e.g. the eyeballs of a sailor man – the rest of the body was buried)…

After a lunch at the hotel with my parents, wife and kids (they rode their bikes over to my hotel) it was time for a hike with a guide. Not as exciting as the morning program, but still quite interesting to hear stories about the island and its people. Around 3:30 pm the weather changed from sunny to rainy and windy, so we went back to the hotel. I then went for a swim in the cold (18 degrees Celsius) North Sea with 2 colleagueas. We were the only ones who dared to enter the sea it seemed. It was refreshing, but I was glad to take a hot shower afterward!

After that there were two hours of management presentations, in which the Q2 results were discussed and some of Spil Games exciting plans for the future were revealed. For the first time also some non MT members were invited to tell something about their jobs (this time 3 people presented about how we do online marketing with SEO, SEA and game distribution). A good idea I think, Spil Games has gotten so big that many

Google Streetview does not exist in China, and considering the problems that company has here I don’t expect it will come anytime soon either. A pity because it’s very useful when you travel to a new place and want to check what the surroundings look like.

A few weeks ago Joop Dorresteijn pinged me about a service he had found that does something similar for cities in China: city8.com. You select the city you want to look at and then you get a streetview-like interface. It works pretty well, but because it’s hosted inside the Great Firewall it is quite slow outside China or when using a VPN.

I tried it out for Shanghai and Beijing and like the functionality and the quality of the pictures. Not only the city center has been covered, but also the suburbs. Even some of the expat compounds are part of the database (ours did not let the camera car in though, so I can’t see my own house), so you can check out most addresses in the city. Just type in the address in Chinese in the search bar and you get to the location right away. You can then move around with the cursor just like in Google Streetview.

The service is now available for 41 cities in mainland China, not only cities on the East (incl. holiday destinations like Haikou and Sanya on Hainan) coast but also in the Western parts of the country (e.g. Chengdu and Chongqing).

This afternoon I got the iTunes message that my iPhone’s memory was full, so I looked at what filled up the memory. Next to lots of music (that I did not want to delete), pictures turned out to be a major reason. I had imported these pictures to iPhoto before but did not delete them from my phone at that time.

With an Android phone it’s easy to select several pictures at once and delete them all, but the iPhone is a bit behind in this regard. Deleting hundreds of pictures one by one is not an option for me so I started to play around with some of OSX’s programs. iPhoto is great, but you can only delete pictures after you upload them, and because I had most of the pictures in there already that was not very useful.

Then I stumbled upon Image Capture (Location: Applications > Image Capture.app, a native app in OSX) and this turned out to do the trick. Connect your iPhone, launch Image Capture, select the pictures you want to delete and press the red delete button at the bottom of the screen. No need to upload the pictures first. If you want to delete most of your pictures best is to choose ‘edit > select all’ and then deselect only the pictures you want to keep. Within 5 minutes the task was finished!

I tweeted about it and immediately got some retweets and DM’s from people who were happy with this solution so I decided to post it here as well. It seems I am not the only one with this problem. Maybe it’s time for Apple to update its iPhone operating system to allow picture batch operations?

Also published on the Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-first-impressions-2011-7

After playing around with Google+, the new social network that Google launched this week, for a few days I really start to like what I am seeing. I am still a bit skeptical, but Google is doing some things better than Facebook is. It actually reminds me a lot of Sina Weibo, the Chinese Twitter clone that will soon surpass Twitter – and may even be a threat to Twitter.

First of all I like that Google+ allows you to follow everybody like on Twitter. As many people know I don’t really believe in privacy and so everybody can follow me on every SNS. The problem with Facebook, however, is that people can only see my updates if I follow them back. But many people that send me friend requests there I don’t know at all, so in order for them to see my updates automatically I need to accept their friend requests. Of course you can then hide them from your time line, but it still feels a bit weird to add many people as friends that you have never met. On Twitter, and now on Google+, people can follow you without you following them back. I think that’s a feature that Facebook should introduce as well.

Another thing that Google+ does much better is the group functionality. Facebook also has Groups, but Google went a step further. Each time you add a contact you can immediately add them to certain groups, called circles. You can also make new circles for them (I made circles for all companies that I am involved in for example), so if you want to share certain things only with a smaller group that’s possible. I think this solves a big privacy issue that Facebook is facing.

When I added a colleague on Facebook a while ago she told me she felt a bit weird about it because I could see all her party pictures. I could understand that (not that it makes a difference to me, I don’t judge people by what they do outside work hours. I actually love to party myself as well, but that’s a different story.), but with Google+ she would not have that issue because there she could just add me to a circle that she does not share her party pictures with. Doing this with Facebook Groups is theoretically possible, but not many people use the functionality because it’s not a main feature of the site like within Google+.

Will many people use circles? Maybe not, it’s more of a geeky thing, especially for people with thousands of followers on Facebook or Twitter. For me it’s quite useful and I may actually follow more people back than on Twitter if I can filter some of their updates through circles or (even better) if they filter what they send me. I understand that you can also follow certain circles, didn’t try that out yet, but that’s another great feature – copied straight from Twitter Lists of course. Talking about copying, a lot of the features that I see in Google+ seem to come from Sina Weibo, I would not be surprised if the Google China people analyzed the success of Weibo and made a list of all their killer features.

I am surprised how busy Google+ already is. The first day Google only let people with a large social graph on there, which was very smart: they are the ones that post most on Facebook and Twitter and would ensure that Google+ would be full of activity right away. They could then invite others, but for some reason Google suddenly stopped that (I can’t invite new people anymore). There was a trick that you could add new people by sending them a Google+ post by email, but I understand even that function does not work anymore.

But despite that, many of my geeky and entrepreneurial friends are already on the service and are actively sharing information. So far I only have 35 contacts, but that’s mainly because I did not spend a lot of time following people, and partly also because it takes a bit more time because you have to decide which circle you want to add them to.

Will Google+ be a success? Hard to say after just a few days where mainly the geeks are active, but I take back my initial judgment that I did not believe a new SNS could beat Facebook or Twitter. The problem is that I already spend too much time updating and reading Twitter and Facebook. I don’t want to add a third one to that list to be very honest. So maybe one of them will have to go to be replaced by Google+.

That would probably be Twitter for me: I don’t see enough innovation there, especially when I compare it to Weibo. But I have about 3500 followers on Twitter, and it’s an interesting audience to discuss things with. To build up 3500 followers on Google+ will take a lot of time, so until then I won’t abandon Twitter. But if Twitter does not innovate more quickly I may eventually drop them and move to Google+. I’ll wait a few months, before giving a final judgment on this. But for now I give Google a chance – and actually even a good chance. They thought SNS through and came up with a great solution and excellent functionality. I look forward to what will happen with this initiative!

Note: The original post partly disappeared after a WordPress update, so I restored it to an earlier version. The pictures and some revisions have not survived the restore, but at least most of the text is still here.

I am in the Narita Express from Tokyo to Narita airport after a 24 hour trip to Tokyo for some meetings. Just a couple of random observations, first a couple related to the huge earthquake:

– I had not been here since the 9.0 earthquake and nuclear disaster (except for a unscheduled landing in southern Japan less than 2 days after the earthquake) and daily life seems to have changed a bit. It had the feeling that it was much less busy on the streets of Shinjuku than before, and my Japanese colleague confirmed this. Some restaurants and shops in this busy shopping district seemed to be closed and also in the shopping arcade below the Hilton a lot of places either closed early or did not open at all.
– There are a lot less tourists, up to 65% less than a year ago someone told me. Outside Tokyo at some places up to 90% less. Normally I don’t stay in 5-star hotels in Japan because I find the ridiculously expensive, but this time I was able to get a room in the Hilton for less than I normally pay for a room where I can’t even open my suitcase. Despite these low rates the Hilton did not seem full, I was supposed to get a low floor room (I was asked if I wanted to pay more for a higher floor room and said no) but upon check-in I got a room on the 23rd floor. Later I noticed that the elevator didn’t stop once at any floor below the 20th despite me traveling up and down at least 6 times during my stay. Could be a coincidence of course.
– The Narita Express has an adjusted schedule (it does not ride between 12 and 2 pm for example) because there are less tourists and business people. Yesterday I took the express bus into town and that was 3/4 empty as well.
– My colleague told me that all households and businesses have to reduce their electricity expenses by 15-20% and this is actively checked – different from China where this kind of measures are often announced (‘Offices can’t set the airconditioner to temperature below 26C’), but nobody ever bothers to check.
– Generally I felt that the Tokyo vibe was not there anymore. Maybe because I was here on a Monday and it was a rainy, foggy and humid day, but still. People seemed more serious. Maybe it’s just me?

Some other things, unrelated to the natural disaster:
– I am always surprised by the high level of service in Japan. From the guys who put the suitcases on the express bus all bowing to the passengers when the bus leaves to the extremely friendly staff at the hotel. This morning when I got back to the hotel after a run in Shinjuku’s Central Park the door lady handed me a bottle of mineral water. I have been running at many hotels all over this planet but I don’t think this ever happened to me before.
– During running runners greet each other. Runners probably know this, but this does not happen in many countries and certainly not in the big cities. Even in Holland runners only seem to greet each other when you’re in the countryside. Interesting observation for me.
– Lots of homeless people in Shinjuku’s Central Park, part of the park looks like a slum where they built their own houses out of blue plastic and wood. Surprised to see this in the middle of this expensive city. Someone explained me that they used to stay in the train stations but they were kicked out by the police.
– I complain a lot about air pollution in Shanghai, but the air in Tokyo this morning was not clean either. I felt it in my lungs during my run. Maybe I should have run earlier instead of during rush hour (I ran around 8 AM)?
– While running in the morning I noticed once again that most salary workers in Japan dress the same: white shirt with tie and black pants (and with a jacket if it’s a bit colder). No room for creativity or individualism there, just a standard plain work uniform ordered by the company. I could not do it (anymore). Japan dresses more conservatively anyway, even in game companies you see a lot of suits and ties – try that at Spil Games! 🙂

And 2 more tech related things:
– You still see a high number of feature phones in Japan. I had expected that by now the iPhone and Android would have taken over, but when taking the train most people are still using their (by now outdated) feature phones. I understand why of course, most sites and apps are still optimized for them and people have been using them for years already (plus several other reasons such as that you can pay with them etc.), but I thought I would see more smart phones by now. I took a look in some phone shops around Shinjuku and even there most of the phones that were sold still seemed to be feature phones instead of smart phones. The smart phones that I saw were mainly iPhone 4 models, not Android. I wonder how this will be in 6 months.
– My Nike+ GPS watch perfectly fine in the Tokyo urban jungle. After my bad experience in Shanghai a few weeks ago I was looking forward to trying it out in Japan to see if it would work here. My watch hooked onto a satellite within 30 seconds, had a small error during the first 300 meters but then was exactly right. And this despite running between skyscrapers! I therefore don’t think that the error I got in Shanghai had anything to do with running between houses, but was really related to something else (see also the comments below that post).

I am almost at Narita airport, so I am going to end this post. I had a nice day in Japan, I always like to spend time here. I sometimes say it’s a more civilized version of China (please no hate mail!), but wonder if China will ever be like Japan. China is more rough, which is not necessary a bad thing. Maybe Japan was like this as well 50 or 100 years ago? I don’t know. The rules and regulations sometimes get on my nerves in Japan (even in the bus they ‘kindly’ remind you to wear your seat belt), but I have a similar aversion to some of the rules in the US. There is no perfect place on this planet, thats why I like to travel every now and then – and sometimes put down my observations in a blog post so I can read them again in a year or 2.

A quick blog post about a book I finished a couple of days ago and that I truly enjoyed. I first didn’t plan to blog about it, but on the plane today I was thinking about the novel again and thought it was actually so good that I should share it with my readers. If you love the Stieg Larsson trilogy you should read Jo Nesbo’s latest thriller The Snowman, set in a snowy Oslo and Bergen. It’s one of those books that you want to keep on reading, it only takes a couple of pages to get completely absorbed in the story and after that you can’t put it down anymore.

The book is a serial killer whodunit, in which detective Harry Hole tries to solve the disappearance of several mothers that have one thing in common: a snowman was built outside their house around the time they went missing. The police think that they have solved the crime quickly, but Harry is not convinced and keeps on searching. Even though I can’t relate to Harry at all (exactly like I had with the main characters in Stieg Larssons novels), I think it’s a great novel with a well thought out storyline and an unexpected ending. If you’re into thrillers give this one a try for your summer holiday – or wait until your winter holiday, somehow it feels weird to read about cold and snow when it’s 35 degrees outside.