I spent the past 4 days in Jakarta on a business trip and got back early this morning. I had not been in Indonesia since last year June (see last year’s blog post), and it was great to be back. Spil Games’ Indonesian site games.co.id has grown tremendously over the past 1.5 years: it’s now the #1 online game site in Indonesia with 8.5 monthly unique players, and over 30% come back every single day to play!

The trip gave me a lot of new insights about the Indonesian Internet market and the game market in particular. I won’t mention too many of the insights here (the competition also reads blogs), but most are quite straightforward and the main one is that this is just the beginning for the Indonesian Internet. There are tremendous opportunities for players that follow the right strategy and I think I now know for sure what that strategy is.

I arrived on Thursday evening on a delayed Garuda flight. The delay was partly Garuda’s fault, because the airplane we were supposed to take had technical problems and they had to use a smaller one. The smaller plane (a brand new B737-800) could however not make it to Jakarta in one time and had to make a refueling stop in Singapore which caused a 1.5 hour delay. But because a Quantas A380 had just made an emergency landing after one of its engines exploded right after take off, one of the runways was blocked and we had to stay much longer than planned at the gate. I actually read about the Quantas accident online when we were waiting at the gate and when we finally took off I managed to get a good look at the A380 that was still parked on taxi lane next to the main runway.

Upon arrival in Jakarta things went relatively smoothly, except for the fact that my cab driver refused to put on his meter when my suitcase was already in the trunk and we were on the road already. This was of course totally my own fault, and after so many years in Asia I can’t believe I made this mistake. I had actually planned to take a Silver Bird Mercedes taxis but found their price too expensive, so I just walked out looking for the Blue Bird stand. I didn’t see it, but many other taxis were waiting, and I just took one of those, totally forgetting to tell him to use the meter before getting in. I still managed to negotiated a Rp. 150,000 rate which was about the same as my trip back to the airport so I didn’t do too bad (as a comparison, Silver Bird charges Rp. 440,000).

Because of major traffic jams I did not get to the hotel until 8 PM, meaning I would miss the StartupLokal event that I had planned to go to. A pity, but instead I went for dinner and drinks with TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacey. We were looking for a nice outdoor restaurant and through a friend I got the address of a good restaurant. But of course the taxi driver couldn’t find it (or pretended he couldn’t find it), so we eventually told him to stop and looked for a restaurant ourselves. It turned out we were lucky, because we ended up at a very nice Bali-style restaurant, Payon (see link for some pictures of the place). We had a fun evening with good Indonesian food and of course some cold Bir Bintangs, talking about Sarah’s Indonesian and Singaporean experiences so far and of course discussing the latest happenings in the Chinese Internet market.

The next morning at 8 AM the conference that I was attending started. I was a few minutes late because it was supposed to be in the Grand Ballroom of the Kempinski, which turned out to be a 15 minute walk all through the (huge) Grand Indonesia shopping mall. The mall was still closed and its air conditioning turned off, so I had to climb 5 floors of escalators in the hot environment to get to the elevator that took me to the Ballroom. Of course I later found out there was a much easier way, but the Kempinski staff neglected to tell me that when I asked them. Actually, being late was not a big deal because the conference also started late, about 30 minutes or so. Jam karet as the Indonesians say. I still remember it from my time working in Jakarta in 1996, and it’s not a big deal for anybody. I had a coffee and talked to several people, it was actually a great networking opportunity.

The conference was very interesting, I learned a lot about the Indonesian Internet industry and got to know a lot of the Indonesian Internet start-ups and their founders/CEOs. There are some really cool companies in Indonesia, but most are purely focused on the local market. I talked a lot about Spil Games and our site games.co.id and was surprised how many people know the site nowadays. During my last visit that was still very different, things can change quickly. Not only the conference was good, also the food was excellent: an Indonesian buffet prepared by Kempinski. I love Indonesian food and managed to eat a lot of it during the past days.

After the conference I had a meeting in my hotel and then joined Sarah Lacey and the people from Indomog.com in their car to the FX Mall for the finalist pitches of the SparxUp Awards 2010. Because of traffic jams it took us almost an hour to get there (it’s only about 3 kilometers)… The pitches were all in Bahasa Indonesia so I mainly spent time at the Expo where I could try demos or live versions of all the start-ups. Some interesting companies to invest in if I would have lived in Indonesia (I only invest in China right now because there may added value is biggest). After the pitches I had dinner and drinks with games.co.id sales rep Romeo Reijman, I had never met him so far so it was very good to be able to meet him in person and hear his vision on the Indonesian game market.

Saturday was a mix of meetings with entrepreneurs and game developers, mainly at my hotel: traveling in Jakarta is such a hassle because of the traffic jams, even on weekends, that it’s hardly possible to set up several meetings in different locations in one day. Saturday night I attended the Awards night of the SparxUp Awards 2010 and gave a talk about games.co.id. Once again I met a lot of interesting people, it was exactly the right event to go to for me. After the Awards night I was invited to the Oktoberfest in Paulaner Jakarta and had a fun night there with Yanik Cantieni and his girlfriend. Yanik is a long time friend (I have known him since 1996 when he was my successor in a SAP implementation project in Jakarta) and the CFO of Mercedes-Benz Indonesia. However, he told me they will move to Switzerland later this month where he will become CFO. Career wise probably a good move, but life in Jakarta seems more interesting than Zurich…

On Sunday I worked on my emails for quite some time and among others met up with some friends. I had lunch at Poste with Marnix Beugel and Corine Tap, who I knew from the old days in Beijing (around 2001-2002 I think) before they moved to Indonesia. Nice to catch up after all these years, and interesting to see that we have quite some friends in common. After that I met a friend from my fraternity for a drink, Thomas Schok. He is still studying so I had never met him in person, but it was cool to meet up anyway. He is a medical student and is doing an assignment at a local hospital in Jakarta (low end). Pretty intense stories about children dying etc., I am not sure if I could handle that.

Monday I again had planned some meetings in my hotel until after lunch with operators and game developers. After that I took a few hours off, sitting at the pool writing down my thoughts about the past days and doing some emails (I love a good wifi connection at the pool!). I went for a 6 km run in the gym around 5 PM before packing my suitcase and heading for the airport. Again I avoided the Silver Bird taxi and saved USD 40 by just walking 100 meters with my suitcase until the closest Blue Bird stop. Of course the taxi ride was long once again because of traffic jams but I was working on emails, so it didn’ bother me much. But I can’t imagine what traffic will be like when it rains (or when Obama comes to town, like he does today). Anyway, I had a very good trip to Indonesia and I hope to be back sooner rather than later.

If you’re active in the Indonesian game or mobile industry and want to get in touch, drop me an email at marcvanderchijs (at) gmail (dot) com

If you follow me on DailyMile.com you probably noticed that I didn’t run for the past 25 days. Not because of an injury but because I had a pretty bad cold that didn’t go away. I got the cold in Korea and because I kept on working and traveling it got worse and worse. Last week in Holland I seriously thought about staying in bed one day, but I finally took some more Tylenol and dragged myself out of bed.

Back in China things didn’t really improve either but today I am suddenly feeling much better. It probably has to do with the tropical weather (I am in Jakarta right now), that is always a good medicine for a cold. That in combination with one good night of sleep (almost 9 hours last night, I was exhausted) means I feel like reborn today.

For the past weeks I totally didn’t feel like running, but today I looked forward to putting on my FiveFingers again. My hotel has a 420 meter jogging track all around it, it’s pretty cool how they made it. It’s on the 5th floor of the hotel and runs through its tropical rooftop gardens, along the swimming pools and rooftop bars and restaurants and then on a small path all around the back, side and front of the hotel.

I did 10 laps for a total of about 4200 meters and it was quite difficult. I am totally out of shape, and the not-completely-clean air plus tropical heat didn’t help much either. But I am glad I am running again. In less than one month I plan to participate in the Shanghai half marathon, I am not sure if I will be back in shape by then, but I’ll try.

My cold also taught me something else, and that is that I need to start working a bit less. Continuous 60-80 hour weeks plus lots of traveling are no problem when you’re in your twenties, but I now realize that at 38 years your body doesn’t recover as quickly anymore. No complaints, I love the work I’m doing and love to go to the limit every day, but I should watch out not to go over it. Feeling sick for more than a week is not healthy I guess. And my family deserves also more time, I miss my kids very often (and worse, they miss me).

So even though it’s not time for New Year’s resolutions yet I decided that I am not doing any more investments this year and will say no to all speaking gigs and other ‘opportunities’ until the end of the year (well, I still have one talk that I need to give in the FX Mall in Jakarta tonight, but that’s the last one). Let’s see if I can hold this promise to myself…

When I drove to the office on Monday morning the whole city was covered in a brown blanket of smog, the sun could hardly get through. I tweeted about it saying “The Shanghai Expo is over and immediately the air pollution is worse than any day during the past 6 months”. Shanghaiist even made it the tweet of the day (thanks Elaine Chow), so I decided to dive a bit deeper into this and see if I could find some data to back up my observation.

A Twitter reply by @bpoasia helped me out, and I now have the data that show that the pollution indeed shot up to unhealthy levels right after the Expo closed its gates. I made a screen shot, check out the original data here: http://datacenter.mep.gov.cn/TestRunQian/air_dairy_en.jsp (change the city and dates manually or if that does not work in the URL).

Will we see the blue skies days again in the near future? I seriously doubt it, this was the clearest summer I had in the past decade here. For this reason I might really start missing the Expo…

UnitedStyles.com is an online kids fashion store, where kids and their parents can choose and design kids clothes in 3D. This personal design is produced on demand and delivered anywhere in the world. UnitedStyles is not yet open to the public but is currently looking for people who would like to test the site and are welcome to place an order.

The current collection is a selection of high quality hoodies and dresses for girls aged 3 to 12. If you are a parent with a daughter in that age group we would love to have you as a tester. After you have tested the site we will approach you with some questions (by email or phone, whatever you prefer) and as a ‘thank you’ you will get a EUR 10 discount on any item that you order during the test period plus free shipping.

If you are interested to join this test please send and email to dirk@unitedstyles.com and he will provide you with the special link and password to enter the site (the site is not live yet for other people).

Zlong Games (Spil Games Asia’s Shanghai game development studio) is doing very well, the October results just came out and the studio generated more than 100 million page views during this month! Congratulations to Leo Liu and his team for this great result, very nice to see how the company and its games developed over the past couple of years.

Zlong produces mainly Flash and HTML5 casual games for Spil Games, both single- and multiplayer games. The company also makes social games, for external social networks but also for Spil Games own network of online game websites.

Within a week of Tudou officially releasing its iPhone and iPad application in the Apple App Store, the Tudou Video App has quickly ranked no. 1 among all Chinese free apps.

I am sitting in a plane back to China after an intensive week in Holland. I left China Sunday night around midnight on the overnight KLM flight. I wasn’t feeling completely well (I am having a minor case of the flu for almost 2 weeks already), so I had 3 glasses of champagne and 2 Tylenol and that combination helped me to get over 7 hours of sleep. The plane landed at 5 AM and after waiting for the suitcases for 25 minutes (noticing once again that it takes much longer for your suitcases to arrive at Schiphol than in China or most other Asian airports) I was on my way to Rotterdam by 5:30 AM.

A brand new Jaguar XJ with a driver picked me up from the airport and took me to the Bilderberg Parkhotel, where I had 2.5 hours to freshen up and do a bit of work. I made some phone calls, wrote several emails, and had 4 cups of coffee before leaving for the Erasmus University / Rotterdam School of Management at 9 AM sharp (again by Jaguar of course).

In the morning I gave a talk at the yearly Entrepreneurial Seminar, together with several other Dutch entrepreneurs. My talk focused on characteristics of successful entrepreneurs, and I tried to make the speech more interesting by giving lots of real life examples that I have seen in companies that I am part of or invested in. I recognized a lot in the talks of the other entrepreneurs as well, the main characteristics for all of us was that you need to fail at least once, should be willing to take big risks, be extremely competitive and work at least twice as hard as others. Our stories did not necessarily convince the students that they should become entrepreneurs as well, in an article about the conference Dutch newspaper De Pers wrote that only one student was confident enough to choose the start-up life. Well, I also started in a corporate career before I realized that was not really my thing.

In the afternoon I gave a two hour lecture/workshop about doing business in China for Masters students. I really enjoyed this, it was a very lively session with tons of questions from the students. They all had to pay an entrance fee to get in, meaning that they were likely much more motivated to actively participate than during a regular lecture. Despite the fact that I was a bit tired after the flight and still didn’t feel well I think it went quite well and I realized that this kind of lecture is something I enjoy doing very much. Maybe I should seriously consider teaching university students in a future life, it gives me more energy than it costs.

At night I drove back to Amsterdam with a friend from my university days, Jasper Bugter. I realized we had not seen each others since my wedding 5 years ago, so we had lots to catch up on. We picked up his wife Tamalene at their house in Amstelveen and then headed into the city. At a special beer cafe we tried several different bock beers (typical beers for this time of year) and had a great night. Around 11 I headed back to my hotel and fell asleep right away.

On Tuesday I had a breakfast meeting in my hotel before taking a train to Hilversum to Spil Games. There the first thing I did was to walk around the whole office and talk to as many people as possible. I realize that despite being in the Dutch office several times per year I don’t really get to talk to most people, aside from saying hi when walking by their desks. I also went out for a cup of coffee with executive searcher Frank van der Linden (and had my second right in a Jaguar in as many days), not because I am looking for a new job but just to catch up. It turned out that we have some mutual acquaintances (not unusual considering his huge network) and I also heard some stories about how my dad was when he was still a manager: my dad recruited Frank for his 1st internship back in 1984.

On Tuesday night I had dinner with a friend who has been in the fashion business for the past 13 years or so (both online and offline). Always good to catch up, especially because of my involvement in UnitedStyles.com. At night I had beers with a group of friends from my fraternity, which was cool as well. But because I still was not feeling too well and I had to get up early I didn’t stay too late. Probably good, because I woke up at 5 AM and the whole of Wednesday was a strategy meetings with the Spil Games management team in our office in Eindhoven. We do this a few times per year now, and every meeting gives all of us new insights and helps us to make sure we do the right things. The online casual games market is changing very quickly, but I think Spil Games is able to change with the market and even anticipate the changes. After a nice dinner in Eindhoven we got back to Amsterdam after 11 pm, where I worked on my emails for an hour and then went to bed.

Thursday morning I had breakfast with trend watcher Vincent Everts to catch up on what we’re both doing, and he used the opportunity to do a video interview with me as well (or here if you don’t have a VPN in China – note: interview is in Dutch). After that Vincent drove me to Spil Games, where he talked to some of the other managers and eventually even stayed for lunch. The afternoon I mainly spent working on a presentation but I didn’t make much progress: the office is an open office, meaning that everybody walks by the whole time and many drop by for a short chat. I enjoy that of course, but it doesn’t increase work efficiency. I don’t think I could work in an open office environment anymore. At night I had dinner with a business friend at Restaurant Lute in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel. It was my first time in this restaurant and the food and wines were excellent. And the location is quite convenient, the person I had dinner with had landed at 7:30 PM at Schiphol airport and was in the restaurant less than 20 minutes later!

Friday morning I worked in my hotel room for several hours, which was much better than in the office. No distractions except for the beeps of new emails coming in (so I turned off my email for a while). I was in the office by 11:00, so I would be in time to meet with Ho-Ping Tung for lunch at Spil Games. As regular readers of this blog probably know Ho-Pin Tung is a Dutch-Chinese race car driver, and he is currently the 3rd driver (reserve driver) for the Renault Formula One team. We normally see each other at least once a year, either in China or in Holland (Ho-Pin travels a lot more than I do). Always good to catch up with him and hear his stories about life as a race car driver. After lunch I took half a day off to meet with my sister as well. Ho-Pin drove me to her office and on the way there he showed me some of his driving skills in his fast Renault Megane RS. Very cool Ho-Pin, I was quite impressed (and I probably should have shot a video for this blog).

I spent Friday night and Saturday morning at my sisters new place. She just moved to a new house, a beautiful renovated farm. Much nicer than my house actually (but also a lot smaller of course). We went to see The Social Network, the movie about Facebook. I just missed it when it premiered in San Francisco last month (it came out on the day I flew back to China), but now I finally got a chance to see it. I loved it, it does not give a true view of Facebook’s start and Mark Zuckerberg’s personality, but it was a great start-up story anyway. Very inspirational and with some similarities to the things I have seen over the past years. If you are an Internet entrepreneur or want to be one, you have to see it!

Saturday afternoon Sonja and I did some shopping in Germany, mainly for me to buy Seelachs (I have not found this anywhere in the world but in Germany, I love it). We had a walk on the hills of Hoch-Elten as well, and after that she put me on the train to Schiphol Airport. That was about 12 hours ago and now I am already somewhere above Western China having breakfast. I had a good week in Holland but I am happy to be back in Shanghai with my family in a couple of hours.

This is pretty cool, an ad for Tudou’s original drama series That Love Comes was shown on Times Square in New York. Not that we are suddenly trying to target US users, but it was a nice gesture from PR Newswire.

And it seems that That Love Comes is not just seen as an entertainment series, because it’s now also used in a university course: The University of Mary Washington uses the series for an extra credit project as “an opportunity to explore and analyze China today through the window of cultural production”. I like the idea!