Spil Games Asia is looking for an experienced manager for the role of Chief Operating Officer for its China operations. You will be part of the Management Team of Spil Games Asia in Shanghai

Tan Yuan Yuan, China’s most famous ballet dancer (and incidentally also a personal friend), made it into the doodle on Google’s homepage today! The doodle depicting the Google logo was created together with the San Francisco Ballet for Tchaikovsky’s 170th birthday.

Very cool for Yuan Yuan and her dance partner Tiit Helimets, hundreds of millions of people will see her in action there today.

This afternoon I was sitting in my garden trying to read some mails and an ebook on my iPad (today was an official holiday in Shanghai because of the Expo). Not a good combination, because it’s hard to see the iPad screen when the sun shines. For me that’s a big reason why the iPad is not the right gadget to use as a primary ebook reader, but that’s a different story (try e-ink readers to see what a real ebook reader looks like).

Next to the fact that you can hardly see anything on the iPad, it also seems to overheat quickly. It wasn’t a particularly hot today (about 28 degrees), but within 15 minutes the screen went black telling me that the product was too hot to use… I brought it inside where it took me 10 minutes to cool it off enough to use it again. To make things worse it also did not auto save some of the things that I had changed. For example, when I turned on the Amazon Kindle app the book opened at the page where I had opened it up last time, not at the page where I was when the iPad suddenly shut itself down.

In Twitter terms: iPad #fail

Yesterday was the Dutch National Holiday of Queensday, basically a day to honor the royal family. The Queen and her family always visit one or more places in Holland and in most other towns and cities there are celebrations. Also Dutch embassies and consulates all over the world organize Queensday events, and because yesterday coincided with the opening of the World Expo 2010, this year a high-level Dutch government delegation was in Shanghai to join the celebrations.

In the morning some delegation members visited Tudou, where my wife and I gave them a tour of the office and we then both gave a presentation to the group. I mainly talked about Spil Games and my wife’s presentation was about Tudou’s development and business model. We had an interesting discussion about (among others) doing business for European companies in China with the group, that consisted of among others the head of the Dutch employers organization VNO-NCW (Mr. Bernhard Wientjes, who coinidentally is also a neighbor of my parents) and the Dutch vice-minister of foreign trade.

But they could not stay very long, because after the 1.5 hour discussion with them we all went to the Millenium Hotel for the Queensday lunch celebrations (my wife had meetings at Tudou so she couldn’t join). Prime minister Jan-Peter Balkenende also joined the lunch reception, and my colleague Joop Dorresteijn took a picture together with him. Both the prime minister and consul general Eric Verwaal gave good speeches: not long talks or dry remarks, but short speeches full of (Dutch) humor.

A pity was that for some reason the traditional herring was not available (as compensation Dutch licorice in the form of a fish was available, as Eric Verwaal remarked!), but the traditional bitterballen (small deep-fried meatballs with mustard) were there. There was also a lunch buffet (not Dutch but Chinese) and of course lots of drinks.

Many people from the Dutch community were present and I talked to lots of people that I hadn’t seen in a while. Among others I met the person who sat next to me during my flight back to China last week (a former ABN Amro banker turned entrepreneur)! I also met several people that I mainly know from Twitter, always nice to meet them in real life.

I enjoyed the lunch reception, but could not stay too long because I had other meetings in the afternoon. A pity, because the weather was fantastic (25 degrees and sunny) and the location (the garden of the Millenium hotel) was great as well.

After work I ended the week on the couch at home, watching the opening of the Expo 2010. I did not have tickets (I actually did not even try to get them), and I was glad I did not have them: I had expected a spectacle similar to the opening of the Beijing Olympics, but this event was far from that. Lots of singing and dancing, unimpressive graphics and even a speech of the French head of the International Expo Organization that was partly given in Chinese and therefore impossible to understand. The whole thing was so boring that I managed to fall asleep during the ceremony!

Even the fireworks were a bit disappointing, they were huge but to me they just didn’t seem very impressive on TV. They just caused a lot of smoke, that was not only visible on TV but that you could also still smell an hour later – when we arrived downtown to meet for drinks at a club. I certainly hope the rest of the Expo will be more successful!

All in all a different Queensday than usual: normally I don’t really celebrate it when in China, or when I’m in Holland I normally party in Amsterdam on the eve of Queensday. It certainly was an eventful day and I won’t forget about it soon.

I just read a post on DeluxZilla about Chinglish signs at the Shanghai World Expo 2010. I was not too

As you can see from the pictures my kids love computers just as much as I do. Elaine at 10 months (now 11 actually, she had her “birthday” yesterday) old already plays games on an old Sony laptop, and the first thing Scott says when I come home is “Papa, iPad, papa, iPad”. For babies and toddlers computers are the most normal things in the world, and they have no fear for them at all.

When I gave Scott my iPad for the first time it took him less than 2 minutes to figure out how to turn it on, how to unlock the opening screen and to open up an app. No manual needed for kids! I bought a lot of toddler games for Scott and Elaine, and Scott already remembers which one he likes best and fires them up before I get a chance to help him. The touch screen user interface is so natural to him that he now tries to move icons on my (non-touch screen) MacBook Pro with his hands as well!

Scott also knows the Apple logo. When he sees the Apple logo on one of my laptops or on my iPad he immediately says Apple! Also when he sees the Apple logo on my screen he points at it and says Apple. I often watch car videos on Tudou with

Yesterday Peter Driessen, CEO and co-founder of Spil Games, was invited to open the stock market at the NYSE Euronext in Amsterdam. NYSE Euronext is the pan-European stock exchange that started in 2000 after the merger of the Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam exchanges.

Opening the stock market by ringing the opening bell (or in this case using a gong) is an old stock exchange tradition. At NYSE

Yesterday Spil Games and social network Hyves announced that they together launched a game platform on Hyves, www.hyves.nl/games. Hyves is Holland’s biggest social network, with 10 million registered users (out of a total Dutch population of 16.5 million people).

The social aspect of gaming is central in the new Hyves game platform, people can for example try to beat their friends high scores. The platform starts off with 300 games, and new content will be added constantly. The platform is similar to the Zapapa Games platform that Spil Games already operates on Facebook.