I regularly see interviews with Gary Wang, Tudou’s CEO, through Google Alerts and Twitter, but most are more or less the same. However, today’s interview with the China Daily is one of the better ones I have seen over the past years. I’m normally not a big fan of the China Daily, but this piece shows Gary like how I have got to know him over the years:

As a man who comfortably mixes his work and free time, Wang is happy dealing with business emails while camping during a hike and allows flexible working hour for his employees. As an interviewee he is relaxed to the point of resting his legs on the office table while excitably discussing his favorite books.

Surprisingly, these characteristics, regarded by some as perhaps conceited and arrogant, helped Wang win approval from many investors, one of whom once said he felt “assured” by Wang’s attitude towards work and life.

“Doing business is like playing games: You grow up by passing each level and fight with bigger bosses each time,” Wang said, sitting in his office in Beijing soon after CCTV and Baidu announced they were establishing their own video websites. “I believe we can survive and thrive.”

The article also talks about the business environment and how Tudou sees the entrance of new players, for example like the Hulu clone that Chinese leading search engine Baidu.com will launch soon:

For many like Tudou, the arrival of new competitors is akin to a group of scrumpers helping themselves to the ripe grapes one had looked after for years. But Wang said he knew this would happen “from the first day when I established the company”.

He said: “It is natural that big elephants will come when the market matures, but I don’t believe that anyone can dominate China’s online video market.”

He denies his firm is in direct competition with content makers such as CCTV and Hunan TV because “the licensed content on Tudou.com only accounts for two to three percent of our total traffic”.

Also makes sure you read the Q&A on the 3rd page of the article, it contains some good quotes such as “What makes people great is mainly down to circumstances. If he had lacked proper chances or the right environment, Abraham Lincoln may only have been a village teacher.”

On January 12 this year China’s leading search engine Baidu was hacked and showed the message “This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army”. Nobody knew what happened, but domainnamewire.com now published the  complaint documents (pdf) of a case in which Baidu sues register.com because of the hack.

It turns out that register.com made some major mistakes that led to this hack. An unauthorized person claiming to be an agent of Baidu started an online chat with tech support at register.com and asked to change the email address on file for communication with Baidu. The representative of register.com then sent the imposter a security code that he had to provide. Because he of course had no access to the Baidu account he provided an incorrect code, but the register.com person did not compare the code to the one that was sent out.

Then the email address was changed from an official baidu.com address to an address that clearly does not belong to Baidu: antiwahabi2008@gmail.com. Note that wahabi is the name of a Muslim sect, and that gmail is of course owned by Baidu-competitor Google. From then on it was easy because with this address the password could be reset and the DNS could be changed.

Shortly after that Baidu contacted register.com through an online chat, but register.com refused to help them! Baidu tried to call register.com but was not able to reach anybody. It took a full 2 hours after Baidu started to contact them before register.com started to to take action to help Baidu!

An amazing story because is shows that ignorant irresponsible people are always the weakest link. Baidu lost millions of dollars because of the outage (that lasted up to 2 days) and this was not particularly good for its reputation either, even though it was clearly not their fault. However, Baidu is not completely without fault because it should have taken more precautions to prevent this. There are more secure ways to protect people from taking control of your domain name. Baidu did not specify how much money it wants to have as compensation, but if the details are correct this might cost register.com a lot of money.

For all the details of what happened see the complaint that Baidu filed here: http://domainnamewire.com/wp-content/baidu.pdf

Despite serious threats to leave China, it now seems Google is not walking their talk: there are job postings on Google’s Chinese site again, indicating that the search giant is not going to leave China anytime soon. As a heavy Google user I am of course happy about this, because I was worried to lose access to among others my Gmail account and my Google Reader RSS feed.

The story is certainly not over yet, but either Google’s negotiations with the government are going well (which would be very hard to believe), or more likely they understand that their US management made a big business mistake in announcing their departure.

Update: Several media, among others BusinessWeek, wrote about the fact that Google started hiring again, but according to a commenter there is also a report saying that these job posting had been there already before Google’s pull out threat.

From March 8-12 I will be in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference 2010. If you would like to meet me for a coffee at the Moscone Center, or somewhere around there for breakfast, lunch or dinner, let me know at marcvanderchijs (at) gmail (dot) com. I am especially interested to meet with online game companies (incl. social game companies) that are considering to set up their business in China, and in VC’s looking at the China online game or Internet market. But of course I also enjoy talking to entrepreneurs or people working for start-ups in or around SF.

Last year I planned so many meetings that I missed most of the GDC sessions, this year I hope I won’t make the same mistake. But I still feel that meeting people is the best way to learn new things about what’s happening in the Bay area in general and in game development in particular.

Also, if you are organizing a GDC party that week, feel free to invite me ;). So far I only confirmed the Accel Partners cocktail on Tuesday, all other nights are still open for parties… I am looking forward to a busy but also fun week!

In my time as a consultant about 7-8 years ago I visited many factories along China’s East coast. Always an interesting experience, especially compared to the clean and efficient factories that I was used to while working for Mercedes-Benz (where I worked until 2002). One of the things you always notice in Chinese factories is that workers do not seem to care about safety: their attitude is often one of ‘why should I wear safety glasses or safety shoes, it’s just a nuisance and I’m not afraid’.

Tonight I came across a good article on the blog of Hong Kong photographer Alex Hofford (h/t Danwei). He took a series of pictures in an ‘investment casting’ factory near Ningbo (a 2 hour drive south of Shanghai). The blog post shows the whole factory process in detailed pictures, with short comments explaining the process while also pointing out the health and safety issues. If you’ve never seen a typical Chinese factory on the inside or just want to understand how many industrial parts are still being produced, you should check out his blog post.

Picture credit (Creative Commons): Mavericyard

On Twitter my friends outside China are all happy that it’s Friday and almost weekend, but here in China everybody is getting ready for one of the “only-in-China” 7-day working weeks that will start tomorrow. I don’t mind too much actually, there are a lot of things I want to do the next days, but working 7 days in a row instead of 5 is not something many people look forward to. The Chinese press always talks about the one week off that everybody gets for Chinese New Year, but by substituting days off for extra working days on the weekend it’s actually only 3 days.

The last day of my holiday I spent mainly with Scott. We went for a long walk this morning (more than one hour), Scott on his tricycle, me walking in front/next to/behind him. Scott wanted to stop every 10 meters because he discovered something new, I am always surprised by all the things he finds along the way. After that we had lunch at the Green Apple where Scott played for a while in the sun. The weather was very nice and the next days will be even nicer. Pity I will have to  spend them inside in my office.

Elaine is not doing so well, she had a high fever for the past two days, so early this evening we went to the hospital for a quick check. Nothing serious, but with small babies you don’t want to take any risks. She is such an adorable little girl, I feel bad for her knowing that she is not feeling well, but not being able to do much. Hope she’ll be fine soon.

The only good thing about the end of the holiday is that our cooking ayi and nannies will (hopefully) come back soon from their hometowns to help with cooking, cleaning and the kids. We managed well without them during the past week (eating out a lot!), but it’s much more convenient having them around.

On the Tudou Intranet there is a feed of my blog, but it shows only the titles of the posts. If you click on the title you get the full text. What I did not realize is that because I started using  feedproxy.google.com (Feedburner) for the content of my posts and this seems to be blocked in China, nobody could read the full post anymore at Tudou. Because my RSS feed contains the full feed, other readers in China without a VPN could still see the whole post. But if they would click on the link to see the post itself or to comment they would get an error message.

I now added an additional RSS feed for everybody in China using Feedsky at http://feed.feedsky.com/Shanghaied. So if you are behind the Great Firewall and use RSS to read this blog, it’s probably better to change the feed. On the top right corner of this blog you will see the two RSS feeds, the original one at http://feeds.feedburner.com/shanghaied and the China one at http://feed.feedsky.com/Shanghaied.

This week the whole of China closes down for a week and so Spil Games Asia also closed its doors for a few days (we will be back in the office on Saturday morning, because this weekend will be a working weekend in China). This year we decided not to go to Beijing nor to the beaches of South-East Asia but to stay at home. Main reason is because of the kids, traveling with two young kids is quite stressful.

I actually enjoy spending a couple of days at home. I read some books (latest was Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, about the LDS church – very interesting read), played some games (just bough Plants vs Zombies on my iPhone, very addictive game), did some sports (ran almost every 5-10 km to keep in shape), and of course had lots and lots of good food and wine.

Two days ago we even hired two chefs to cook us a good meal. Quite an experience to have real chefs at home! Our regular cook went home for Chinese New Year, so this was a good opportunity to get some high end chefs to cook some special Chinese dishes for us. In total they prepared 12 appetizers and 12 main courses for us, I think I gained quite some weight that night.

Other days we cooked ourselves or we went out to restaurants in the neighborhood. Last night for example we went to Spanish restaurant Las Tapas where we tried lots of nice tapas and had some paella and noodle dishes. Excellent, especially in combination with cold San Miguel beer and pitchers of sangria. Because we started our dinner quite early (the kids also joined us) we ordered our drinks still during the happy hour, so we got double the number of drinks that we had planned to order. No big problem, we finished it all.

Of course I also played a lot with the kids. It’s fun to be around them the whole day and interact more with them. Scott is such a busy boy, amazing how he can keep on running around the house for hours. No wonder he eats so much, he probably burns more calories during a day than I do during a 10 km run. Elaine is much more quiet, but she can also scream out loud if she wants attention! She is a real sweet girl, it’s very interesting to see how different our kids are.

Next to all fun and relaxing activities I am also doing a bit of work. There are not many mails coming in, but I still had a large number of emails that I didn’t get to answer yet, and I am trying to get most of them away this week. I am also studying Chinese characters for about 2 hours every day, mainly reviewing them. I want to increase my reading skills and the only way to do that is by reading more and memorizing the characters that I don’t know. Doing this for 2 hours or more per day leads to immediate progress, it’s better than just 15-30 minutes per day. Too bad I don’t have so much time during normal working weeks.

The next two days will be more of the same. I am enjoying this holiday, it’s good to be away from the office and get my mind off of all work related problems. The past couple of months have been quite intensive and I needed this break. A few days at home may not be enough to complete recharge my batteries (I probably need to get away from Shanghai to do that), but I feel much more relaxed now than just a few days ago.