Today I received my t-shirt for this weekend’s 2009 Shanghai Marathon. In previous years the t-shirt was white with a logo and the text Shanghai Marathon in black, but this year the organization had the luminous idea to experiment with colors. The result: a plain ugly light blue shirt with the text in even uglier colors…

Luckily we Spil Games Asia made t-shirts for all our runners (in total 15 colleagues will participate, we’re a sportive company!), so we won’t be tempted to wear the official t-shirts. Our shirts are white with a big orange/black Spil Games logo on it, so if you plan to watch the race you will be able to easily spot us in the sea of light blue marathon shirts.

One of the things I always try to do when traveling, is to spend some time in a bookstore. In Hong Kong last weekend my wife and I spent about an hour at Dymocks. Some of the books that I bought there include:


China Cuckooo – Mark Kitto
I know Mark (I even blogged about his 40th birthday party) and therefore the story about how he built and lost his Chinese media ’empire’ and how he ended up at Moganshan is one that interests me a lot. I already started reading the book and it’s written in a very humorous style. I look forward to continue to read it tonight.

King Hui, the man who owned all the opium in Hong Kong – Jonathan Chamberlain
Not sure how real the story is, but it seems like an extraordinary tale about life in Hong Kong in the early and middle of the 20th Century.


Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile – Geraint Anderson
I expect this to be a modern day version of Liar’s Poker, set in London. Bought it based on the title, without knowing anything about the book itself.

The Accidental Billonaires – Ben Mezrich
A book about the founding of Facebook must be an interesting read for me, even though I know the book had mixed reviews. The book will be made into a film as well.


What the Dog Saw – Malcolm Gladwell
I like to read Malcolm Gladwell’s books, not necessarily because all the information is correct, but they are highly entertaining and some of the anecdotes make for good dinner discussions with friends (who have normally also read all his books). The NYTimes review wasn’t too positive, but I bought the book anway because of the author.

If one of them is particularly good I might review it here. Work is quite busy these days, so likely it will be a few weeks before I can finish them all.

This morning’s editon of the Sunday Morning Post had an interesting headline: “PLA didn’t play fair, runners claim”. The SCMP publication story was about this weekend’s Trailwalker, a 100 km hike/run mainly through the New Territories. This year for the first time two teams of the PLA (Public Liberation Army, the Chinese army) participated, and to many people’s surprise they managed to take place 1 and 2 in the race.

But according to some participants the PLA did not play fair. Why? The main reason was that they had about 50 supporters helping them with food and drinks during the race, and at any given time they had 10 people running with them. According to the teams that finished 3 and 4 these extra runners made it more difficult for them to overtake, or even slowed them down deliberately. Also they complained that after the PLA changed to new shoes after 50 kilometers they just left them there so they had to “dodge around them”.

My reaction: this seems like pure envy by the losers. Chinese compete in a different way than Americans or Gurkhas (the normal winners of the Trailwalker race) and they will do everything can to win. That’s how it works in Chinese business (many foreigners still underestimate this) and that’s also how it works in a race with a lot of media exposure like the Trailwalker. The Chinese wanted to win and that’s what they did. Why is it not playing fair if you have 50 people helping you? Every team has helpers, the PLA just had more of them. You still have to run yourself, it’s not that they carry you or something. And it’s not against the rules. Sure, I can imagine that it’s irritating when you (think that you) are being slowed down, but that’s what competition is all about.

The PLA team had to cover the 100 km trail run over Hong Kong’s hills in the fastest time in order to win the race and that’s a major feat. If you had expected to win and suddenly two new teams are ahead of you, I understand that you would be disappointed. But then complaining to the press about other teams not playing fair goes to far. The PLA teams did a great job winning this race (even though they did not break last year’s record) and I feel it’s not fair play trying to make them look bad. By the way, I wonder what the consequences for the SCMP might be, a big negative headline on the top of the front page about the PLA is probably not something the powerful army people like to see on a Sunday morning 🙂

Update: It turns out that it was indeed a case of PLA-bashing. The HK Standard reported on Tuesday (Nov. 24) that the Oxfam organization defends the PLA, and that team 3 and 5 sent emails denying that the PLA guys were bad sports. So it was indeed pure envy by team 4 and 6, not the PLA but they are bad sports. 

This weekend my wife had an INSEAD girlfriend get-together in Hong Kong and I decided to join her. Normally when she goes shopping (the main activity during this kind of women-weekends) I can enjoy a coffee and a good book in one of Hong Kong’s many cafes or go for a run in the hills, and so that’s what I did.

We left Shanghai on Friday morning and arrived in Hong Kong just after lunch. As usual China air traffic control caused the flight to be delayed, the third time in a week that planes I took were delayed (Monday 2.5 hours flying to Beijing, Wednesday 3 hours and Friday just over an hour). Upon arrival we went to our hotel straight away. We had decided to try out the brand new Upper House, a luxury boutique hotel high above Pacific Place. I expected a normal 5-star hotel but what we got was much better.

The experience starts upon arrival, there is no check-in but 2 hotel staff (very stylish ladies) accompany you to your room where they check you in with a signature on a mobile device. They also explain the room to you, because it has a lot of interesting features and is quite high-tech. The room itself was huge, I think about the size of 2 rooms in the JW Marriott (the hotel that occupies the floors below the 38th floor in the building). When you enter you come into a big bedroom, that also has a couch in front of the windows (with a great view of the mountains, the city and Victoria Harbour). Close to the entrance is a working and kitchen area, with among others a well-stuffed mini-bar and wine fridge. The mini bar contents are for free, you can drink as much as you like – except for the bottles of wine, that were very decently priced. Each room also has its own Illy X7 espresso machine and jars full of among others cookies, M&M’s, and roasted almonds (eat as much as you like!).

The room is quite high tech. There is no standard hotel directory, but you get an iPod Touch with all the information you might need on it. Pretty cool. The hotel also has a sound system, with speakers in every room, and with a connector for your own iPod, iPhone or computer. It worked great, so we had good music during our two-day stay here. Another interesting feature is the TV in the bathtub room: if you press the remote control, part of the mirror turns into a TV. I had never seen this before, but I would not mind having this in my own bathroom in the future.

The bathroom was quite something as well. It was huge, with a separate area for a rainforest shower and for a very big bathtub, both with a view over downtown Hong Kong and the mountains on the South side (our room was on the 43rd floor). The washing basins were in a different area of the bathroom, just as the toilet. Everything was very luxurious and no detail was overlooked. Even the phone in the toilet was a Jacob Jensen! The room also has a dressing room / walk-in closet, so you don’t have to put your suitcases in the bedroom like in most other hotels, and with enough space to hang clothes for at least a week.

I have to admit that I was impressed. I have stayed in quite some high-end hotels, but of the city hotels that I have stayed in this was probably the best that I ever spent a night at. I don’t want to compare it to tropical resorts, because you should not compare apples with oranges, but for a city hotel I don’t think you can get it much better. Of course this kind of hotel does not come cheap, but for me it was absolutely worth it. On a business trip I would not stay here, for work I normally try to stay in more budget oriented hotels (my standard HK hotel costs about 25% of the price of this hotel per night), but for private trips I don’t mind spending a bit more for a luxurious experience. At the moment the hotel has specials because they just opened, so if you want to try it out now is a good time. By the way, Upper House has a sister hotel in Beijing, Opposite House, that (at least judging from the outside and the entrance) looks just as special. I had dinner there last Monday and spent an hour working in their lobby, and was also quite impressed.

The trip itself was a lot of fun. On Friday afternoon my wife and I walked around Central, doing some shopping (I bought a large number of books at Dymocks!) and enjoying drinks in one of the many cafes. At night we had dinner at M at the Fringe, the Hong Kong version of Shanghai’s M on the Bund. M at the Fringe will close in late December, so it was the last time we could have dinner here (probably more about the M chain of restaurants soon in another blog post). After dinner we spent some time in Lan Kwai Fong before getting a good night’s sleep. Saturday morning I started by making some espressos and reading the South China Morning Post on the couch. A relaxed start of the day. Later we took the ferry to Discovery Bay for brunch with friends who live there.

In the afternoon my wife went shopping with her girlfriends, and I went back to the hotel to work a few hours. After that I went for a run on Bowen Road. As most runners who have ever stayed in downtown Hong Kong probably know, Bowen Road is one of the best places to run. The road starts above Admiralty, about a kilometer up (follow the foot path past next to the Peak Tram up until the 2nd bridge). From there you can run for about 4 kilometers on a flat surface overlooking the city. There is no traffic for most of the road, just a lot of other runners and hikers.

Half way Bowen Road you can take a right to go up into the mountains. I had planned to do that, but missed the turn and eventually ended up at the end of Bowen Road. From there I ran up a bit further until the trail that I was following suddenly stopped. So I decided to take it easy and slowly run back. I thought I had run about 10 km, but when I later mapped the route on DailyMile.com it turned out to be 13.5 km. Not a bad training, especially considering the hills and the hard surface (I normally run on a treadmill). After a hot bath at the hotel I felt reborn!

At night I headed to Causeway Bay for a dinner with friends at Agnes B. – Le Pain Grillee. A very nice
and cozy French restaurant on 111, Leighton Road. We had some excellent food and wines there; I’d recommend the restaurant to others. After dinner we walked around a bit before ending the night in the hotel room reading a picture book about the history of Hong Kong while having some drinks from the minibar (and listening to a Buddha Bar CD on the sound system).

On Sunday I again started the day with the SCMP and an espresso, before heading for a Dim Sum brunch at Zen with friends. After lunch we decided to take an earlier flight back to Shanghai, because we both missed our kids. So we went over to IFC to check in and managed to get the last seats on the 3 PM Dragonair shuttle back home. I look back at a fantastic weekend: good food and wine, interesting  talks with my wife and with friends, lots of new books and clothes, and even a good work-out session in the hills. I wish I would have time to do this more often.

Except for an occasional cigar I am not a smoker. But I can imagine that it’s frustrating that you have to hand in your lighter each time you board a plane. If you’re a smoker and land at Shanghai Honqiao Airport you are lucky: At the exit of the terminal you can choose another one from the lighters they confiscated there from departing passengers.

I noticed that many people took a lighter from the pile, I had to wait about a minute in order to take a picture without any passengers in it. I think this is a great idea, otherwise the airport would probably throw the lighters away or auction them off.

A couple of days ago I read an excellent piece on Venturebeat in which serial entrepreneur Scott Olson talks about how easy companies can loose (and win) customers. When I read the article I recognized a lot of what he said, so I decided to use it as the basis for a blog post as well.

Scott’s point is that companies often loose clients because of minor annoyances. He gives an example of a bureaucratic procedure to deposit a check at his bank that ticks him off, a procedure other banks do not have. It would be a simple thing to change, but often companies don’t realize that their customers are not happy.

I have the same with many companies that I am a client of. I especially hate it when they try to charge me for something that used to be free or that is free at many of their competitors. One example is wifi in hotels, unless there is no other solution I refuse to stay in hotels that charge me for wireless Internet. I changed the standard hotel I used to stay at in Amsterdam a few years ago because of this. I now normally stay in a hotel that is a bit more expensive but has free (and fast) wifi. A lot of hotels have missed my stay there just because they decided to charge USD 10-20 for wifi. I always check it out online before I book, and I know a couple of other business friends that have exactly the same attitude towards this.

When other companies make mistakes, this is a great way for their competition to come in and gain market share. As Scott Olsen put it in his article:

Want to steal your competition’s customers? Identify areas where they may be irritating their customers and ensure your company handles those smoother.

For example, Does the competition charge to pilot their product or service? Find a way not to. Does your competition have complicated, line item pricing? Find a way to simplify your own pricing. (This is an ongoing effort in the telecommunications industry.) For customer support, does your competition subject customers to a maze of automated phone tree responses? Get a person on the line with a command of the English language.

Some companies do not seem to understand the opportunities that this gives them. An example is KLM, since November 1 they charge their customers an additional EUR 50 per suitcase if you bring more than 1 suitcase on flights to and from the USA. A great way to make your customers unhappy before their trip has even started, when they during check-in have to pay EUR 50 (or more) extra. And you know what their argumentation is? Because many other airlines also do this. What’s the management thinking?

This would be a great way to differentiate yourself from the competition, show their passengers that KLM does not charge this and you might win some of them. How much money would KLM make from this? Most business travelers have only 1 suitcase or only travel with hand luggage, tourists normally travel together and likely won’t have more than 1 suitcase per person either. So let’s say an additional 50 suitcases per flight @ EUR 50 per suitcase, makes EUR 2500 more revenues per flight. Does that outweigh the number of unhappy customers? In the short term maybe, but in the long run I don’t believe it.

There are always easy opportunities to do a better job than the competition, but only a few seem to to something about it. For example, I used to use Twitpic for uploading pictures to Twitter. But I got tired of always having to email the pictures (it only takes about 30 sec. but it’s annoying). Also their iPhone app is useless, check the comments here. Then I saw a tweet about how well Mobypicture‘s app works on the iPhone and I downloaded the free app. It works flawless and very fast, and I can upload my pictures not just to Twitter but also to many other services such as Flickr and Facebook. I started using it last week and I don’t think I’ll ever use Twitpic again. Making an app is not very difficult, but it can make a huge difference for customers. Mobypicture did it right. As Scott Olson put it, don’t follow the competition, but excel where your competitors suck.

On Friday Mike Walsh visited me at the Spil Games Asia office to catch up and to do another video interview (wanted to put link here to a documentary he made last year for which he also interviewed me, but cannot find it right now) . Mike is a key note speaker on the digital future and CEO of innovation research agency Tomorrow, and he seems to travel constantly all over the world (he arrived Friday in Shanghai and I just saw on his picture feed that he is now in New York already). And now he is also an author: his book Futuretainment will be published officially tomorrow (according to Amazon.com) and he gave me a copy during our meeting.

This weekend I read the book and I have to say that I really enjoyed it. The book is extremely well designed by Vince Frost of Frost*Design, with illustrations and full page pictures on every page throughout the book. The book is about the end of traditional media and how changing consumer behavior is forcing business models to change. Mike cut the book into 23 chapters discussing small parts of the media revolution that’s happening around us. As an illustration, some of the titles of the chapters are Network, Ubiquity, Crowd, Social, Viral, Lifecast, Tag, Platform and Disrupt. Each chapter consists of short articles that explain the changes using lots of real life examples. These examples make it an interesting read, also for people who are less involved in new and social media than I am.

The book starts off talking about the fact that people’s relationship with technology is changing and that because of this entertainment will never be the same. The book is about what will happen next. It focuses partly on trends and user behavior in Asia to predict what will eventually happen in the rest of the world. The current young generation knows no life without Internet, so they expect to be in control of their entertainment. They don’t understand why a TV programming schedule would be useful: linear programming is over, you watch something when you want, not when others decide that for you. The world is changing because of this. While the industry was trying to come up with better photo and video cameras, the younger generation started taking pictures and shooting films with low resolution phone cameras. It turned out that high quality is not necessary anymore. They also do not want to just watch a clip, but want to be able to change it themselves (mediajacking is what Mike calls it).

Another part of the book is about viral distribution, how this works and how you can (or cannot) influence it. How do you find new content? Through your online connections: Who you know is what you know. Friendships change, a friend is no longer a noun but a verb: you don’t make a friend, but you friend someone. It also touches on why people are willing to spend so much money on virtual items online: The more we live, work and play online, the more important it will be that we invest in the way we represent ourselves online. Lifecasting is the subject of a chapter, the trend to broadcast your life to the world, either through Twitter or by posting your pictures or even live video online.

One thing many traditional broadcasters do not seem to grasp is that it’s not about the content anymore. What really counts is the context, the stuff that surrounds it: reviews, recommendations and ratings. Those are the things that make people watch content, not big marketing campaigns anymore. The book ends with scenarios for the future of TV, movies, music and games. I agree with most of Mike’s future visions for these sectors, he really thought them through. Marcel Fenez (PWC’s global partner for Media and Entertainment) just did an in-depth interview with me about the future of TV, and I am glad to see that the things I told him are in line with Mike’s conclusions. Mike actually takes it one step further than I had in mind, saying that broadcast channels will be designed to drive traffic to a website instead of the other way around. An interesting thought.

I’d recommend the book to anyone active in traditional media who wants to understand better what is hitting the industry and where it may lead to. But it’s also a good read for people in New Media, they will still find a lot of new insights in it and get more background on how media and user behavior evolved. And it’s a good book for the general public that wants to understand what shift is happening because of the Internet. You don’t need any previous Internet knowledge to understand it. The book is easy to read and has lots of good real life examples. And the great design andh pictures throughout the book make it an en even more enjoyable read.

Tomorrow TEDxBeijing will take place at CNEX. This is the second TEDx event in China, after TEDxShanghai that took place at M1NT in June this year.

Never heard of TEDx? You probably have heard of TED (if not, check out their Wikipedia page), TEDx is an independently organized TED event. As the TEDxBeijing website describes it:

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx.

TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is call TEDxBeijing, where x = independently organized TED event. At our TEDxBeijing event, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group.

I won’t be able to attend TEDxBeijing in person tomorrow (I wish each day would have 48 hours…), but Tudou.com is once again the publishing sponsor and will live stream the event starting at 1:30 PM China time (6:30 AM Central European Time) at http://www.tudou.com/home/tedxbeijing. The program is expected to be finished by 7:15 PM.

All talks will be available online at Tudou after the event as well. And if you’re interested in the TEDxShanghai talks, you can watch them all here: http://www.tudou.com/home/tedxshanghai