When I was growing up in the 1980’s in Holland I used to watch the literary talk show Hier is… Adriaan van Dis. That’s probably what made Adriaan van Dis quite famous, but he is much more than just a TV host, because he is actually one of Holland’s most famous writers (both novels and poetry). Over the years I read most of his books, with themes that are mainly related to his personal life, such as his families Indonesian roots, his homosexuality and his travels all over the world. Most of his novels are easy to read and quite witty – even though many of his themes are relatively heavy. He plays with words and combines them in innovative ways, sometimes even inventing whole new words.

So when I heard a few weeks ago that Adriaan van Dis would give a talk in Shanghai this week, I immediately signed up for it. I looked forward to hearing him speak about his life as a writer and he didn’t disappoint me. Because many Dutch people live in Hongqiao, the event took place there. Good for me, it was literally a stone’s throw from my house in a nice coffee bar / restaurant just off Hongmei Lu. About 80 people turned up for the event, a lot more than I had expected. I saw a lot of Dutch acquaintances that I had not met for a while (some I had not seen for years actually), and because the event only started at 8:45 PM instead of the planned 8 PM, I had a lot of time to catch up with old friends and get to know new people.

One of Adriaan van Dis’ first books described a trip to China in 1986. It was titled ‘Een barbaar in China’, literally meaning ‘A barbarian in China’. I reread the book on the plane from Holland to China last week, it’s a short novel that you can read in 2-3 hours. During his 1986 trip he traveled along the Silk Route and spent about 6 weeks in China. Living in contemporary China you don’t recognize the China that he describes. And the opposite happened to him: he was in China for the first time in over 20 years, and he of also did not recognize the country anymore. He seemed to be impressed by Shanghai, making a rhyme on the way from the airport to the city along the lines of Shanghai high high high and Shanghai buy buy buy, upon seeing only skycrapers and shopping malls.

‘Een barbaar in China’ was of course a topic during the evening, but he mainly talked about his latest book De Wandelaar (The Walker), in which he describes the daily walks of a Dutch person living in Paris with his dog. Adriaan van Dis has been living in Paris for many years and makes daily long walks on his doctor’s request, so the book is based on his own experiences, showing the darker side of Paris that most tourist never get to see. Quite interesting to hear, especially because I had just started reading his book. He also talked about his upcoming book about South-Africa, that he is currently writing. Adriaan van Dis studied South-African language and literature (Afrikaans) and he revealed that he had even been trained in Paris in the early 1970’s to infiltrate in South-Africa to support the ANC (he never used his training though). Based on what he told the audience the book should be an interesting read as well.

The evening ended around 11 PM. I enjoyed hearing Adriaan van Dis speak, he is very eloquent and has a very big knowledge about all kinds of topics (especially literature and politics). I assume that next to writing and walking around Paris, he spends a lot of time reading magazines and newspapers. During the evening I decided to read all of his books that I did not have the chance to read yet, including some of his poetry. He read some of his poems and they were quite impressive – even more so because he explained the background and because he read them himself. It was an evening to remember, thanks to the Dutch Association in Shanghai for organizing this!

Spil Games Asia is looking for a Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), based in Shanghai. I have spoken to a couple of good candidates already, but I want to make sure I don’t miss any candidates that are not aware of the job opening. In the past I found some excellent people through this blog, therefore I decided to put some information on this position here as well.

What does the CCO at Spil Games Asia do? This will be a new position in the company. The way I see it, is that the CCO will be in charge of all marketing, product and business development activities for the Chinese websites of Spil Games Asia. This means that you are in charge of growing the websites (more users, spending more time on the site, coming back more often etc.) by optimizing the product (new features on the websites, different structure etc.) and by setting up the right partnerships with other companies and products. Depending on the background of the candidate the role could be even broader in the future. You will report to me, but functionally you will also report to the CCO of Spil Games in The Netherlands.

Who are we looking for? The best candidate (M/F) is a smart, internet-savvy, experienced manager in an online (preferably gaming) company with a passion for and understanding of everything related to the Web. If you’re not active online there is no need to apply. You should speak, read and write fluent Chinese (native Mandarin speaker preferred, basic or intermediate Chinese skills is not sufficient) and have good written and spoken English skills.

You should like to work in an entrepreneurial environment, because we try to maintain an entrepreneurial spirit in the company. That means work hard & play hard, but it also means that every renminbi has to be earned first before it can be spent – something multinationals sometimes tend to forget. The ideal candidate will have at least 10 years work experience out of which at least 5 in an online environment. A technical background is preferred but is not a hard requirement.

If you’re interested or want more information feel free to get in touch with our HR manager Ms. Switer Cheng at switer.cheng (at) spilgamesasia (dot) com

Bad luck, I dropped my G1 phone last night and my screen did not survive it. Because the phone has a touch screen it is virtually useless now. I am going to try to get it repaired, because I really like the phone’s operating system. If that doesn’t work I will need to start looking for a new phone. Not sure what I will do in that case, another Android or going back to the iPhone?

I like Android, but I also still like the iPhone. However, buying a iPhone 3G or 3GS in China does not make sense. The hacked version cannot be used on China’s 3G networks and the official one has no wifi. Even more important, and a fact that has been overlooked in every media article that I read about the lacklustre sales of the iPhone in China, is that I cannot use my current China Mobile number on the official iPhone. There is no number portability in China between providers, and because the vast majority of people uses China Mobile they would all need a new mobile number in order to start using the official iPhone that is sold by China Unicom. In combination with a price that is a lot higher than the hacked version it is not surprising that nobody wants to buy it. Did Apple overlook this?

It took a few years, but Shanghai Disneyland has finally been approved! The original idea to build a Shanghai Disneyland was thought up by former premier Zhu Rongji in 1990 during his tenure as mayor of Shanghai. It took Disney and the Chinese authorities almost 20 years to get from an idea to an approved plan! In 2006 it seemed there would be a go (see my blogpost about it), but it seemed the Shanghai mayor was not able to get it past the State Council.

The park will be about 1000 acres, which would be similar to the parks in Tokyo and Paris, and bigger than the original Disneyland in Anaheim. The location will be quite close to the city, somewhere between Pudong airport and downtown. The legal structure will be a joint venture in which Disney will only have a 40% minority share (maybe that’s part of the reason why it took so long to agree on this?), and 60% will be owned by a consortium of government appointed companies. That likely won’t make it a lot of fun to manage the business, good luck with that Disney…

Accoring to a CCTV report this morning the park should open in 2014. Considering how quickly the Expo Shanghai 2010 site was built, that seems like a very long time. Just in time for my kids to be old enough to appreciate the Magic Kingdoma and its rides, though. If we still live in Shanghai by that time of course (I have no plans to leave), but otherwise we’ll surely come back to visit.

While going through my RSS feeds from the past days I noticed that Tudou.com was again included in the 2009 version of the Silicon Alley Insider top 60. This is a list of the 60 most valuable private Internet start-ups. Last year Tudou landed at place 22 with a USD 300 million valuation, this year we were at place 27 but at a higher valuation of USD 500 million. The analysis that SAI provided:

Tudou is largely seen as the YouTube of China, which represents a large growth opportunity as more and more Chinese aggressively consume online video. A year ago the site had 60 million monthly unique visitors, which has likely grown closer to 90 million. Though YouTube is clearly a threat, the Chinese are well-known for strongly favoring their own Web sites and so far this has proven true with Tudou, which has a greater market share in China than YouTube.

Revenue figures are hard to come by, but the company is likely losing a lot of money due to high bandwidth and licensing costs. Online video aggregators have come under scrutiny recently due to questions about the viability of their business models, but we still believe the opportunity is still large in the space and there is value in the leaders while the industry figures out how to turn viewers into profits.

Last year we gave the company a conservative $300 million valuation. This year we get a little more aggressive given the company’s growth the past year, resulting in a $500 million valuation.

Of course the list is quite arbitrary (where is Spil Games for example? Much smaller competitor Miniclip is in there at place 38) and the makers also acknowledge that, but it’s still nice to be included once again in such a ranking.

Note: I will not be able to comment on the valuation or on any of the other figures in the article, nor on the position of our competitors.

Today is Halloween and probably for the first time in 10 years in China I am celebrating it. Most Chinese have no idea what Halloween is, but in an expat compound like the one that we are now living in it is a big thing. On Friday Scott’s kindergarten already did a Trick or Treat (Scott could not join, because he was still sick), and tonight was the big Halloween night.

This afternoon my wife and I went Halloween shopping: we bought a Halloween costume for Scott and masks for ourselves, plus a lot of decoration materials for the house. We also bought candy bars and chocolate for about 50 kids. We were just in time because many parents were in the City Supermarket as well hunting for treats and a lot of candy had sold out already.

We received a notice from the compound that the Trick or Treat would start at 6:30 PM, but already before 6 PM the first kids rang our door bell. And from that moment until 8 PM the bell kept on ringing! Around 7 PM we had run out of candy already, and had to check our storage for other things to give away. Around 7:30 we even went out to buy additional treats for the children. We were amazed by the number of kids in our compound, until we found out that there were at least two school buses that had unloaded their students in our compound to give them a special Halloween experience! No big deal, we probably gave at least 100 kids a candy bar and all were very happy. Some were so happy that they came back a few times to get more chocolate bars (3 girls came back 3 times until we figured out that they had been here twice already!).

Scott is still not completely well, but he was feeling good enough to dress up as a pirate and join his father and mother for a round of Trick or Treat. He liked it a lot, getting something at every door where we rang the bell, even though he did not want to eat any of it (he still hardly eats after being sick for a week). We walked from house to house with some of his kindergarten classmates, most of them are a bit older and some were truly scared of the dressed up people. But Scott seemed to totally ignore it, he did not even mind me wearing a scary mask! I guess he is still too young to understand that you have to be afraid when people put on a horror mask? It was a fun evening, and next year should be even better when Scott and Elaine will be a little older.

I am in Holland at the moment where I will give a speech at the WECBA Executive Conference this afternoon. It’s a very short and also very busy trip, but that’s how I like it.

I arrived in Holland Monday evening around 7 pm and had dinner with my parents in Amsterdam. The next morning I got up early to catch up on emails and then went directly to the Spil Games office in Hilversum, where I had several meetings during the day before leaving around 4 pm to go to The Hague. At 6 pm I had a cocktail reception followed by a dinner in the Ridderzaal (The Knight’s Hall), with among others Dutch minister of foreign trade Frank Heemskerk and many CEOs of big Chinese companies.

This morning I got up early to work on my presentation for this afternoon, and I just finished it. The conference starts in 30 minutes, so just in time 🙂 Luckily I also had time for a short walk on the beach in front of my hotel (the Steigenberger Kurhaus Hotel, a beautiful classic hotel – the Dutch government picks up the bill :-). Right after my speech I need to leave for the airport, because I will fly back to China late this afternoon. I hope I can catch up on some sleep on the plane, because I missed out on a lot of sleep over the past 2 days…

Scott had a cold for a couple of days already, and earlier in the week he even stayed home from kindergarten because of this. It looked like his health was improving, until yesterday he suddenly became really sick. He had a fever and did not want to do much. He slept a lot and went to bed early last night. Around 1:30 AM he woke up and started to throw up in his bed. It went downhill from there, because he could not keep anything inside that he ate or drank. During the day he kept on throwing up, I felt so bad for him each time it happened.

His fever also got higher, and eventually we decided to see a doctor. Because our favorite doctor at Hongqiao Parkway Health (which is quite close to our home) was not available we drove to the United Family hospital. We were well taken care of, but because Scott had a high fever (38.2 degrees when we arrived) we had to sit in a special fever area. Swine fever precautions I assume. Hope we did not catch anything from others there…

The doctor checked Scott up and thinks it is a virus. He actually thinks it’s just beginning and Scott will be sick for at least a couple of more days 🙁 Interesting is that Scott could communicate to the doctor that he had pain in his tummy, I did not realize he was able to tell us this already. He also could say “aaa” when he had to open his mouth so the doctor could look into his throat. The nurse gave Scott some dehydration medicine while there, and when we left we got a whole bag of medicine for Scott to take. I hope it will at least make him feel a bit better.

Having a baby or toddler who is sick is much worse than I would imagine. The problem is that Scott cannot really communicate yet what he is feeling, and the only thing you can do is trying to comfort him as much as possible. He doesn’t understand what’s happening and is either very silent and in a half asleep state of mind, or crying like crazy because he is in pain. As a parent that is a terrible thing to see. I’d prefer to be sick myself, but of course that’s not possible. I hope he will recover soon and that Elaine won’t be infected…