All over Shanghai you can find traffic cameras hanging on light poles, bridges and traffic lights. If you break the traffic rules you are supposed to get a ticket if the police catches you, so most people watch out when they see a camera. So far most cabbies knew pretty well where all cameras are located (my driver is a former taxi driver and he has a good knowledge of them), but many others notice the cameras only when they see a flash or when they are in slow-moving traffic jam.

It seems the police decided that a wider knowledge of the location of these instruments might reduce the number of people breaking the law, so they now put all traffic cameras online. You can see all cameras in the city on Shanghai’s traffic police site. According to the website there are a total of 1739 cameras in Shanghai and hidden cameras, e.g. cameras that are not on this list, are not allowed. The camera locations were opened up to the public earlier this week, and a lot of people were eager to find out the locations: as a result the site had 4 million hits in the first 7 hours the police cameras were published there! I did not see any mash-ups with Google Maps or Baidu Ditu yet, I think that would be a big hit as well.

After using Twitter for almost two years on a daily basis I literally could not live without it anymore. It has changed the way I do things and it has enabled me to get to know (and meet in real life) many interesting people. It had a positive impact on my life and on my work. People who don’t use it don’t know what they are missing, and the problem is that it’s hard to explain. I have tried it many times, but you have to start using it intensively for a while to really understand it, and that’s what most people will not do. That’s fine with me, as long as they don’t bad mouth the service as being irrelevant and a time waster, as has happened often in Dutch media recently. Most journalists do not seem to understand the value of the service yet, that may even be a potential threat to their business.

Do you know what is the first thing I do in the morning when I turn on my computer? Not looking at my email, not looking at my RSS feeds, but looking at the latest trends on search.twitter.com. That’s where you see what’s happening at that very moment all over the world. That’s where you read the news before it appears on blogs and on Google News and (much later) in newspapers. Then I look at my Twitter replies and only after that I open my RSS feeds and my email.

During the day I check Twitter a couple of times. I don’t read everything, which is impossible if you follow a few hundred people, but just jump into it and read few pages back to see if there are any interesting conversations going on. If so I might jump in for a few minutes, and if not I continue with what I’m doing. I do read all my replies and always have the search screen open for my Twitter name, for Spil Games and for Tudou. So anything that gets written that’s relevant to me I will see.

The things I write on Twitter depend a bit on my mood and on what I’m doing. Normally they are just some random thoughts or things that I am doing, often while driving to a meeting or while waiting somewhere. Things that may be interesting for others, but also things that may seem useless at first. However, I have learned that even seemingly useless messages become interesting if you follow people for a longer time. You really get to know them, and I think I know more about many of my Twitter friends than about some of my real life friends.

Twitter is also a good tool to quickly get information. Last week for example I took a cab from SFO airport to downtown and a few minutes before we arrived at my hotel I realized that I did not know how much to tip a SF cab driver. I tweeted that and within minutes I had at least 10 people answering me. Today I realized that I spend about USD 500/year on fees for my main credit card because of a 1.5% fee on non-EUR transactions, and I asked my Twitter followers for advice. I got some interesting replies, both on Twitter and through DM, and I will check out some of these options. Sure, I could have done a Google search, but not only is this Twitter easier, it is also more personal. I know or can easily get to know the person who replies me. Social recommendations are more valuable than ads or (relatively) objective Wikipedia information.

Most important, however, are the people I get to meet through Twitter. Last week I twittered a lot about what I was doing at the GDC in San Francisco. Because of that I got to know at least 4 interesting people (entrepreneurs, investors and people from gaming companies) and found a lot of new followers who were also attending GDC. With two of the people that I met through Twitter last week I discussed about entrepreneurship in the Valley and I learned a lot from them. Without Twitter I would not have had these conversations.

Twitter is a new way of how to deal with real time information. I did not have a lot of time to go to the GDC presentations, but I was still able to read about the main things that were going on by doing a search on the hashtag #gdc or #gdc09 in Twitter. Real time information about what was being said. For me it’s not only useful, but it’s also fun. Twitter is a social tool to get to know or keep in touch with people and to keep track of information. As I mentioned in the first paragraph it has changed the way I work. Of course Twitter costs time. I estimate that I spend at least 30 minutes per day on Twitter. Combined with another 30 minutes on my blog and about 30 min-1 hour on my RSS newsfeeds, that means 2 hours per day spent on online and social media. Is that a lot? Depends on how you see it. In these 2 hours I get all the information I need, and it’s exactly the information I want to have. I hardly ever read newspapers: I scan through the Shanghai Daily in 5 minutes and download, but often not even read anymore, my daily Dutch newspaper on my ebook reader. And I hardly ever watch TV. I get my information online, not from talking heads on a TV screen. Not spending time on these two media saves me a lot more than 2 hours per day.

For me Twitter is here to stay. The way I use it may change now that more people are on it (in 2007 I used it very differently from now: I read everything my friends said, but at that time there were just a handful users) and when new Twitter services and appliances become available. But I think it will be increasingly useful and a real productivity tool instead of a time waster. If you’ve read until the end and are not a Twitter user yet I hope I have convinced you to give it a try. Just go to http://twitter.com and sign up! And don’t forget to add me.

I’m sitting in the lounge at SFO airport waiting to board a flight to Tokyo, after a busy couple of days in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. I was here mainly for the Game Developers Conference (GDC), but I actually did not get to see much of it because of an overloaded schedule with meetings. In total I spent about 30 minutes on the expo floor and I did not see any of the presentations that I had planned to watch. I guess that’s normal if you attend a conference like this, because you finally have the opportunity to meet all your industry peers in one place.

The trip itself was absolutely worth the long flight. I arrived last week Friday morning at 9 AM and spent most of the day in meetings (a good way to forget about the 15-hour time difference between SH and SF). I also made a 1.5 hour walk around town, from Union Square to Coit Tower and back. On the weekend I worked at bit in the morning and went for a run (I got up very early because of jet lag) and did some sightseeing in the afternoon.

On Saturday I drove to Napa Valley and visited the Robert Mondavi winery, and on Sunday I drove part of Highway 1 along the coast. The Bay area is a stunning place to live, you have everything here: beautiful nature with hills and beaches, a nice but relatively quiet city (SF is more like a town, especially compared to SH), a good nightlife (restaurants, theater), and excellent sports opportunities (you can even go skiing in less than 3 hours, you can see the snow covered mountains while driving south on 280). And the weather is nice, fresh air, clear skies and a good temperature.

But best of all is the entrepreneurial vibe that I feel here. The vibe that I am missing in Holland (and in most of the world for that matter), but that I am so used to in China, is here as well. People think in opportunities instead of in risks. People are not afraid to fail. There is a start-up culture, especially in area around Stanford University (Palo Alto etc.), which is very inspiring to me.
I talked to several VC’s and angel investors over the past days and am surprised about the number of new start-ups here. Of course I should have known about it because I’m following blogs like Venturebeat and TechCrunch, but I somehow had the wrong impression that the recession would have had a negative impact on start-ups. I don’t feel that’s the case, but please correct me if my first impression is wrong.

I would not mind spending some more time here and maybe even doing another start-up in the future. But that would mean I would have to leave China, and that won’t be an easy decision. It won’t happen soon because I have no intention at all to leave Spil Games Asia, but who knows what the long-term future will bring. Life is full of opportunities, you just have to make sure that you grab the right ones.

I am in San Francisco at the moment for the annual Game Developers Conference. Having a great time here, but with an overloaded schedule. It’s so bad that I have not seen one speech or presentation yet over the past days and I didn’t even visit the expo yet. It looks like I may not even manage to get there, because also today I am tied up in meetings. Nothing to complain about though, because the main reason for being here is not the show, but meetings with media, research analysts and many of our game partners. So far the trip has been very successful, I met many people and learned a lot, and worked on some ideas for the future strategy of Spil Games.

Many of the meetings were set up by Spil Games PR agency TriplePoint. They are a (or maybe even the) leading agency in the interactive entertainment & gaming space with offices in SF, NY and LA. TriplePoint allowed me to work in between meetings from their office on Union Square, which is very useful during a conference. Their office has one of the best views you can imagine. It’s located on Union Square at the top floor of the Tiffany’s building. There is a balcony where you can sit outside in the sunshine overlooking the city. Excellent, and nothing compared to the view from my office in Shanghai! Maybe I should just stay here 🙂

In my RSS reader I just found an AFP piece written by journalist Glenn Chapman about the fact that YouTube is blocked in China. I quickly scanned it and noticed that they are quoting me in the article. A bit strange as I am in San Francisco at the moment and nobody interviewed me about this. I did not really know about the YouTube block actually, I just saw a couple of messages on Twitter about it.

The article from the Sydney Morning Herald quotes a piece from my blog from October 18, 2007 (when YouTube was also not available for a few days) and says I posted this yesterday to explain why YouTube would be blocked. Because it’s a syndicated article it will likely appear in a lot of other newspapers tomorrow (or today, depending in which time zone you are in). The content is total bullshit. There is no National Congress going on, nor did YouTube just launch its Chinese version. Check your facts before you post an article like this Mr. Chapman. Just Googling and copy/pasting is only what bloggers do, right?

Update: I received an email from the AFP (but not from Mr. Chapman) saying that they read my blog post and corrected the story. The new version sent out across the wires now reads at the top “ATTENTION – CORRECTION: REMOVES quotes from blogger Marc van der Chijs in paras 15-19 which were mistakenly taken from comments made in a blog dated 2007. Here is a corrected repetition.” However, the piece still appears uncorrected in many media, a quick search just now still led to tens of articles where I am misquoted. Not only in English (such as the SCMP or The Times), but also in French at Les Echos and even in a Bolivian publication!

Last week I stayed one night in the Jinglun Hotel in Beijing and was surprised to see their phones. The hotel had in-room phones with large touch screens, I had never came accross these before. But the most interesting aspect was that they showed advertising on the screen. At first only on the right side of the touch pad, but after a while the whole screen was taken over by 30 second (or even longer) TV commercials! It was like having a second TV screen in your room, but one you cannot turn off – at least I did not figure out how to do that.

I found it quite annoying actually, what gives the hotel the right to spam me with commercials even inside my hotel room? For me that’s enough reason not to stay there again (the other reason is that I had a room on the Jianguomenwai Dajie side, which gets very noisy early in the morning). At first I was afraid I would have a lit-up screen next to me the whole night while sleeping, but luckily the screen turned itself off when it’s dark in the room. So maybe the trick to hide from the ads is to close the curtains during daytime and make sure all lights are turned off. Although the phones look nice, to me this is a big FAIL for the management of the Jinglun Hotel in Beijing.

Over the years I have been featured in many magazines, newspapers and other media, but I don’t think I ever made it to the front page of any publication. Well, there is a first for everything because someone just sent me a picture of the cover of the (Dutch) MarketingTribune. I am afraid a good looking lady would have been better for sales – especially considering the fact that the picture was taken right after I got off a plane from Shanghai to Amsterdam!

The share of online advertising in China still lags far behind the US or European market, an important issue for everybody involved in the Internet in China. I had hoped that the financial crisis would speed up the transition from traditional to digital marketing (because it’s much easier to measure), but I am actually seeing the opposite effect. Last year’s IAB China initiative has taken more time than expected to get off the ground, but I think eventually IAB will also play an important role in China’s online industry. In the meantime I applaud and try to support every initiative to increase awareness and opportunities in digital marketing. Today I was therefore pleasantly surprised to see that Omnicom and Fudan University launched a program to help marketeers and agencies better understand the world of digital marketing.

The course consists of 3 times 3 days of classes (Fri-Sun), with speakers from Internet companies (such as Tencent), PR and advertising agencies and professors from Fudan University. The class will be mainly taught in Chinese and will have simultaneous translation. The course will be a combination of lectures and case studies, so just like on the Web it is not just one-way communication but bi-directional!

Themes that will be covered are among others:
– The development of the Web in China
– Who is online in China
– How to use online to reach marketing objectives
– How to use the different tools (from advertising to UGC video, and from games to widgets)
– Crisis management (they should invite CIC’s Sam Flemming for this topic!)
– How the Internet is changing the advertising and other businesses

I am glad Omnicom came up with this initiative, because a course like this does not exist yet in China (as far as I know) and is very much needed. Many agencies sadly still lack basic knowledge about what the Internet can do for their clients, and this course can make a change. I hope it will become a big success!

More information: http://www.digitalworkschina.com/
Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=72220843078