I am sitting in an internet cafe in the town of Moshi (Tanzania), about 40 km from the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. Internet is pretty bad here, but at least we found a place to go online. No way to use my own laptop though, and the word wifi does not seem to exist yet in Swahili!

So far everything went pretty smooth. We arrived in Arusha last night after an uneventful flight, and took a small van to Moshi. Here we are staying at a basic (not even airconditioning) but clean hotel, even with its own swimming pool. I woke up at 4:30 AM from the call to prayers at the local mosque, but luckily managed to get back to sleep afterwards.

Breakfast was pretty good (pancakes, eggs, fruit and coffee) and after breakfast we decided to walk to town (a few kilometers). The hotel staff warned us that we had to watch our bags and camera’s (“the people here are bad”), but we did not feel threatened at all. Very friendly people who all greet us with “Jambo”. Just smile back and say Jambo as well!

We decided to walk over the railroad tracks to town (When in Rome…), together with all the locals. It’s not only the quickest way to walk (no potholes and trucks trying to hit you), but you also have the best view as the railroad is slightly elevated. We felt at home right away, because everybody here rides on Phoenix bicycles – Made in Shanghai! Pretty cool.

Tomorrow morning we are off to the foot of the mountain and we should be back by next week Wednesday. Gary, my dad and I look very much forward to the climb. It will be difficult, especially the last two days, but we do this because we like a challenge. Until we’re back I will not have any email or internet access (even GPRS is not working, so I cannot even Twitter), so the next blog post and my pictures will have to wait for at least one week.

This weekend Grace and I went to France for her 5-year INSEAD MBA reunion. Time flies, it seems like a much shorter time ago that she spent a year on the INSEAD campuses in Fontainebleau and Singapore. But it’s really 5 years, I did not even blog yet at that time (I made a first attempt during SARS, which happened while she was in France). I visited her many times during that year, so I knew quite a lot of her classmates. And of course many of them now work in Asia, so we regularly meet with some of them. We decided to take Scott with us, at 5-month old it was his first intercontinental trip. Not sure if that was really such a good idea, the flight was certainly not as relaxed as the average flight to Europe, and we’ll probably wait a few months before we take him with us on another long flight.

The 5-year reunion was held at the Fontainebleau campus (less than one hour south of Paris) and was organized in the same weekend as the yearly INSEAD Summer Ball. It was a 3-day event (Fri-Sun), but we only joined around 9 PM on Friday night. Because we were quite tired due to traveling and jet lag we just had a glass of champagne at the cocktail party and joined part of the dinner (with among others an unlimited supply of my favorite food: foie gras!). The next morning we had breakfast at the INSEAD residence (where we were staying) with Scott and some former classmates, and then went to see a lecture on campus. We missed the first one (on Blue Ocean Strategy, which was developed at INSEAD) but joined the one about “INSEAD now and then”, comparing how INSEAD has developed over the years. The class was given by several students together with INSEAD dean Frank Brown.

Some interesting statistics: 25% of all INSEAD MBA graduates end up working in Asia, for example, and there are more than 25 countries with alumni networks with more than 100 members each. This really makes INSEAD the Business School of the World (INSEAD’s official slogan). Harvard and other US top schools are much more local, with most people still ending up working in the US. I think in an international world it could give INSEAD an advantage. And not only for students. Harvard professors have to live within 50 miles of Boston. INSEAD professors can live in either France, Singapore or Abu Dhabi (executive education campus), and some even live in the US and fly in for courses. Considering how difficult it is to get and retain top faculty, this may be another advantage of INSEAD over other schools. I know a couple of Harvard grads that read my blog, so just to clarify, I think Harvard is still a great education with excellent students and staff, but I think they may be too focused on the US. Feel free to let me know in the comments if I am wrong.

During the class a student from Zimbabwe who is at INSEAD on a scholarship gave a very moving speech. Basically the scholarship was the only way for him to go to INSEAD, and it also gives him the possibility to go back to Zimbabwe later on to help build up the country (he does not have to stay in Europe to get a high-paying position to pay back his loans). I thought about this for quite a while, and think there may be a business idea in here. In Europe paying EUR 50,000 to study for a year is not cheap, but for many people from third world countries it is totally impossible. If these people are very good (and they must be in order to enter a top B-school), why is there no mechanism for them to obtain funding? I think there could be some very creative solutions for this. I don’t have time to work on this idea, but maybe it can give one of my readers some inspiration for a new venture?

After the lectures a class picture was taken (with Scott and his proud mother on the front row), followed by an excellent lunch (buffet style to ensure I would gain some additional weight). In the afternoon there was a French market and a wine tasting, but after buying Scott some INSEAD baby clothes we decided to make a walk through Fontainebleau. It’s a beautiful old town that of course has not changed much over the past 5 years. Our lives are completely different from 5 years ago, but here there were still the same shops and restaurants as when Grace lived here. In a way that’s nice actually. My life always changes, and I have no idea what I will be doing in 5 years, but some parts of the world will remain basically the same.

At night we had dinner in a restaurant along the Seine river with my parents (who came along to baby-sit Scott. If you read this, thanks a lot for that!), and around 11 PM we went to the Chateau de Fontainebleau for the INSEAD Summer Ball. This ball is the biggest party of the year at INSEAD and a strictly black-tie affair. Most of the people at the ball are current students, and I suddenly realized how young they all seemed to be. Well, I suppose that was the same 5 years ago, but I am just getting older. The ball was a great party, and of course the location in one of the nicest castles in France made it even nicer. There were three separate parties going on: a big one in a transparent tent in the courtyard overlooking the pond, a smaller one with a jazz/lounge band in a big room on the second floor and one with a (at least) 2 live acts (one with oldies hits and a salsa band). At midnight there was a big fireworks spectacle combined with loud classical music, the combination made quite an impression on me actually. This was one of the highlights of the night for me. We came home around 3 AM, completely exhausted because of the party (and still a bit the jet lag).

Sunday morning we had breakfast and went back to the campus with Scott to takes some pictures. The weather was sunny and not too warm, and lots of former and current students were enjoying the sunshine on campus. Scott also enjoyed it and if we did not had to drive back to Holland we probably would have stayed longer (there was a big barbecue planned at 12). But because of our busy schedules we had to go back. It was a short but very nice weekend, and we’re thinking about coming back in 5 years for the 10-year reunion.

Because of the three-day mourning period all entertainment sites in China were asked to shut down from Monday until Wednesday. Gary woke us up with a phone call very early on Monday morning to inform us about the new rules (Tudou was probably among the first sites to be notified), and I called the Spill Group Asia technical and marketing people to discuss what to do. We did not receive a notice yet, and were therefore not sure if our sites game.com.cn and xiaoyouxi.com would also have to follow it. I checked the internet (it was around 1 AM on Monday) and noticed that none of our gaming competitors had adjusted their sites yet. I also could not find any information about the ban online yet, so I put it on Twitter to see if other people had more information. Incidentally I broke the news on Twitter by writing about it (see for example this article) and Scobleizer picked it up right away after Fuzheado retweeted my message to him. Then things went fast and within minutes I had 30 new followers on Twitter.

Tudou was already working on a new temporary site, but I was still not sure what to do. If you shut down your site, but the competition does not do it you might lose a lot of regular players. Spill Group still had not received an official notice, and therefore we decided to wait a few hours to see what would happen. The next morning at 10 AM none of the flash game sites in China had changed anything yet, but most of the video sites had implemented the changes already (except for QQ video). From a business point of view it’s not easy to make a decision to close down your site temporarily, but at that moment I decided that it was not appropriate to keep the site up when the whole of China is mourning and especially not when you are specifically asked to close it down. So even though the competition kept their sites online we put a specially created memorial page online.

The competition was probably looking at us, because not much later they also took their sites offline. Traffic wise Spill Group Asia’s sites game.com.cn and xiaoyouxi.com are no. 2 in China among all flash games sites with about 20 million unique IP’s per month (4399.com is no. 1), but it was nice to see that they are looking at us to decide what to do. But not just that, they probably liked our design and copied it to their server. First 4399.com and later also 7k7k.com. It seems our designers did an excellent job! Strange enough shortly after that our stats went up a lot. We had no clue why, we had gotten a lot of traffic during the day from search engines and sites like hao123.com, but it was quite steady until our competitors copied our site. And then we realized what happened: they not only copied the design, but also our site measurement code that was embedded in the site. Thanks for giving us some insightful information on your traffic compared to ours, dear competitors!

After the others copied our design we decided to redesign our mourning page and add the possibility for people to leave a comment. Right now we get one new comment every 2 seconds! Of course it did not take long for 7k7k.com to also add the comment function, but 4399.com still only has the static page. I don’t mind them copying everything we do, it’s always better to be a leader than a follower. And in this way our message and wishes for the victims will be spread out even further.

Today I downloaded my first newspaper to an e-book reader (the Dutch NRC Handelsblad on the iLiad reader), and I am really happy with the result. As regular readers of this blog (or of my Twitter feed) know, I am a big fan of e-books. I believe that is the future of reading, as long as the producers manage to get people to try it and if the readers become cheaper. When I travel I can bring all my books with me and I can read my favorite newspaper sitting on a tropical beach – without having to wait for days for it to be delivered, or without having to read it from a laptop screen that is unreadable in the sun. Try it and you’ll love it.

But getting my first newspaper to work was a major hassle. I complained before about the total lack of marketing knowledge at the people behind iLiad. But also the newspaper people have a lot to learn about being user-friendly. First of all it took me a lot longer to get my iLiad then I was originally told. Someone from the Chinareis organization was supposed to bring it to me late March, but the iLiad-NRC combi was delivered a week later than planned (despite NRC assuring me that it would be there on time). So I had to wait for my next trip to Holland to pick it up, which was two weeks ago.

Because I was too busy with other things I waited until two days ago to set it up. First of all I had to create an account at iLiad. Problem is, I already have an account there for my other iLiad so I had to use a different email address. Now I know that I am probably one of the very few people with more than one iLiad at this time, but still they should think about this. Because I don’t use the other iLiad anymore I decided to use that account and use it for my new iLiad.

I followed the steps in the NRC booklet explaining how to set it up but soon hit a brick wall. The booklet told me to go to www.nrc.nl/epaper and click on the activate button. Seems easy to do, except for the fact that there was no activate button. I surfed around and even searched the NRC site for the word ‘activate’ – zero results according to their internal search engine. Finally I tried typing in epaper.nrc.nl and to my surprise there I could activate my subscription! I twittered about it, and to my surprise people at NRC were listening in because the next day I got a reply through twitter that they would change the link. I just checked it, and they indeed forwarded nrc.nl/epaper now to epaper.nrc.nl. Thanks!

So everything was ready to download and read my first paper. I kept following the steps in the booklet, connected to my wifi network and the iLiad started searching for downloads. Result: Nothing found to download. Huh? I went back to the booklet, maybe I made a mistake? I tried the whole procedure again but still the same result. I decided to turn my iLiad off and on, that works for Windows computers, so maybe the iLiad might also need a restart first. But no, still the same result. Now I was getting a bit angry and of course I posted about it on Twitter again.

What to do? I looked for a user forum for iLiad users and found one on the NRC site. You had to log in with your NRC subscription code (kind of weird, why not open this up guys? It’s not secret information right?), and then I scanned the questions. Soon I found out that everybody there had the same problem, you have to wait at least 24 hours before your subscription is activated. OK, no problem, but please please please inform people about it. Just put a note next to the activate button on the site for example. The current user experience totally s*cks.

Anyway, now the iLiad has been set up and it works fine. Today the iLiad automatically downloaded my first paper and it was on my machine within one minute. Finally I can read my favorite Dutch newspaper on the day it is published, wherever I am in the world. I am very happy with this, and I hope the e-ink technology will eventually catch on with the bigger population as well.

All the people and media that keep saying that Twitter is useless may have to think again. When I looked on Twitter around 2:30 PM this afternoon I noticed a tweet from Frank Yu saying “Earthquake in Beijing?“. Despite the shaking building, he kept on Twittering and he even made fun of himself when he wrote: “i twittered as the building swayed…screw running out the door, MUST TWEET !“

By that time several other friends in Beijing had started to Twitter about the earthquake, but in Shanghai it was still quiet. Either because the quake was not as obvious here, or maybe because it arrived a bit later in Shanghai (how quick do earthquake waves travel actually?). Although I was busy working I was so fascinated by what happened on Twitter during the next hour or so that I spent more time watching the tweets roll by than focus on the emails I was planning to write.

At first nobody knew where the earthquake was, but soon it turned out that the epicenter was around Chengdu. And of course within a few minutes the Twitter community found at least 3 active Twitterers (http://twitter.com/inwalkedbud, http://twitter.com/lyrrael and http://twitter.com/casperodj) that were reporting live from Chengdu. Quite amazing to see how quickly news spreads on Twitter, because we already had all information before the mainstream media picked it up. In my 80 year old brick-and-mortar Shanghai warehouse office I did not feel a thing, but on Twitter I read that many office buildings in Beijing and Shanghai were being evacuated. Must not be a nice feeling to walk tens of stories in a crowded stairway while you are not sure what really happened and if another shock might hit soon. Being in China, I would not be surprised if some people decided to just take the elevator despite the potential danger.

Some interesting tweets followed. Niubi reported that the Beijing air traffic controllers left the control tower when it started shaking (imagine you are a pilot making an approach to Beijing airport and suddenly you cannot reach the tower anymore!). Later he tweeted the CCTV advise of what to do during an earthquake: sit in the corner with a sofa pillow over your head (no kidding!). According to Shizao the first website that went down in China during the earthquake was…. the Earthquake Bureau’s website (thanks to Kaiser Kuo for the retweet).

Only a while later other media followed. First the blogs (Danwei was the first with a post up I think, soon followed by this post on Shanghaiist), and then the major news agencies. CNN decided to use this Tudou footage in its constant covering of the earthquake, but nicely covered the Tudou logo with its own logo. Twitter kept on being the first to report, and even though initial reports showed not much damage in Chengdu it soon turned out to be much much worse outside the city. In Dujiangyan for example, where the Dutch Chinareis group went just over a month ago to get VIP seats during the water release ceremony, schools and houses collapsed and hundreds of people are now buried under the rubble.

My colleague Thijs Bosma had booked a plane from Shanghai to Chengdu that was supposed to take off soon after the earthquake, but it first got delayed and was later canceled. Shortly after I heard that Chengdu airport had completely closed. Bad luck for him, but nothing in comparison to the thousands of people that have lost their lives today. A terrible tragedy on Buddha’s birthday and exactly 88 days before the Olympics (both these facts I got from Twitter today; 88 is a lucky number in China). It seems the Olympic year is not China’s lucky year: first the heavy snow, then the Tibet protests, followed by the still ongoing HFM disease, and now this huge earthquake (source: this tweet). Let’s hope that things can only get better.

This morning I went to the visa bureau in Pudong to extend my Z-visa / residence permit. In the past years I never had to go here in person to get an extension, but because of tighter visa rules I now had to appear myself. Not a big deal I thought, because I had heard that this should take maximum one hour.

Wrong. Because of the new visa rules many foreigners were trying their luck to get tourist and F-visa extensions, and there were huge queues. Several people were arguing loudly with the staff, but they could not bend the rules for them, and most of the foreigners had to leave China. To make things worse the staff took a 2-hour (!) lunch break despite a notice saying that the service would not be interrupted during lunch. Technically right, because out of the 14 counters 2 were still manned during the break.

The result was that I had to wait for 3 hours before it was my turn. Luckily I brought my fully charged laptop, so I could do a bit of work (even though the place had no wireless internet). I even found a place where they sold coffee. Not a very good quality, and overpriced at RMB 18 per cup, but better than nothing.

One security guard was overseeing the visa hall, but did not interfere in any of the arguments. Instead he decided to take a nap in the corner. The interesting thing was that when he woke up he decided to wake up the guy sitting behind me who had also decided to take a nap. The guy was spread out over two chairs, which was probably the main reason for the guard to wake him up. The guy got quite angry because of this, but the security guard just smiled (he did not understand what the guy told him, which was probably better – also for the guy).

When it finally was my turn the procedure went quite fast. I had already filled out the forms and had all required documents with me. They asked me 2 questions, took a digital picture and within 2 minutes I was outside again. I will get my passport back in 5 working days and luckily don’t have to go there myself, a courier can pick it up for me.

The Shanghai Daily is not the best newspaper in the world (understatement), but it is pretty advanced online. It has its own RSS feeds, several blogs and podcasts, and even an online PDF version. And now it will also be published in the Kindle E-Book reader format, the ugly-looking eBook launched by Amazon last year. For just USD 5.99 per month you can get your daily dose of local Shanghai stories and propaganda delivered on your Kindle. This is a good development, the more papers that get published on E-Books the better (I am a big fan of E-Books). However, I wonder if they will have any extra sales because of this, because the Kindle is only on sale in the US so far and it does not work on Chinese GPRS or 3G networks (correct me if I am wrong). And I don’t really think anybody in the US would be interested in reading the Shanghai Daily.

A nice feature is that the Shanghai Daily will be updated twice daily, meaning that it is more up-to-date than the printed once-per-day version. Right now I have a paper version subscription, but because that normally does not get delivered until somewhere in the afternoon (the Shanghai Daily is a morning paper) I would actually consider changing my subscription from paper to eBook. However, I have a Sony E-Book reader and two iLiads, but those formats are not supported yet. If you redesign your paper for E-Books, why not directly make it compatible for all available formats? The same is true of course for other newspapers like the Dutch NRC Handelsblad that is only available on the iLiad so far. But maybe this is just a first step and we will see the newspaper in other formats as well very soon.

At the moment I am in Holland and among others I went to take a (last) look at the house where my grandparents used to live. My grandfather passed away a couple of years ago and now my grandmother became too old to live here alone and moved into a nursing home. That means the place will likely be sold soon…

That’s a pity because it’s a fantastic place filled with memories from my childhood. I came here very often when I was a kid, playing in the big garden (3400 sqm) or swimming in the pool. Even though Holland has become increasingly full you don’t really notice it when you are here. That’s what I like about it, it’s close to a small town (Ommen), but you feel like you are far away from the busy world. The house actually has two more small houses in the garden, a teahouse (with own bathroom) and a slightly bigger vacation house close to the entrance gate (with its own bathroom and kitchen). There is also a stable for a horse and a swimming pool, which has not been used in many years.

If I would have lived in Holland I might have considered buying the property myself, but it does not really make sense when you live in China. Therefore the house will come on the market soon for a price of about EUR 800,000. In my opinion not bad considering the excellent location. However, the place needs to be renovated (e.g. a new kitchen, new bathroom and possibly changing the lay-out) to comply with modern living standards. In case you’re interested feel free to drop me an email. More pictures of the house can be found here.