My blog is fully active again 30-06-10
Finally after 3 months of waiting my blog is fully active again behind the “Great Firewall of China.” I’m still curious why it was blocked; maybe I have posted to critical opinions about Internet freedom on Twitter. In the mean time I embraced (also for my research project) local players like t.Sina (similar with Twitter), RenRen (similar with Facebook) an Taobao (similar with eBay). These players are more innovative and show revenue and advertising models, which I wasn’t familiar with in Europe. For example McDonald’s has a huge online mall on Taobao (e-commerce) were Chinese people can buy Hamburgers. Another example is t.Sina (microblog), you can directly place a picture and video at your text message. At RenRen there are massive campaigns of Adidas, Nike, McDonalds and Nokia who have more then 10 million followers in total. The Chinese Internet landscape is constantly changing and rapidly growing. I truely believe with the massive population and the urban development Shanghai will have the biggest internet economy in the world in the near future.
Unfortanely Tmblr and Mobypicture are blocked, so in near future you will receive a link off a local photo sharing player.
Living in Shanghai 24-06-10
After a long time of the grid WordPress works a little bit in China and I can post again some things about Shanghai. There’s so much where I can talk about, but I’m not going to do, because I can fill a book with it. Currently I cycle every day to my work. In street of Shanghai cycling isn’t just ordinary trip, but it’s more like a videogame where I try to avoid cars and silent electric scooters who pop up from everywhere. At the creative park (Red Town) the environment is constantly changing and still brilliant to work in. It gives a lot of energy and ideas. In the past two months I have seen more then 25 events passing by in event hall next to the office space, seen some new restaurant open up, galleries have shut down to reinvent them self and a new local box club opened. I have already tried a lesson. This atmosphere is very lively and people are constantly doing business in all kind of ways. For this reasons I like the city so much.
First week in Shanghai 18-03-10
They say: “Time flies when you’re having fun.” I totally agree, because there happend a lot last week. Friday 11 March I Arrived at Pudong Airport where I was picked up and went with the Maglev Train (300 kmp/h) towards the city. The first night there was a Dutch night organized by Michael, my contact person in Shanghai. Directly I met some other students who are for the same thing here in Shanghai. The party was at a local bar and it was great!!!. Day after I was broken 
At Sunday I could finally go to my duplex apartment situated at the 20th and 21th floor in de Jing’An area. Beautifully are with a lot of skyscrapers and shopping malls. I didn’t expected, but across the street of my apartment building is a luxury bakery (very cheap prices) were I go everyday.
Tuesday was my first day and I arrived by metro at a beautiful creative district with a lot of art galleries, little bars and advertising agencies. They are situated in old warehouse and all have an own cube. See at the right the picture. Maximum has three floors and it is beautiful designed. In the company is the atmosphere great and the challenge is amazing. For the next 5 months I’m going to design a social recruitment strategy for the brand’s of Maximum. It starts by defining the landscape, social media and employer branding, as well as giving insights into its similarities and differences across China. It then provides practical, hands on advice on what steps brands of Maximum should take to plan their social recruitment strategies along with a framework. Beside the work I am learning a lot of the Chinese people and their culture. Especially when I’m going with them to a typically Chinese restaurant or a bar.
Pictures are here @ Tumbler
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Virtual currency harms the real world 10-03-10
China’s social media landscape is constantly growing, innovating and evolving. Before my internship I had never heard of QQ. This is a virtual network which you can compare with Facebook, only in China there are more then 340 millions user then Facebook worldwide. In this network I can earn QQ-coins, a kind of virtual money was initially designed to allow me to buy digital commodities, such as virtual flowers, but has taken on a real market value. The use of the coin took off, and then something very strange happened: online vendors started accepting the virtual currency in exchange for real world items. Due to the scale of the entire operation, the result would be actual inflation.
