Conflicting Ideas from SJTU EMBA Program

Immediately after I came out of the class of SJTU EMBA program, Wendy and I went to a villa in Zhujiajiao. There are too much stress in the previous week that I have to find a place to stay quiet for some while.

During the class, surrounded by 60 executives in the eCommerce course of the SJTU EMBA program, I demoed how to blog with this entry: I am at an EMBA Class in SJTU. I showed how easy it is to create a blog, and helped people to understand that you don’t have to enter a file name for what you write…

The topics were around how to make money from blog, and why blogging. I feel I did a not-bad job explaining everything. To be honest, I feel a strong contrast of “old-fashioned” thinking in the class.

EMBA, and MBA programs in Shanghai

In Shanghai, there are three major places to go for MBA classes. The best, of cause, is the CEIBS (where the magic wall stays). The CHINA EUROPE INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS SCHOOL is among the top management school in Asia. It is expensive but if I have any chance, I will definitely choose to study in this school.

The other are SJTU (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) and Fudan MBA programs. As a new program, both school charges high for the program and I have many friends in the program. They typically have their classes taught in Shanghai or Suzhou or sometimes they go to other countries (I take it more as a tour instead of a class). :-D

SJTU and Fudan’s program are new and I hope the best to them. Harvard Business School started about 100 years ago and I can imagine with good strategy (it is one of their most important course), after 100 years, these two programs will be also be perfect.

Why Blogging? How to Make Money

Thanks for Andreas to invite me as a speaker to the class. After the one our session, I felt strong challenge from the participants about what we have just discussed. It was not easy for those CEOs (most of them are very successful) to understand the basics of blogging. Some asked “Can I open a blog?” and then got confused “why I can do it for free?” Being free, the most interesting economic phenomena seems interesting to them. Meanwhile, after they accepted “being free” is possible, some asked: “How can I make money if I blog?” They got even more confused when they were told that nobody is giving money to bloggers. “Then why I blog?”

Some directly challenged the course design that “Why not teach us something like B2B, B2C? Why does it make sense to tell us something that does not generate money, like blogging?”

Andreas’ Class

I don’t know how to tell the participants that Andreas is one of the best professor I have ever met. He jumps out of academic thinking and directly connects students with the latest technology and latest ideas. Not everyone has the chance to be exposed to the most advanced topics.

Andreas’ slide includes lots of great new sites that represents the future of Internet. For example: flickr.com, del.icio.us, technorati.com, wikipedia.org… and gives a strong thread “tag” to pointed out the common things. Later, the afternoon session is called “Architecture of Participation”. It is a great name, I have to say. This umbrella put all these concepts into a unified way to present. Yes. A much better name than “web 2.0″…

The Conflict of Thoughts

However, these are just too new for these EMBA class participants. It is very common that people asked the tough question. I totally understand what the CEOs are talking about. I wasn’t able to really understand why my students (about three years ago) asked “Tell me what Microsoft did when it is still small?” At that time, I was sharing the Microsoft “PM-Tester-Develop” team model with the CEOs of software companies. My answer at that time was: “When Microsoft is small, there were not much processes, but it does not mean that if you don’t implement something what Microsoft has created over so many years, you will become Microsoft.” Now, I understand them better since it was almost impossible to replicate everything into their company.

This time, I felt a strong gap between the two generations of thinking. For example, when bloggers take it for granted that no censorship is the beauty of blogging, majority of the participants in the EMBA program think no censorship of what a blogger write will cause big trouble to the society and is something unbearable. “Hey, does anyone read what you write everyday?” I was asked by one CEO. She was obviously shocked when she was told no one read, edited and censored what I wrote. “It is too dangerous!” She commented. Well. I kept silence.

I intend to think that they are right. The newest things do not always mean the better things. The conflict is just there. I appreciate their patience to be there, to smile at me, and to listen to what I told. This session at least helped me a lot to understand what the older generations of CEO are thinking and helped me to understand maybe 5 years makes a new generation of CEO in this Internet-speed world. I hope I continue to be a fresh CEO after 5 or 10 years.

According to Supervisor’s Notice

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Notice in metro city

This is a typical notice in Shanghai, or in China. The note says:

According to Supervisor’s notice, this W.C. will be removed

I recently notice almost all the posters in Shanghai metro starts from the same sentence: “according to supervisor’s notice”. Following this starting sentence, there are many events, like: “no baggers are allowed”, “the business time will be extended” or the “Dongfang Road station will be closed”…

It is a very interetsing way of expressing something in national-owned large enterprises. All the actions are driven by the supervisors, not the customers. :-)

Kevin Wen

I met Kevin today. Blogging, helped both of us to connect with each other so we seem to be good friend already. Actually, not blogging, the continuous writing, and updating that connects people.

As I told Kevin, the top 3 beneficial blogs in the blogging/it category I read are Keivn‘s, Chedong‘s, and 6e.

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Face of Kevin’s name card

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Back of Kevin’s blogging name card

Autumn

When I enter the class room of Andreas, I read a banner outside the building: 2005 EMBA Autumn Class. This morning, when I took a short walk in my garden, I found many yellow leafs in the garden. It is a strong indicator of Autumn in Shanghai. I am going to plant some tulip in the garden at the end of Nov. So I have some hope for March the next year when the cold winter comes.

Andreas’ class

Recently, when I am drafting strategy, and I found to foresee many years ahead for a business is a weak point for me, or most people at my age. So I spent this Saturday to attend Andreas’ EMBA class. Thanks Andreas to genouerous allowed free admission for me. To my surprise, I was put the spotlight and finally turned out to be one of the speaker for the afternoon session when we talked about “tag”, “participation architecture”. I start to wonder whether I should take some time to attend some EMBA education.

Kevin’s Word

Kevin quoted the CEO of technorati.com:

Focus on one thing;

Do it really well;

and enjoy it!

Well said.

Biggest Kijiji Logo So Far

This is maybe the largest Kijiji logo we painted so far in Kijiji China.

Update November 16, 2005

More information about the pictures.

I took the picture in Anji in Zhejiang province. It was an outing with Kijiji team. We brought projector and projected the slide to the mountains or village houses. The last picture was the Chinese version of the Kijiji logo on the mountain. It is HUGE. Although on the picture, it is not as bright or big as it really seemed to be.

Kijiji links

Kijiji China

Kijiji Canada

Kijiji Spain

Kijiji Germany

Kijiji England

Kijiji France

Kijiji Australia

Kijiji Switzerland

Kijiji Poland

Kijiji Turkey

Kijiji Italy

Kijiji Taiwan

Kijiji Japan

Kijiji New Zealands

Kijiji Australia

Kijiji South Africa

Kijiji Ireland

Kijiji Wales

Kijiji Scotland

End of update

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Kijiji Logo on roof

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Kijiji logo on wall

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Kijiji from people

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Logo on mountains

KFC Dropped Potato Wedge in Shanghai

Wendy reported that from today, KFC removed Potato Wedge and Pepsi Coke from all the suites. Instead, they provide vegetable salad and orange juice.

It seems it is a national wide change in KFC.

I remember this Monday when I had lunch there before the Beijing trip, Potato Wedge was still included.

There is always big conflict between a product in U.S. and in China. I think KFC is making a wise change to adjust their product to China marketing. Kudos.

Back from Ji’An Trip

Just back from camping in the mountains of Ji’An in Zhejiang Province with Kijiji team, media and community members. Here are some pictures I took during the trip. See what happened on the date of 2005-10-23. Obviously, we only have this day once in our entire life.

Thanks for Flickr (of which I am a pro users). It seems I can use only very few percentage of the bandwidth limit they set for me – 2G.

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P.S. I realized I am always in too rush time to publish blogs these days. Most of the blogs are updated after midnight, and I start to think whether I should spend more time on each entry while write less, so always keep the blog interesting for both my readers, and (I think more importantly), to myself.

Fudan, Tongji and SJTU

Recently visited the three universities in one month: Fudan, Tongji and Shanghai Jiaotong University. Received three small gifts from each university and I will post photos later.

Now on the road to Anji in Zhejiang Province. Tomorrow will camp on the mountain. Must be interesting.

Update Gifts from three universities November 15, 2005

Gift from Fudan University

From SJTU

From Tongji

Thanks for giving me the honor.

Happy Birthday To Me

Happy birthday to me. It is my 28th birthday. Mean time, happy birthday to my friends who enjoy the birthday these two days: Dengjia (tomorrow), Joanna (yesterday), and burcu from Turkey…

Night.

At McDonald of Hongqiao Airport. Wendy is flying back from Beijing tonight, but the flight was delayed till 21:55. No surprise at all. The flights are always like this. It is the right time to sit down to look back to what happened in my life in the last year.

Thanks for the wonderful greetings from my friends around me. I love the photo album yiyi and the team created so much, as well as the flowers and the cards. Henry and Run even changed their display name to “Happy Birthday to Jian Shuo”. Thank you very much. Mr. Xu, the life ensurance broker also dropped a SMS message to me. He has kept sending us flowers, SMS, greeting cards on all our birthdays, wedding anniversaries and other important days of Wendy and me. I am very moved by his professionalism and care. Thanks everyone. I’d love to thank RC as a good friend and as a mentor. What I have learnt in the last two days is a great gift for my birthday – I love to grow up as fast as I can. My expectation is my experience grows faster than my age…

Here is a list of events that happened from my last birthday in 2004.

October 2005

September 2005

August 2005

July 2005

June 2005

May 2005

April 2005

March 2005

February 2005

January 2005

December 2004

November 2004

October 2004

There are much more in the previous two years after my birthday in 2003 and 2002

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Birthday cake this year

Call a Taxi on the Phone? In English?

My friend dropped an email and complain about waiting for half an hour or even one hour for taxi everyday – seems he is living in a very “decent” place that even taxi won’t go there to break the peace of the area. He asked if there is any telephone number he could call to book a taxi. He does not speak Chinese.

Well. There are many numbers to call in Shanghai for taxi services, but not many offers English service, so far as I know.

My Preferred Call Center – Qiang Sheng Taxi

After the previous year, I have formed the habit to dial +86-21-62580000 for taxi services. There are many other lines, like 96822 from Da Zhong taxi, but the chances to get through to Qiang Sheng call center is much higher (Dazhong’s taxi is much better though).

I checked with the center. They don’t have special English service line, but there are some agents who are able to answer English phone calls. So just call it and say whatever language is not Chinese. If an operator cannot understand you, chances are, he/she switch it to a person capable of English.

Lunar Calendar is Moon Calendar

Lookup and see the moon tonight – it is full moon, and I know it is the 15th day of the 9th month in lunar calendar. The beauty of Chinese lunar calendar is, it always exactly meets the face of the moon.

Closed Trackback

I removed the trackback script from the system which means there is no way to post track back to this site. I also removed the trackback information from the page.

The Death of Trackback on My Site

Three years, trackback brought a lot of fun to me, when not many people blog and not many people know about blog. That was really exciting expertiment.

Recently, many people know blogging, especially many “smart” spammers. They turn to use Trackback in a more efficient way than normal bloggers. They send thousands of trackbacks to my site.

After putting about 3400 different patterns and IP addresses into my MT-Blacklist, there are just increasing number of spammers join the Trackback Spam Club. I bet it will be a problem in Chinese blog sphere some time, but so far, so good.

In the last year, I deleted about 10 thousands trackback spams, and my blacklist is blocking several about 200 trackback pings everyday.

The Death of Innovation?

I regret to shutdown my trackback, and I believe many people will do the same after spammers get more and more smart. I hope I can reopen the system after I upgrade to MovableType 3.0 or higher, and get protected by better spam prevention tools. But for now, sorry.

Faithful for the Truth Instead of Dream

Trackback is a good idea, but periodically, before better anti-spam tools/standard is aviable, I am more concerned with the success of the content and reader experience, instead of insisting on a technology.

Just as DDOS attack educated that the Internet is built on a weak infrustructure, trackback proposes very high risk when someone what a DDOS to a site – how about try to enter 10G of data into the disk of a blogging system – if the system has 10G or more to fill?

I Hope I can Turn it On Some Time

Just like Push technology Channel failed in IE 4, RSS changed to a new way to do the same thing after several years, I hope we have better ways to leverage the idea of trackback after 3 years. I hope I can turn trackback again in Oct of the year 2008.

Four Must-See Roads in Shanghai

Johnny asked about four must-see roads in Shanghai. My answer is:

  • Nanjing Road – for the commercial scene of Shanghai.
  • Shi Ji Road (Centuary Road) – for the development of the Pudong area.
  • Henshan Road – to know the beauty of residential areas,
  • Small roads in Yu Yuan – to discover the history of Shanghai

Enjoy your Shanghai trip on Shanghai street!

Chongming Hotel

This question is rare, since not many people go to Chongming.

Dear Sir,

I visit your personal web site and blog site, because I trying to find

somes information about Chongming Island.

In fact I need to find a hotel on Chongming, where I will stay during 2

weeks for works, but I can not find any hotel information on the web.

Could you please help me and tell me if it is more easy to stay in Shanghai

and go to Chongming every day.

There are some hotels on the Chongming Island, but I don’t think they have websites yet. The only thing I can confirm is, it is impossible to going to Chongming back and forth on daily basis. It takes about 1 or 2 hour for the ferry. The hotel on the Shanghai side is not much better than the Chongming side unless you go to the downtown, which takes another 1 hour. Hope my Chongming Trip report helps to understand the distance.

Two Side of the World – Where Should I Stay?

How interesting that on one hand, so many people are looking for services and goods and on the other hand, many services and merchants are spending too much but still cannot find customers.

I often receive emails to help on recommend good tour guide, hotel to stay, or places to buy stuff. Many times, I have to reply that I don’t have much more information than the information already on the Internet, or on my blog. :-)

I believe the difference is, there is not a strong TRUST between two side. Even though thousands of ads are running every day to tell you what is the best hotel, people (you and me) will still ask the question to our friends: What do you recommend to stay? We do NOT trust advertisement as much as friends. If people cannot find some friends who know the area – if no one from around has visited the place, they turn to someone they think a little bit more trustworthy, say, Jian Shuo in Shanghai for Shanghai information.

So to run a successful advertisement business, the key opporunity is, to build trust between the two sides…

Hit by Caribe.sis Virus via Bluetooth

So exciting. One week after I switched to Symbian phone Nokia 6670, I was hit by a virus distributed via bluetooth.

Yesterady, when I had coffee at Starbucks, my phone ringed and displayed “die*_*lucky is sending you a file via bluetooth”. I accepted, and it promoted me to install an application. I realized something wrong happened. So I interrupted the installation and turn to Google for the name of the application:

Caribe.sis

Cabir replicates over bluetooth connections and arrives to phone messaging inbox as caribe.sis file what contains the worm. When user clicks the caribe.sis and chooses to install the Caribe.sis file the worm activates and starts looking for new devices to infect over bluetooth.

So Interneting Physical Replicated Virus

This is very intersting – I know someone around me – within 10 meters – carried a phone that was infected by the virus. How fun…

Friends Nearby?

I got very excited. Not the virus, but the fact that someone very similiar with me are within 10 meters away from me:

  • We use the same Symbian Nokia Series 6 phone.
  • We all enabled Bluetooth
  • We are in the same city, same district, and in the same Starbucks Cofee. There are just less than 50 people there.

If I were not in a business conversation, I would be really interested to stand up and look for the virus spreader… I thought of the application of Jambo.net by Jim and Charles. They install the application on laptop and detect other people with Jambo nearby via Wifi. It is the concept of Internet technology in a very specific area.

P.S. Shang Jin sent me this. Pure geek happiness again.

Where to Buy Digital Cameras and Phones

Aliza asked:

Hi, I am looking to buy a digital camera in Shanghai, can you please

recommend a reputable store? I will be here for 2 more days.

In Shanghai, there are two major places where you can buy low price 3C product – digital cameras, phones, computers, MP3…

Metro City

Metro city is the traditional gathering place to buy these products. Here is the location:

The nearby Pacific Digital Plaza is also a good place to go.

Transportation: Metro Line #1 Xujiahui Station.

Cyber Digital Plaza

Transportation: Metro #1 Huang Pi Road Station

Cautious

They offer the best price, but it is too crowded inside. Be aware of pocket pickers. Many of the goods there are pirated (imported without tax), so there is no warrantee. Please be aware of the risks before going there.

Super Girl Concert in Shanghai

Yesterday is next to the last day of the long vacation. Around 4:00 clock, Wendy suddenly brought up the idea to go to the Super Girl Shanghai Concert. Well. It sounded not bad. Although I am not a big fan of super girl – the competition, the TV show and the crazy SMS voting campaign, but I don’t think I am old enough to say: “Let those kids go there and play…”. The Super Girl Concert is a big event in Shanghai – at least in certain rage of age of people. How about just go there and experience the real-time effects of the end of this crazy show?

The Stadium

Shanghai Stadium is the largest gathering place in this city. The 80 thousands capacity is often used for super large event. It is the place for this Super Girl Concert. According to news, many fans arrived in Shanghai from surrounding areas.

The Ticket

We didn’t buy ticket in advance. We have been experienced enough that for these event, there must be enough escrowers hanging around. They offer last minute tickets that is typically cheaper. The risk is, sometimes when the tickets are too hot, you can hardly get a ticket. I think we can take the risk. Finally, we bought the ticket at the original price – 100 RMB (12 USD). It is a little bit closer to the stage than the 50 RMB tickets, but later, we found out the different is so minimal that we can ignore. Many people are selling tickets originally marked 580 RMB at less than 100 RMB. Instinct tells me that they are selling fake tickets. Before the show started, everyone is running, screaming – just like a war.

The photos

Here are some photos from the event.

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© Jian Shuo Wang. Many colorful lights waving in the air

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© Jian Shuo Wang. The main stage

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© Jian Shuo Wang. The stadium is completely full

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© Jian Shuo Wang. The stage is far away – I bought 100 RMB (12.5 USD) ticket. There is not too much difference whether I am 100 meters closer or further – it is just too far to see anyone on the stage. The telescape helped a lot

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© Jian Shuo Wang. The shining sticks are full of the stadium

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© Jian Shuo Wang. Enough policyman gathered to ensure safety

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© Jian Shuo Wang. Many cars outside the stadium

After the show

As expected, transportation is a big problem for any show like this. When 80 thousand people coming out of a stadium at the same time, there is no way to catch any taxi, any bus. The metro was closed due to the safety consideration – which is critical. We walked about 1 KM to the Xujiahui area, waited in the Metro city for a while and then joined the long line at taxis waiting area…

MU2043 from Luoyang to Shanghai

I took the Luoyang to Shanghai flight MU2043 and safely arrived in Shanghai.

Luoyang is a small city. Around 12:30, I got on board a green CITROEN taxi – Citroen taxis are among the better class of taxis in Luoyang.

Luoyang airport is near the central of the city – about 10 km away. 10KM is a long distance in Luoyang. The road to the airport is very good, and more importantly, no too much traffic.

I remember when I was in primary school, we visited the airport – in my impression, it was quite big, but now, it seems just like a normal building without many people.

The Luoyang government spent much effort and money to keep the airport alive – for a city with just more than 1 million population, it can hardly support the operation of an airport. The Zhengzhou airport is just 1 hour of express way east of the airport, and the tickets are much cheaper than Luoyang… That is the situation 80% of the airports in China have to face.