Tired

It has been two intensive days. I have arranged 11 meetings for myself, and Wang Chen in Beijing and meeting with 20+ people, and a presentation with about 100 people.

Got back to hotel now. Going to sleep now.

BTW, I enjoyed big hotels, and now I more and more enjoy smaller hotels like the Orange Hotel in Zhongguancun area. In US, I started to hate those big hotels with hundreds of hotel rooms. Maybe just 20 rooms or fewer are better for me. I am at second floor of the hotel. Think about the elevator, 20+ floor hotel room, and overseeing the whole city – I hate that now.

Good night, Beijing.

I am in Beijing

I predicted that 2011 will be a year with a lot of Startups coming out – the another Spring of Internet in China. I still believe in so. I am in Beijing these days, and I have/will visit many startup companies, like Douban, Qunar, Baihe, Sina, Sohu, Tencent, Google, Innovation-works, and many other media/companies during the three day trip. The Beijing’s weather is not very cold, although it is technically speaking colder than Shanghai, but the atmosphere of the Internet world is still has hot as summer – well, compared to the real peak of Internet bubble, it can be called as late spring. The recent new models like LBS, Mobile Internet, Groupon-clone, and twitter-clone have been enough to fill entrepreneurs and copiers into. One thing that is so unique in Beijing is, these companies are so close with each other in the Zhongguancun area. These big/small companies are lined up side by side with each other within walking distance. That is a unique competitive advantage for this world – just like Silicon valley to the rest of the world. If you ask me to pick only one place that is closest to silicon valley in China, that has to be the Zhongguancun area in Beijing.

Although the agenda is fully filled, ping me via twitter, email, or mobile if you want a meetup.

Unicom iPhone Cuts My Friend Connections

A very high portion of my friends cannot be connected via the number stored in my mobile phone. They changed their mobile phone number, just to use the Unicom iPhone. They consistently share their new mobile phone with 186 at the beginning of the numbers with me. For more, I simply got "The number you dialed has been out of service" message when I try to reach people.

Will it be significant that a new communication tool, or even just a new client device like iPhone dramatically shift the social interaction? Think about fax number. The impact of the iPhone 4 wave for me in China is, it cuts my friend connections effectively.

Expo Destruction Started

Today on the ramp bridge of Lupu Bridge, I saw some towing Expo Buses were towed by towing truck. These Expo Buses use electricity and need to charge at bus stations from time to time in the expo site. That is the reason they can only be reliably moved  by Bowing truck out the site.

The once splendid Expo site is still splendid, but without any visitors in it. A pavilion on the Puxi side is surrounded by green construction nets. It seems the destruction is going to start soon. Bye Bye, Expo!

Baixing Recruiting Event in SJTU

SJTU = Shanghai Jiaotong University.

Baixing.com will hold a recruiting event in Shanghai Jiaotong University tomorrow night at 6:30 PM at Tiesheng Building (铁生馆).

I am very excited to get back to Jiaotong University, where I studied between 1995 to 1999.

If any of you knows anyone in Jiaotong University or other nearby university who are interested in positions in Baixing (http://jobs.baixing.com), please direct them to the event tomorrow. I will be speaking there, and am more than willing to chat with people there.

Taxi as Bottleneck of Hangzhou

The Shanghai to Hangzhou high-speed train just takes 45 minutes to get to Hangzhou, but today, we took another 45 minutes waiting in the long line for a taxi desperately while there are basically no taxi coming.

On the way back, it is also horrible. At round 4:00 PM, there are empty taxi everywhere on the street but none of them would take passengers, because it is the time for them to get back (all of them) to taxi company, and handle over the car to the driver at another work shift. There is basically no way to get to the train station to catch up that really fast train.

Taxi has been a keep bottleneck to my experience in Hangzhou now.

10 Years Later

So many things dramatically changes over 10 years, but it happens so gradually that we didn’t pay any attention to it when it happens. Here are some examples.

  • The IT support in my office was gray haired. When I just started my career, IT support is a profession of young people. Now, when the outsourced IT person appeared in my office, I realized that he is also in his 30-40s. That changed.
  • Credit card processing is so quick. Now, I don’t bother to use cash since most of the time, the credit card processing is as quick as the same time as swiping card – it is supposed to work that way, but when I just started to use credit card, it easily takes few minutes, waiting for the printing machine to start printing. Sometimes, I have to make some phone calls to the bank and let the bank call center person to teach the cashier how to swipe the card.
  • The business meal in the Xujiahui area gradually raised to a level higher than Hong Kong, and most places in U.S. The set dish has reached to 58 RMB (8-9 USD) or higher. The 10 RMB box meal completely disappeared from this area.
  • The CPI has raised to a level that people in Shenzhen started to buy home supplies in Hong Kong, and more people discuss about pork price these days than 10 years ago.

10 Years. Many things changed.

I am Second Employee of Adventure Works

Interesting enough, I got an email reads

Hi Jian Shuo,
It is very cool to execute the following statement in SQL Server 2000 if you have the sample database Adventure Works 2000 installed:
SELECT *
FROM Employee
WHERE (EmployeeID = 2);
The result would be:
       2       Jian Shuo       2       1       Wang            0       509647174       Engineering Manager     1997-12-121964-12-13    adventure-works\Jian    Jian@adventure-works.com        1       MQiang Wang     249-433-7659    1       M       1       2       43.2692 2       21      0       1       2003-1-15 19:26:14      {69C8C27C-87DF-45B4-9A46-AB603268AB1B}
It is noticed that the first name is stored as "Jian Shuo" with capitalized ‘S’ and a space between "Jian" and "Shuo", which is your preferred written form in your article before. Also, it is different than other Chinese-liked first names such as "Jinghao"(EmployeeID = 77) and "Jinghao"(EmployeeID = 241), making it the only Chinese name with a first name separated into 2 words in the database.
I’m not sure whether this imaginary employee is based on your figure so I’m writing to get your confirmation.
BR

That reminded me that I was listed as Employee ID #2 of the famous fiction Adventure Works in the sample database of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and all versions after that. In that sample database, I appeared as Engineering Manager with few other people reporting to me, and I reported to Employee #1,  Terri Duffy. To find out more, you can just do a query in any Microsoft SQL Server after 2000.

How come? The person was me. I remember I signed a lengthy legal form to release my name for use in future Microsoft product in sample database. I am sure that most of the names listed in the sample databases are actual Microsoft employees at that time.

So, besides the things I have done, I am also a fiction employee of the fiction famous company that lives only in the database of millions of copies of a piece of software around the world.

To answer the question why my name is entered as "Jian Shuo Wang", instead of "Jianshuo Wang", here are some articles I wrote about it.

I briefly explained why I didn’t have English name (Jason Wang seems to be closest choice), and why I started to us Wang Jian Shuo since 2008 instead of Jian Shuo Wang. For the first name, I used Jianshuo (connected to form a single word) most of the time in early days of Internet, and then started to spell it the current way (with a space in between, and capitalize the S), because I feel it is the way to reflect my Chinese identity better. There are three characters in my Chinese name, so should the English counterpart.

Yifan Love to Land Aircrafts

Yifan enjoys the game FlightControl very much. When there is a chance, he will grab the iPad and play with it, and my role is to make sure he hand it back to me within few minutes, so he is not too obsessed to computer games.

Look at how happy he is when he got the iPad!

image

Facebook Effect – the Book

I didn’t remember that I bought the Facebook Effect book in Singapore, and I ordered it again from Amazon. Today, I found out the book, and started to read it – very interesting one. There are some similar scene with the Social Network movie, but in a much deeper way.

Recommending people who are interested in technology and Internet to watch the movie, and read the book.

Chinese Blogger Conference Changed Location

To hold a conference in China is not easy. Not surprisingly, although the venue was only announced 4 days before the actual event, the venue was canceled due to "well known" reasons. The organizers are still busy working to find another venue to make it possible for blogger flying, or taking train from across the country (some from worldwide) to gather the day after tomorrow. Exactly like the Hangzhou conference, the venue needs to be changed few times before the actual event happens. Good luck!

A technical and innovation conference was perceived in many years as a trouble maker conference, for so many years.

Chinese Blogger Conference Changed Location

To hold a conference in China is not easy. Not surprisingly, although the venue was only announced 4 days before the actual event, the venue was canceled due to "well known" reasons. The organizers are still busy working to find another venue to make it possible for blogger flying, or taking train from across the country (some from worldwide) to gather the day after tomorrow. Exactly like the Hangzhou conference, the venue needs to be changed few times before the actual event happens. Good luck!

Attending China Blogger Conference 2010

I am going to attend the China Blogger Conference 2010. This year, the conference will be held downstairs of my office – at 55 Guangyuan West Road, Haoran Hi-tech Building, Shanghai, China.

image

This is the sixth conference. I attended the first one in Shanghai and the second one in Hangzhou. I missed the Beijing one, didn’t go to Guangzhou conference, and completely ignored the Lianzhou one. Since this year’s conference is in Shanghai, I am happy to return to the conference.

Are you going there? See you at the conference.

Ping me at twitter @jianshuo, or send me SMS. My mobile is on the homepage of this blog.

People Matters

People are always the core of any company. Enough focus on its people is the essential to the success.

Keep the talent density high enough is to the key.

Be sensitive to the environment and act quick enough.

Always find the right people to do the right thing.

Mondays

A nice Monday.

The post expo days are much better than the half year – at least for the Pudong section.

Young people always brings energy to the team.

The Asia Games obviously didn’t draw too much attention from the people around me.

The Chinese Blogger Conference was just announced today – the conference will be held on this Saturday, breaking the record of the most rushing conference revere and they didn’t announce venue yet. The only thing people outside Shanghai knows is, it will be held in Shanghai so buy the ticket now. The rushing style of the conference is so interesting.

I took some photos using iPhone. It was good, but I didn’t have time to upload yet.

So much for today.

PS. I posted this article using iPad. Not too bad for typing.

Busy Days for Blogging

I skipped blogging in the last few days, rare in the 8 years of history. Here are some outlines of what I did.

  • Went to Hangzhou via the highspeed train for a  day – 45 minutes, and the experience was great – better than Maglev.
  • Welcome to the new hires on Baixing. There are many recruiting events going on and I continue to feel honored to work with the talented young guy got on board.
  • Played tennis and basketball at nights and Sundays. It is good to get back to sports.
  • Yifan is doing well. Wendy went to school during the weekends in the last few weeks, so I took the role to take care of Yifan – we hung out in KFC for three hours this morning.
  • Watched movie "The Social Network" – first on pplive.com, and then downloaded from verycd.com. Good movie, although it is said to be far from reality.
  • Conducted some interviews and the article to be published was pushed back to the next week because of the Asia Games opening the last Friday.
  • I enjoyed the ceremony of Guangzhou Asia Games – good one without being too exaggerate on money spending.

Anything else I left?

I will be back to blogging gradually.

Expo is Over! Finally!

I was not able to update this blog for quite some time. It has been busy days…

Expo is over. We visited the site on October 30 for the last time. Wendy’s comment: “I started to regret that we hadn’t come more often”. She loves the Italian Pavilion in particular.

What the expo left for the people in this country? I would say: It is the biggest event to educate people to line up. The long lines had became the symbolic sign for this expo. People waited for up to 12 hours to get to a pavilion.

Think about it. How does lining-up for 70 million people impact the line-up habit for this country?