In Italy, I got 3G network for one month, unlimited data and 5 EURO calling at 12 EURO (10 EURO in Venize). In the bay area, I am going to get T-Mobile 1.5G monthly plan at $25. It seems the world bandwidth cost is getting down, except China, right now.
I am at T2 of Shanghai Pudong Airport, and ready to get on board UA858 to San Francisco. I will be in the bay area from July 14 to July 19, 2012. Besides some pre-arranged meetings, I’d like to visit more startups during this trip. I visited Google, Facebook, eBay for too many times, and even Apple, and Yahoo!. This time, I am looking forward to meeting more friends from startups – companies with 5 to 20 people and understand the subtle difference between a pure startup and a mid-sized company, and how to push the company psychological age down.
Interestingly, I found I hand around San Francisco area more than bay area this time.
It has been a while. I was on road – Cannes, Nice, France, and varies cities in Italy. Here is a brief schedule of what happened in the last 10 days. Just FYI if you plan the same trip. I will share more photos later.
6/20 Fly from Shanghai to Dubai to Nice, France
Stay in MMV Resort
Registration of Cannes International Creative Festival
Have coffee with the delegation
Attend the Cannes Lion Award ceremony
Have dinner at restaurant near the Dame
6/21 Google Lecture on Social and Mobile
Tour in SandBox
Lunch at Geston restaurant near the bay
Tour in the afternoon in Cannes
Long dinner at basement of a small restaurant in the old town.
I am about the leave for Cannes, France. This is the most unprepared trip I had ever had. I was in full day meeting for two days, and till now, I don’t know exactly where the place is, how to get there, which airline of flight, and what we are going to do there. Wendy is working to put everything together, which I am completely not aware of.
Is it a good thing? If it is, by what means? Not? By what means?
There are time that a trip to the local zoo can make me excited for days. Then the excitement was replaced by a city trip, or international trip. I had never been to France, and the Cannes Creative Festival is new to me – what it is about? No idea. When running on the fast track of any thing, you would like to keep the direction, and I will be much more delighted to be able to get back to office than getting onto a trip to Paris, Nice, Cannes, Barcelona, Madrid, and Rome. I just realized how hard people change their daily life, unless something force them.
I visited the Microsoft Zizhu campus, and met with many old friends – I didn’t expect to see about 10 persons who joined Microsoft around my joining, and they are still there after more than 10 years.
I was a little bit sad though to see the current Microsoft is more like the Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus, than the office in my memory. The building quality is not good enough, and that surely does not justify the long distance from the downtown.
It is so rare – there are blue sky and clear air. I took this photo out of the window of our 18th floor office in Xujiahui.
Whenever I see city scene like this in Shanghai, I am thinking about climbing to the top of a skyscraper – either World Financial Center, or JW Marriott with my sketch book and draw something of this city.
I wrote about the Chinese provinces I visited. It is the time to do a summary about the world as I travelled – the foreign countries I set my foot on. The life is a long journey, and many people believe it is endless, and they always have a chance to visit every country of the world. Not likely to happen. If that is something I really get interested, set a plan for it.
Again, as the rule of the last time, transition without a night stay does not count. That promptly remove Korea and Japan from the list.
A very small list compare to many other people at my age. Need to continue to find opportunities to get there and interact with people, to build more knowledge about the world, and continue to shape my thinking.
Happy Birthday to my little Yifan. He is 5 years old today!
We first went to the Century Park, Yifan’s favorite.
Then had dinner at Kerry Center.
Birthday Party
At home, we had the birthday cake, and Yifan invited his best friend Xuanxuan to join us.
This was the first family day we organized. More than 10 kids visited our office, and had a wonderful party together. Below are photos taken by @摄影人-红姐. Kids are obviously happy to see both other kids and their parents on afternoons of working days.
Xiaoliang wrote that majority of people in Israel visited 12 countries before age of 35. Let me count how many Chinese provinces I visited.
Provinces I have never visited are:
P.S. Passing by in a train or plane or bus means I nerver visited.
P.S 2. Transit airplane or visit without a night stay does not count for “visited”. How about you?
This photo marks the end of a project, and it seems everyone is happy about it. In case you are curious, I was standing on top of a table when taking this photo.
I am quite amused by Alexis Madrigal’s story How Google Can Beat Facebook Without Google Plus. This is one of the best article talking about the deep reasons why a product succeed or fail.
California City
He mentioned California City, CA. Although it is the largest city by land in CA, it only has 15K residents – 1/10 of the number in residential area I am living. The California city has all the infrastructure a great city needs to have, but, it is just an empty city. People gather because of other people, not the infrastructure.
Websites face the same problem. Most websites have in place before the first 100 visitors come to the site, but the problem is, the only problem is, people!
But by most accounts and third-party research, the service is growing its number of users but not their engagement. People are “on” Google Plus, but they are not really ON Google Plus. The infrastructure is there. The street signs are there. People own plots of land. But there’s nobody actually visiting town. To make it obvious: Google Plus is the California City to Facebook’s Los Angeles.
Basically, people are saying, Google+ is a ghost town.
Considering the same thing on other websites, including my own, the core of the sites are people. Internet connects people. When the real people are there, the infrastructure supports, not the other way.
Time on site
Time on site is an important indicator of how people use the product. Google+ has 3 minutes per month. Facebook has 405, Pinterest has 89, and Trumblr is 89 too. (src)
John Herman even mentioned that Google+ “looks like a cubicle farm and smells like a hospital.” How can a product smells like a hospital?
Why John Herman describe it as a hospital? Because of the clean and clear interface? The technical thinking behind it?
A website is built for people to “USE”! Use means spend time on it. Use means getting back frequently, not by accident, not by clicking links that they randomly run into.
Seamless is a Bad Word
When I talked with my friend in Google about Google+, I heard the word Seamlessly often.
You search, and your search queries get to G+ seamlessly. You use Picasa, and your photos integrate into G+ seamlessly. You do x, and you do y, and all these things are synced into G+ seamlessly.
Seamlessly means unconsciously. Seamlessly means they are not intentionally using the site. That explains why classifieds search does not work, and many aggregation sites does not work, because people don’t have the intention to have their content shown on the page. They have no idea about what they share when they “unconsciously” share it.
A community is not about content aggregation. It is about consciously participation. If people see what others are saying, and post intentionally, that is the core of the community.
Yifan grows up, and he is not afraid of hair cut. He is cooperative tonight when I brought him for haircut. He acted as grown-ups. Look at the photos:
It is just one week away from Yifan’s 5 year birthday. His mom said, I lost another job – to hold Yifan to have him haircut. I said: we are going to lose more and more functions that Yifan really needs you in the days to come.
We had Italian dinner at Coolzey Pizza at Huashan Road. The benefit of living in Shanghai, despite of high living cost, is access to all kinds of food, if you want to explorer. 
We are away from the downtown Shanghai for too long, and since Wendy is driving, I can take some photos of the skyscrapers.
P.S. In the afternoon, Yifan met with his other classmates, and they played football for long enough – to be hungry.
We basically didn’t send Yifan to any pre-school education other than his kindergarten, to give him enough time to explorer what he loves at home. He showed great interest in drawing, go, singing, and making stuff using paper and Lego. So we started to bring him to drawing class and see if he loves it.
After completed for few years, the Chengshan Road surface is under construction. The big machine had get rid of asphalt of the surface, and waiting for the new surface to be laid out. So, currently, the road surface looks like this:
It will be few days like this, and it caused big problem with the traffic. It reminded me of the most advanced asphalt paving system I have ever seen. It combined the two steps into one, and the road is instantly new with the asphalt. Shanghai should learn from Weihai.
Yifan’s best friend at kindergarten is Xuanxuan, our neighbor. He had Xuanxuan visited us tonight. The two kids spent great time together drawing trains, and building trains using Lego. Two kids can talk and can share happiness, and can understand things that only makes sense in their world. China really need to think about changing its one child policy. I don’t know how this half century recorded in history.
Their drawing of the Shanghai Metro is not bad.
Many restaurants in Shanghai charge a bottle-opening fee for any wine brought by customers themselves. The typical amount is 50 RMB per bottle. I didn’t know the reason of this pricing and thought it was too expensive.
Recently, when I compare the purchase price and the retail price of the wine, I started to form a theory that they charge for 50 RMB, because that is the typical margin for them to sell a bottle of wine there. For example, a bottle of wine priced at 100 RMB/bottle are likely to have about 50 RMB as purchase price. Does it make sense?
