Attended FT Charity Dinner

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I had the honor to be invited to the FT Charity Gala Dinner named the Art of Living at Shanghai Science and Technology Museum. It gives me the feeling that Shanghai is definitely under the spot light of the world these days. The CEOs of the top luxury brand like Broini, Gucci, Richmon,、Bulgari,Valentino, Prada gathered in Shanghai to hold the meeting. It was something like the Oscar in U.S, and issued some awards to the talented new comer.

It was quite an amazing event for me. I was in IT industry for too long time and had almost no idea about fashion. The event I attended are the gathering of young people. The dress code was always T-Shirt. :-) Although people call the attendants “white collar”, I believe the better title should be “round collar”. :-)

The dress code for this event was, to my surprise, “black tie”. I was familiar with dress code like casual, business casual, business formal… It is the first event I have ever attended with dress code “black tie”. It was rare for me. I dressed up with black suites with a tie – it was the most fomal suite I had, but still found I am among the minority. Most gentleman wear “black bow tie”, and ladies wear evening dress. I was a little bit embarrased, but I comfort myself that “I have wear formal enough for an IT guy. At least I didn’t apear with T-Shirt.”

I know most of them are super famous in the luxury world, but the only person I know were Jin Yuxi 靳羽西, the “most famous woman in China” by People magazine. Her sharp red dress was wonderful. I also enjoyed the performance of the 12 Girl Band (女子十二乐坊). The interesting detail was, there are 13 girls in red on the T-Stage. It was interesting.

Thanks for Judi to invite me to the event. It was eye opening for me. Meanwhile, I feel Shanghai, as a city, is more close to the spot light of the world, and is much closer to the world. At least, it has become a choice for desitination of many world-class event, just like London, New York and Paris. Although there may be many years for Shanghait to catch up in many areas, especially in art, and people area, it is becoming better and better.

Language Exchange Partners Wanted

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I came to the Shanghai University of Science and Technology yesterday and talked to hundreds of students. I confirmed that English is very important, although the English examination is not. I encourage every students to find some foreign friends in Shanghai – to learn more about the world, to improve oral English and to help foreigners in this city feel at home. I am more than happy to do it. I asked the students to post their request on my classified site Kijiji and I will help them to post their information here. Here are two

Felix

Felix majored in Chinese literature and now is a graduate student. He wishes to make friends with foreign friends for language exchange. He can teach chinese, and provide other help for friends and want to improve oral English. His contact is:

Mobile: 13524591277

email：felixding@21cn.com

His Chinese last name is Ding. So you can call him Felix.

This information was originally posted on Language Exchange area of Kijiji

More will Come

Just as I said, a classified platform is not that useful if there is no service helping people to really get connected. I am willing to provide this service. No matter how big the business becomes, I am personally committed to do that.

For English speaking persons, you can post here. By posting, you grant me the permission to translate it into Chinese and post on Kijiji for you.

If you speak Chinese, you can post to Language Exchange Category on Kijiji. Please add four characters 口语醒目 at the end of your ads, so I know you grant me the permission to move it to this page.

Work Life Balance

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Thanks for everyone’s discussion on my work and life balance. ILH asked:

Is it worth it if you are starting to neglect your personal heath and sacrifice your family life in order to have a full time job, maintain a couple of Weblog, and have a lots of social activities? Posted by: ILH on May 14, 2005 02:19 AM

Well. It is NOT worth to have a full time job to sacrifice my family life and health. In Stephen R. Covey’s First Things First put this sentence as the headline of the first chapter:“How many people on their deathbed wish they’d spendt more time at the office.”

I totally agree. What I am doing is really integrate my dream, my life and my job together. I have my commitment to every friend around me, my family, my company and my life. I believe I can balance for most time. This Beijing trip is an exception, that I believe what I sacrified well paid for what I got. Thanks for everyone’s care.

Share a picture of Jin Mao Tower in Pudong with everyone:

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Photography by Jian Shuo Wang

Hire a Taxi? Avoid Rainy Friday

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I waited one hour to get a taxi after I arrived in Hong Qiao Airport around 6:00 PM today. Wendy was waiting for me at Metro tower and waited for me to “help” her out because it was almost impossible to hire a taxi there. Whenever the rain meets Friday in Shanghai, quit the idea of hiring a taxi at rush hour. It is almost impossible. Check the long line of people waiting for taxi at an airport. Some first time visitor coming to Shanghai to say: “Hey, people in Shanghai are so patient. How can they bear waiting for taxi for hours eveyrday?”

Seeking for Shanghai Questions

I am back from Beijing. Recently, I feel not as good as I was in fullfilling the mission of this website – to help foreigners, expats, and people outside China to learn more about Shanghai, plan their trip better and to survive in this city better.

As everyone knows, my focus shifted in the recent months, especially after I join eBay. Last three days was wonderful, except that I skipped sleep for the first day (actually I slept two hours), and skipped breakfast and lunch for the second day. But it worth it.

I need your help to send me more questions about Shanghai. Let me help to answer so to help more people.

I Paid for Flickr Pro

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At the first try of Flickr, I know I will pay for this service. It is only a matter of time. Today, when I wanted to upload, the bandwidth I have used reached 99% and I cannot upload. I am not frustrated at all, since my credit card is ready within my reach. I paid 24.95 USD for the Flickr Pro immediately. It works great. Now I have 2G disk space (or bandwidth) and permement archive (for one year).

Before I paid, I noticed there are 2 new mails. I was quick enough to complete the payment and thought I can check the mail later. It prooved I was completely wrong.

In one mail, my reader snack offered a free flickr account for me: “I have a Pro account, and they gave me 2 additional Pro accounts to give away for free. I have one left – would you like it?”. I would definitely say “I like it”, if I didn’t pay. :-) I would like to thank Snack for the kindness so much. Flickr account is a perfect gift to share, I agree.

Traveling in Beijing

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I stay in Shangri-la Hotel in Beijing this time at the west of Beijing. To stay in a hotel is of cause not to comparable with staying near the real Shangri-la in Lijiang during the trip, but the worst thing is, I only had 2 hours in the hotel last night.

Beijing is the heart of IT industry, and the media industry in China. People ask me about Where to Start an IT Company? in 2004, my suggestion is Beijing. If the confidential level is 6 out of 9 last time, my confidential level is almost 8 out of 9 after sometime. It is the easiest place to get noticed from media, get support. There is great circles here. I have decided to spend about once every month in Beijing recently.

Trusted Tourism Agency

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Stephen asked me about a reliable package tour from Shanghai to Beijing:

Can you please recommend any reliable package tour from Shanghai?

He is the not the first one to ask me the same question. Actually, there should be 20 emails around this topic I received so far.

Well. Since I don’t use travel agency too much for my domestic or international travel, I don’t have personal experience to guide me to give you an answer. But I believe there are some choices, based on what I heard.

They seem to be more famous.

I would like to bring the questiont to my readers: do you have any recommendation based on your experiences?

P.S. I will be in Beijing in the next few days.

Black Day for Shanghai Stock Market

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May 9 is not a good day for Shanghai Stock Market. It reached the lowest point of the six years. It closed at 1,130.835 yesterday.

I never invested in stock market in Shanghai, and I have no idea about the stock market. But I know, the stock market in China encountered big problem.

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Image in courtesy of Yahoo! Finance

From a normal non-financial major person, the fact I know/heard of (but didn’t confirm) is:

  • Most of my friends were losing money in the last three years (from 2002 to 2004), and I didn’t see anyone discuss about domestic stock market.
  • People say the prosperity of real estate market in Shanghai may be due to the lack of confidence to stock market
  • I personally don’t trust listed companies.
  • My friends told me many CEO or big boss of listed company don’t know the stock price of their company at all – they just don’t care.
  • Yesterday, I watched a program by Lang Xian Ping, a famous encomiast in China. He called for more stick monitoring of the bad guys in the stock market.
  • I heard from radio that recently, there is only one result for any news release, no matter it is good news or bad news from listed companies or the market. The result is: big drop in the stock price or the stock index.

Disclaimer: as I said, I have no idea about stock. The above information were either heard (from TV, radio, my friends) or my personal observation. I have no ability to check whether the facts are correct or not, or the opinion are correct or not. So take it with great caution.

Vacation Ends

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I feel embarrased for paused my English blog for three days. It was the longest pause in the recent year. Part of the reason is because of the May holiday, which was from May 1 to May 7, the other reason is the launch of my Chinese version of my blog.

When I just started my blog, English blogs get much more attention than Chinese one. Now, the situation seems to be different than two years ago. I wrote 4 articles, and all of them stayed in the portal of Donews (Alexa rank around 1400) and 365key (a Chinese version of Del.icio.us) for one week. The traffic to my Chinese blog raised from almost zero to 2000 page view everyday. Although it is still a small portion of my total traffic, it is quite surprising to me.

To maintain two blogs are not easy, but let me try it. The rule is simple: English one will continue to be the best first hand information on Shanghai – from the view point of daily life, and Chinese blog will focus on Internet technology and the venture I am taking – Kijiji.

I will keep the two blog balanced, with a little bit more focus on the English one – the one I have committed my last two and half years of my life.

P.S. Congratulations to the marriage of Hong-Wei, my former manager in Microsoft, and Grace, my good friend. Their wedding ceremony is so wonderful.

P.S. Shanghai holds the world champainships of Table-Tennis during the May holiday, but it didn’t affect my life in any way – I didn’t see a report on it (maybe because I am off town) from newspaper or TV, and I didn’t see any traffic from it.

The Boat in San Francisco

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DSC03122, originally uploaded by jianshuo.

This is the boat we sailed in San Francisco Bay. What a nice boat!

P.S. Actually, it is a test post from Flickr.com. I still have concerns to store my password in Flickr, so I didn’t choose to save my password there. If there is some way to post more than one pictures from Flickr to my blog, that will be super cool!

I Draw my Own t-Shirt

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In Lijiang, I spent one afternoon drawing my own T-Shirt with Wendy.

In Lijiang, it is a huge business to draw the Dongba characters on T-Shirt and sell the T-Shirts to tourists. It seems every 1 out of 3 stores have those T-Shirts. I suggested we buy some white T-Shirts and borrow the color and brush to create our own t-shirts. So, this is the whole story.

Jian Shuo with the pen.

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© Jian Shuo Wang

The color plate:

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© Jian Shuo Wang

Started with the red Sun:

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Photograph by Wendy

Big head of my cartoon boy:

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© Jian Shuo Wang

The big head from another view:

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© Jian Shuo Wang

My stamp with my name on the t-shirt:

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© Jian Shuo Wang

The small flower on the grassland:

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© Jian Shuo Wang

Wendy also draw another T-Shirt. She draws better than me.

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© Jian Shuo Wang

I wear my T-Shirt.

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© Jian Shuo Wang

The work took the whole afternoon to complete. There were too many people watching us drawing that they almost blocked the road.

Lugu Lake – Part II

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Where is Lugu Lake

This is for everyone who are curious about the place but doesn’t have too much basic geography knowledge about China. The most beautiful part of China I have experienced is the south-west. There are three provinces: Sichuan, Yunan and Tibet. In October, 2002, I started from Chengdu and visited Daocheng – that was about three-day car’s ride. This time, the trip is much easier. I took flight from Shanghai to Kunming, the capital of Yunan Province, and transit to Lijiang. Lijiang is the ancient small village with rich culture. What impressed me so much is, they have an airport! Even some big cities in China does not have one.

Lugu Lake is about 240 km away from Lijiang. We took bus from Lijiang to Lugu. It cost 5 hours and 120 RMB (15 USD) per person. We started at 9:00 and arrived around 15:00. Wow. The road was the typical winding road on the mountains. It is also dangerous – the cars can easily fall into the valley. :-) The Lugu Lake is about 2685 meters above the sea level….

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© Jian Shuo Wang

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© Jian Shuo Wang

The Mysterious Lake

The most interesting part of the lake is, the people in the villages are still living in the Maternal families. It means, they do not marry. Visiting marriage represents the main marriage system of Lugu Lake’s Mosuo people. There are only mothers. There is no concept of father. It should be the last matriarchal culture in the world.

The Hotel I Stayed

Now, Lugu lake is not only a place of Lugu local people. Many people settled down there. The owner of the hotel I stayed is among them. I spent some time on the architecture of the wooden house I stayed and finally believed they can move the entire house to a new place within three days. The wooden house is very simple. There is no simple nail throughout the house. It is simply made up of a lot of building blocks, that can be put one upon the other. The owner shared the story with us: He went to a old Mosuo village and fell in love with this house – a house with 100 years of history. He gave the owner about 10,000 RMB and bought the house. He gave the workers 15 days to move the house to a new place. The local workers laughed loudly and said 15 days are too much. Finally, they spent one day marking the woods in the house and tore it down. They spent another 2 days building it up. :-) Amazing story.

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© Jian Shuo Wang

The cost per person per night is 30 RMB. We know that is raised price due to the May holiday. I assume the price should be much lower in normal days.

Lugu Lake

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Lugu lake may not be great place to relax. Many people came here for walking, either walk around the lake (in two days) or march toward Daocheng. It takes 7 days… For me, an inn (typically combined with a Cafe) is good enough.

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The lake, birdeyes from the top of the mountain.

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The Mosuo Wangshi Inn I stayed.

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The computer and Internet facility in the Inn.

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Lake view from the window of the inn

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What impressed me most is, it may be among the most Internet connected villages in the country. Almost every inn provides Internet access (some with wireless coverage), so I can use my own computer to send out the 14 pending emails from my outbox (via VPN) and upload the pictures above to my server. The connection is ADSL… Meanwhile, accompanied us along the way are the China Mobile and China Unicom radio transmission tower. I never experienced “out of service” on my mobile – GPRS also follows me.

IF the transportation is better, and there is enough policy support, the west part of China has the potential to be a software base – the infrustructure is ready, maybe what we lack is 1) education and 2) Funding… When I took the boat in the lake, it gives me the feeling that it is very much the sailing in bay area. I do hope one day, the west part of China raise up to be another bay area.

The owner (a couple) of the inn came from Chengdu. The husband came from Chengdu and was a teacher for Computer Science in Tianjin. He is in his 40’s. He bought a house with 100 years of history from the village, moved it to be lake side within 3 days and opened this inn and cafe about one year ago. After that, he settled down by the lake. The music of the bar is great. Last night, during the dinner time, the music was an album from Sara Brightman…

He said he had run after many dream but turned out to be very disappointed. So he settled by the lake. “Have you found what you want here?” Asked Wendy. He replied: “Still not”. Maybe it is all about “Enjoy Doing or Being Able to Do“.

Thanks Everyone!

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I am back from SFO trip to Shanghai (three days ago), and I joined another meeting and they don’t have Internet access, so… sorry for the pause of blogging these days.

I am still very excited about the trip, and feel so happy to have great friends in the bay area. I know I have a very long list to thank. Here is the abbridged version.

First of all, thank RC, Yumi and all the great persons in eBay for hosting me and showing me around. I had great time to meet with all the people I wanted to meet, and learnt so much – much more than I expected.

Special thanks to Carroll and Jim for inviting me to dinner at their beautiful house on top of the mountain. It was a very unique experience for me. I had great time there. The moment that we observe the airline landing toward the San Jose airport is a permement part of my memory in San Jose.

Thanks Tom and Andreas from BVCapital for inviting me to BV. I enjoyed the very interesting discussion we had on Friday and Saturday. I am so happy to meet Mathias, Yann, and Christian. Thanks for Yann to invite me to the sail boat and wish Christian recover soon.

Thanks to Chris from Rojo to host me in Rojo’s office and gave me the thorough introduction for Rojo. Chris was so kind to arrange my Six Apart tour. Thanks Mena, Ben, Barak and Ginger for your time with me. I also like to thank Charles and Jim from Jambo.net to share your great ideas and to come to my meetup. I love their slogan “Wireless Hello” very much. I weared their great gift , Jambo T-Shirt, today!

Sailing in the Bay

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Believe it or not, I sailed for the first time in the San Francisco bay. Yann, Alex and Niki are so nice to invite me to join them to sail in the Bay. We started from the marina of the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge around noon, and soon pull on the sail and sail close to the wind. It is a little bit easier to learn how to sail. When we turned off the motor, and pulled up the sail, the boat when to the Golden Gate Bridge at the speed of 2.4 – 3.1 knots. Sometimes, the wind goes up to 30 knots and rains heavily. When we reached the gate and started to move out of the bay a little bit into the Pacific, it is sunny, but the tide is huge. :-) Yann is a perfect captain and we quickly learnt to how sail a sail boat (although not complete). All the pictures are in my camera but I didn’t bring the cable with me. I will post the nice pictures here when I am back.

Meetup in San Francisco, CA

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I am thinking of hosting Wangjianshuo’s Blog Meetup in San Francisco at Cafe Flore. I have no idea about this place. I asked Andreas where should I put the meetup, SFO airport or downtown. He directly posted me to Cafe Flore. It must be good, I think, although it can be a little bit far from where I live. So here is the detailed information about the meetup.

Cafe Flore

2298 Market St, San Francisco, CA 94114

Time: 9:30 AM to 11:30 AM, Sunday, April 24, 2005

Map: Google Map for Cafe Flore

All my friends and readers are welcome. No RSVP required. Just show up at anytime within the two hours. It will be great if you post a comment to notify me your participation though. Jing and Nina, you are explicitly invited. Sorry for the late notice. I am not good at planning, and it is not easy to plan a meetup in a completely new different environment. I understand the same feeling for visitors to Shanghai. Sometimes, for visitors in a city, a meetup can be “Anywhere in this city”, but the problem is, where is the Anywhere.

I am excited to meeting you at Cafe Flore tomorrow morning. I will catch my flight back to Shanghai at 14:20 at San Francisco Airport.

The Silicon Valley Spirit is Back

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I was sitting in the office of Rojo.com, the newly launched website to manage RSS more effectively with the help of tagging and friends’ recommendation (some kind of SNS). It is located in a large warehouse-like space – actually it is the AT&T building in downtown San Francisco. The reason it looks like a warehouse instead of an office is, it is a large space, in terms of areas and height. Evryone share the same open space by placing their tables in the middle. It is just like the architecture company in the Suzhou creek art district in Shanghai. There is no separation between – no cubicles, no offices, no meeting rooms – it is just a large open space.

Chris, the CEO and founder of Rojo.com, introduce the team to me. They are all nice persons and Chris showed me the functions of Rojo.com. It is quite impressive – RSS made it easier to track many feeds (around 100? Some has 1000? Are you kidding?), and Rojo helps to recommend those only matters to the user. I would recommend everyone to open an account, take a look and share your feeds with me. My account ID is jianshuo. Free feel to add me as your friend in Rojo.

During our talk, Chris mentioned there are many blogging related companies nearby. “Really?” “Yes!”.

“Six Apart is 2 blocks away”, Chris pointed to one direction, and “Technorati” is two blocks away” Chris pointed the other direction. “Feedster is there, also two blocks away”. I said: “Wow. That is cool!”

This is really cool. There are many small dot.com companies popping up this year (or becoming famous this year). I feel a little bit strange to call these innovative company “dotcom” since they no longer have the attribute of the old dotcom has. These services provide values and start to spread by the word-of-mouth. Some has succeeded already.

To be honest, I feel boring when I look back to the computer history between the year 2000 and 2004. It seems the curtain of the wonderful Internet drama was closed. When the legend of Apple, Microsoft, Dell, and HP fades in 1995, Yahoo!, Netscape appeared. But after the year 2000, there are actually not so many interesting application on the Internet. From the year 2004, new things are happening very month. Many blogging software, social network software, taggings, podcasting emergesÂ… Google start to become hot. It is exciting.

For me, to read the story from the history book (at least from magazines) is one thing, to experience it in real life with me is another. In my trip to Redmond last Decemeber, I met the wonderful guys Eric and James, the founder of picture sharing application Heypix. I planned to write an article about the product but they said “hold on for several days since our website will release in 3 days”. 4 months passed, I dropped an email to those guys and update the current situation. They replied and say: “We were just aquired by CNET”. It is amazing. When this kind of stories happen around me everyday, both in China and America, I clearly feel that the Silicon Valley spirit come backs again.