About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

A combination pool hall and bar lounge with dark and sleek decor, Racks is an impressive space. The mechanical bull by the DJ booth and bar is definitely a nice touch, but getting to the hidden-in-the-wall restroom brought back nervous People 7 flashbacks. As it is, Racks is located across the bridge from the G-Plus nightclub at the south end of Shanghai’s XinTianDi, where the old CK Why Not nightclub use to occupy.

Yeah, “why not name our club CK?” That’s a real forehead slapper.

Like Volar, Racks has a sister venue in Hong Kong and also promotes a certain members-only exclusivity. But if Volar Shanghai’s experience is of any indication, that’s a policy with its obituary already written.

The China Business Network and The Shanghai Business club hosted a “Joint Happy Hour” at Racks this past Wednesday, and Elliott suggested that I attend after twittering a pseudo-invitation out of the event organizer, Christine Lu. After an afternoon of plotting world China domination with the Regional Director of admanGo, Herman Yueh, I managed to convince him to come along. After all, we’re looking for a few good men and these sort of international-minded/expat professional mixers just might be a good place to do some network recruiting, especially after one gets fed up with local talent (more on this in a future interview piece).

We arrived fashionably late. Greeted by the vast and empty black expanses of Rack’s, we almost walked right back out the door. To be sure, a splatter of people for the event were lounging in the corner, but the relative emptiness (and vastness) wasn’t particularly inspiring.

I’m glad I forced us to stay.

We ended up spending about a couple of hours there, and while we didn’t meet an army of people, I did get to network with a handful of great individuals across different fields (FMB, international trade, publishing, expat services, logistics, chemicals, contract manufacturing, architecture headhunting, etc.). With that came ample discovery and discussion of various potential business opportunities, both for admanGo and my own travel start-up, adex360. As far as I was concerned, that made for a productive evening.

I never did end up meeting Christine Lu, which I felt would’ve been common courtesy due to her and Elliott’s twittering relationship. I recall recognizing her (from her Facebook picture) early at the event but later she was nowhere to be found, ostensibly busy interviewing for her video profiles. Too bad, quite a few of us were curious to meet her.

One last thing, and I hate feeling compelled to ask this but, did anyone at the event catch those two (questionably) stunning ladies? Someone tell me those two dolls were, uh, professional models (yeah) and not, uh, the stereotypical gold-digging Chinese huntresses that prowl Shanghai wherever relatively affluent foreigners with the scent of money can be found (of which XinTianDi is not unknown for).

Note:  Proceed at your own risk.  This post contains an easy five step process, with lyrics included, for a non-fluent Mandarin speaker to belt out a song with local friends at a KTV lounge.  CN Reviews disclaims all responsibility for your potential loss of hearing, pride, face, or business relationships.

When I visited Beijing in January, the manager of the Beijing team scheduled a team-building event at Cashbox Partyworld. My problem was threefold: My Chinese wasn’t good enough to follow the lyrics, my singing wasn’t good enough to follow the tune, and I didn’t know any Chinese songs. When I shared these impediments with the Beijing manager, she suggested that I sing Liang Zhi Lao Hu (两只老虎） which seems like at best would have been embarrassing and at worse some kind of devastating loss of face. In the interest of global employee retention, I was determined to make a good showing on behalf of our US team!

Chinese people may not realize that most Americans have absolutely no idea what a KTV experience might look like. I’ve posted photos of Cashbox Partyworld at the end of this post because frankly I found it mindblowingly different than what I expected.

Step 1: Pick a Song

I asked my fellow CN Reviews blogger Min Guo to bail me out. She selected Wàng Qíng Shuǐ (忘 情 水) aka “Water of Forgetfulness.” Her rationale was that Andy Lau’s singing was not that great, hence great for someone of limited vocal range, and that his Mandarin was also not that great, hence perfect for me!

Step 2: Find the MP3 and the lyrics online

Min helped me find the MP3 and the lyrics online, and I dutifully uploaded the song to my iTunes and listened to the delightful strains of Wang Qing Shui.

Step 3: Convert the Hanzi into Pinyin

With only 3 days to go before the big event, I chose not to use the Chinese lyrics as a Chinese character learning opportunity. So I downloaded the trial version of NJStar which I had used before in the past, and slammed all the Hanzi into Pinyin. I have attached the Pinyin translation below to save you this step.

Step 4: Practice!

In the privacy of my Beijing hotel room, I listened to the song on iTunes and sang along using the Pinyin.

Step 5: Get ready to sing, and volunteer early so someone else doesn’t “steal” your song by singing it before you do.

When I discovered that Wang Qing Shui was already on the playlist, I felt a creeping sense of panic. I decided to soldier on and sing the song!

Photos of KTV in Beijing at Cashbox Partyworld, 2008

OK, so what in the world is KTV anyway? Here’s my journey into KTV Wonderland…

Buffet Spread at Cashbox Partyworld

Hallway to our private KTV room

Door to our private room

Happy singers inside

Our Party in Progress

My Beijing debut. I will never forget my first taste of the Clear Water of Forgetfulness.

Appendix: Wang Qing Shui (忘 情 水) in Pinyin by Andy Lau

The song follows an A-A-B-Chorus-Chorus format and repeats twice in its entirety. Then it ends with a repeated Chorus. Quite a simple song form actually. With this appendix, you should be able to follow the song with complete accuracy.

A 1
céng jīng nián shǎo ài zhuī mèng yī xīn zhī xiǎng
曾 经 年 少 爱 追 梦 一 心 只 想

wǎng qián fēi
往 前 飞

xíng biàn qiān shān hé wàn shuǐ yī lù zǒu lái bù
行 遍 千 山 和 万 水 一 路 走 来 不

néng huí
能 回
A 2
mò rán huí shǒu qíng yǐ yuǎn shēn bù yóu yǐ zài
蓦 然 回 首 情 已 远 身 不 由 已 在

tiān biān
天 边

cái míng bái ài hèn qíng chóu zuì shāng zuì tòng
才 明 白 爱 恨 情 仇 最 伤 最 痛

shì hòu huǐ
是 后 悔
B
rú guǒ nǐ bù céng xīn suì nǐ bù huì dǒng de
如 果 你 不 曾 心 碎 你 不 会 懂 得

wǒ shāng bēi
我 伤 悲

dāng wǒ yǎn zhōng yǒu lèi bié wèn wǒ shì wéi shéi
当 我 眼 中 有 泪 别 问 我 是 为 谁

jiù ràng wǒ wàng le zhè yī qiē
就 让 我 忘 了 这 一 切
CHORUS 1
a gěi wǒ yī bēi wàng qíng shuǐ huàn wǒ yī yè
啊 给 我 一 杯 忘 情 水 换 我 一 夜

bù liú lèi
不 流 泪

suǒ yǒu zhēn xīn zhēn yì rèn tā yǔ dǎ fēng chuī
所 有 真 心 真 意 任 它 雨 打 风 吹

fù chū de ài shōu bù huí
付 出 的 爱 收 不 回
CHORUS 2
gěi wǒ yī bēi wàng qíng shuǐ huàn wǒ yī shēng bù
给 我 一 杯 忘 情 水 换 我 一 生 不

shāng bēi
伤 悲

jiù suàn wǒ huì hē zuì jiù suàn wǒ huì xīn suì
就 算 我 会 喝 醉 就 算 我 会 心 碎

bù huì kàn jiàn wǒ liú lèi
不 会 看 见 我 流 泪

INSTRUMENTAL INTERLUDE

REPEAT ENTIRE SONG

REPEAT CHORUS 1,2

REPEAT 2ND PART OF CHORUS 2

Happy New Year! Greetings from China.  I celebrated New Years in the air, leaving SFO at 12:13 pm on December 31, 2007, and arriving in Shanghai at 6:30 pm on January 1. I hope United counts the entire 6000 miles as flown on 12/31, because I still have 100% bonus miles from having Premier Executive status on United, which I am certainly going to lose for 2008!

I’m trying out a few services that will make it easier to stay connected while on the road. I would like to review them more fully after I get some experience using them this trip. There are two things I want to achieve: make it easy for US people to call my China mobile phone, and make it easy for me to call US people on my China mobile. This post reviews only the first–to make it easy for US callers to call my China mobile phone for cheap.

In summary:

• Use Skype if you want to provide one US area code “virtual” number to everyone and don’t mind paying $60 a year plus $0.021/minute. It takes a few steps to set up and cobbles together several Skype features to do this, namely: SkypeIn, SkypeOut, CallForwarding.
• Use Jajah or Jaxtr if your callers are trying to access you from the Web or social networks, or have a few callers that you can set up as “friends” in their system and train them to use the system. With Jajah, callers between US and China can call each other free from landline and mobile numbers. If one of the recipients is not a Jajah user, then it costs $0.033/minute. I can’t figure out how much it costs to use Jaxtr.
• Use eCallChina if your users are calling frequently from the same phone number, so you can set up pinless dialing for them. This is the cheapest option at $0.016/minute but they need to know how to dial your number from the US (e.g. 011-86-xxxxxxxxx) and they need to remember the local access number.

The Details

Here are 4 ways that I’ve tried to make it easy for US phone numbers to call a China mobile phone.

1. eCallChina pinless phone card

I set my office up with a pinless rechargeable phone card and linked the office phones to the phone card so people can dial a local access number (in our case, an area code 650 Mountain View number) and then dial the China number (with 011-86 preceding the full number including city code if applicable) without entering a PIN. So this is easy if you can remember the local access number and are a location where the pinless feature is already set up. We’ve used eCallChina’s rechargeable pinless card and it is the cheapest option here at $0.016 per minute, or 1250 minutes for $20. I then posted all this info on the Kango internal wiki.

2. SkypeIn number, combined by Skype Call Forwarding

For people who already have Skype, this could be the easiest way to allow your friends to access your China mobile phone. Rates to China are $0.02 per minute, and more rate info here. Skype doesn’t have a single feature that addresses this user scenario of “forwarding calls from a US number to a China mobile phone” so I had to cobble together a few features. Here’s the general steps:

1. set up an ordinary Skype account if you haven’t already
2. set up SkypeOut by purchasing SkypeCredit. From the Skype application. Select menu item Tools/SkypeOut. Then follow directions to purchase SkypeCredit. This allows you to call out from Skype to local numbers. This is very useful if you are on your computer already. Many times, people in China are not at their computer and I need to reach them on their mobile phone or landline. However, this feature alone allows you to call other people, not other people to call you.
3. set up SkypeIn. From the Skype application, select menu items Tools/SkypeIn. It will then direct you to a Sign up page on their poorly designed and difficult to navigate website. SkypeIn information can be found here. Current rate is $18 for 3 months, and $60 per year, unless you do it as part of a SkypePro premium account. Current rate for SkypePro is $3/month with a 60% discount on a SkypeIn number, which is about $36 per year. SkypeIn allows people to call from their phone to you on Skype, but not yet to your cell phone. (I just discovered another feature SkypeToGo which may address my need for a cheap calling solution from my China Mobile number to call the US. I’ll look at that later.)
4. enable Call Forwarding. Select menu item Tools/Call Forwarding. Be sure to type the full phone number including “+” sign and country code. For example, a China mobile might be something like “+8613555555555″ or something like that.

SkypeIn allows people to call your Skype account. Call Forwarding allows your Skype account to call your mobile when you don’t pick up on Skype. SkypeOut allows you to call other people, and also is the payment method that enables Call Forwarding. If you have any questions, just comment on this blog and I’ll try to answer it.

3. Set up Jajah

I signed up for Jajah. By visiting my personal URL at http://www.jajah.com/elliottng you will come to page which allows you to request a call to be set up between me and your phone in the US. I pay for the call. Here’s a badge so you can do it directly from this page. It is $0.033 per minute or free between Jajah users. Here’s the rate info.

4. Set up Jaxtr

I also signed up for Jaxtr. I’ve known Konstantin for a while and thought I’d try out his product too. Similarly, you can go to my personal URL at http://www.jaxtr.com/elliottng to initiate a call to me, or use the widget below.

Get jaxtr | Login

So I’ll put these in use and see how it works out. The key issue is making it easy for people in the US to adopt this technology. Giving my wife a bunch of URLs and asking her to go to her email to find the URL and then surf to a page to initiate a call, is less easy that giving her a phone number that she can just program into her cell phone memory. I think both Jajah and Jaxtr creates a “virtual” phone number that is tied to your mobile phone after you use the widget. But its not clear what that phone number is until after you make the first call. Both Jajah and Jaxtr would be well served to make it more clear that you are creating these “personal, virtual” phone numbers that can be used for calling me in the future without having to go back to your computer. Skype, on the other hand, doesn’t make it easy for me to set up a US access number for my China mobile phone, but once I have it set up, the biggest benefit is that there is one number that I can provide to everyone, without all the steps that people need to go through to call me using Jajah or Jaxtr.