Yes, I’m still alive. Just extraordinarily busy, and trying to sleep enough to keep from getting sick.

I like Shanghai – it’s a lot like Manhattan, tighter downtown, smaller streets, more European, cleaner, and less polluted. English is prevalent and it’s easy to get around. There are tons of ex-pats. Charles had a family emergency, so I have a new translator/guide Alice Guo. She’s on top of all of the logistics. I’m staying in the Shanghai Hilton, which is fine but a bit tired, and has the longest waits for the elevators ever. It’s soupy here, but much cooler than it was last week, when it was over 40c (104F).

I had four meetings:

• Steve Mushero, an American who founded China’s first cloud computing company, ChinaNetCloud, still in its infancy and chasing an enormous opportunity
• George Godula, Managing Director of MHDirekt the Chinese subsidiary of an international direct marketing company that also has an arm Web2Asia which is essentially an incubator/angel fund
• Doron Kalinko, founder of Motion Global Limited which runs eyeglass ecommerce sites in 16 countries, though you’d never guess it from their web site
• Steve Leong, a Managing Partner at Mustang Ventures. He’s on the board of Wanmo.com, which is in the display space (sort of Traffiq + Turn, for you display advertising geeks)

Steve made a number of interesting points in a long and free-ranging conversation. The most fundamental was the difference in the Chinese and Western ways of thinking about planning. The Chinese tend to make decisions sequentially, they react to what’s happening and optimize at each step. Westerners tend to make a plan then re-plan when things change. Traffic patterns in Beijing and Berlin represent the differences well. I’ve seen it in scheduling – everything is completely fluid here, even with the most senior people. It’s also reflected in the Chinese approach to contracts; it seems completely natural to them that things change and that contract terms become irrelevant.

George is an Austrian who came here to open the Chinese office for his company. They are now trying to take western media concepts (e.g. SeamlessWeb), adapt them to the Chinese market and put a team and some money around them. This is a flavor of a major recurring theme – it will be interesting to see if it works. George confirmed that click fraud runs in the 30-40% range here still – incredible. And I learned that you can buy almost any list you want with anything about anyone here. For example, when foreigners get a work visa, they have to do a health check-up. You can buy a list that includes all of their names, addresses, phone numbers, incomes, blood type, and whether they have AIDS. Of course, none of this is legally sanctioned, but it’s easy to get. Whoa.

On the way to our last meeting, I saw a car wash. It’s a bunch of guys with a pail of water, they don’t have automatic car washes here.

Doron asked me to remove the paragraph about our meeting, so I did. It wasn’t very interesting anyway. :-)

Finally, I met Steve at one of the ubiquitous Starbucks in the city. (I was told and it seems to be true that every Starbucks employee here speaks english – the service in Starbucks is consistently better than in any other store or restaurant I’ve been in. They’re also outrageously expensive and always crowded.) Steve knew and could articulate the development of successful internet services here and how the sequence differs from the U.S.’s. For example, reviews Dianping.com (essentially Yelp; I’m meeting with their CEO here too) started here three years earlier, but ecommerce is just starting to take off. He was also the first person I’ve met who has a real grasp on the structure of the internet economy and specifically the advertising ecosystem, which is very different from the U.S.’s. He shared a startling fact: Alibaba blocks Baidu. That’s like Amazon blocking Google. Search isn’t the on-ramp to the internet here like it is elsewhere – there’s a real battle for the consumer still.

Once this trip is over, I plan to do a series of posts that synthesize my learnings:

• Culture
• Politics
• Search and Google in China
• Internet advertising in China

Meanwhile, I’m trying to keep current with these brief notes and catch up on all the days I missed!