January « 2007 « Shanghai China Snippets

January 29, 2007

Ronaldo Stops Grinning in Lozenge Ad

Filed under: China News Soft — Shanghai @ 10:52 pm

Ronaldo grins in China When I first saw Ronaldo holding a lozenge and stupidly grinning on Chinese TV I was wondering who the hell the director director was that made this terrible excuse for an advertisement. Then again, I see similar bad advertisements on CCTV 9 so not that surprised actually.

I got used to it and figured that Ronaldo Luis Nazário de Lima got a nice buck for doing this.

Wrong again. Invited to dinner in 2003 by the Guangxi Golden Throat Group (What a great brand name by the way) the poor chap had posed for a picture holding the now famous lozenge package. Why would a drug maker want you to pose with their product…. well, Ronaldo probably grinned like he did because he was wondering that himself as well.

It took a Chinese competitor to wake up Ronaldo’s management more than 3 years later.

From the China Daily:

Ronaldo decided to go to court when another Chinese drug maker wanted a deal with him with a precondition: he must terminate the contract with Guangxi Golden Throat Group.

He did not realize until then that he missed as many as seven chances to sign contracts with Chinese enterprises because of the “Golden Throat” ad. Each contract could have fetched him 3.2 million euros a year.

Of course this is a great example of infringement of image rights etc, etc. On the other hand it’s also very cunning from the Golden Throat Group to trick one of the most popular football players in the world and let him make their product famous all over China. And they will even get more (free) publicity now.

Even if Ronaldo wins the case he will never get the millions he could have got.

Maybe the China Law Blog can help out and give an estimation on how much he can/will get.

Comments (2)

China Travel Blog Interviewed

Filed under: China Travel — Shanghai @ 3:59 am

Just published a new interview on MyChinaStart.

This time I chatted with RoyGraff from Ccontact about the Outbound Travel Industry.

He talks about Chinese tourists, the challenges for Western tour operators and more.

If you’re interested to learn more, read the China Travel Blog interview.

Comments (2)

January 27, 2007

Shanghai Fitness Centre Hopping

Filed under: Shanghai Life — Shanghai @ 3:03 am

Our old fitness centre, Total Fitness on Nanjing Xi Lu, was not bad at the beginning. Sure, they had problems with the volume of the music and I had to get used to men drying their scrotum with a hair dryer, but getting past that, it was ok. That’s Shanghai fitness, I gathered.

A year ago, things started to deteriorate. The DVD players stopped functioning, TV’s became foggy and remote controls went awol.

I know, all these are irrelevant if your part of the Spartan approach to sports but running on a treadmill is hard enough as it is. You’re going nowhere by default, hence some distraction is needed.

We now changed to a new fitness place. Brand new, including swimming pool. You can smell the paint. Having been a member somewhere else will get you a for sure discount as they like to take out the competition.

We bartered a good deal, at least that’s what we think. We got 14 months for the price of 12 plus a discount on the list price.

Let’s hope everything still works in month 15 or we have to move on again.

Comments (3)

January 25, 2007

Pandas Are a Disease?

Filed under: China News Soft — Shanghai @ 11:41 pm

Pandas are one of China’s hot commodities.

Doing a search showed me that there is a connection between Pandas and diseases, at least according to Google.
Panda diseases

Comments (1)

January 24, 2007

China Internet Slow Again

Filed under: Chinese Multi Media — Shanghai @ 11:26 pm

It isn’t any news that the Internet in China is still slow and it bugs a lot of people I noticed .

My previous article about the slow speed of the Internet gets a lot of visitors searching for terms related to the incompetent structure of the Internet in China.

People ask the search engines:

“Why is the Internet in China slow”, others suffice with just typing “China Internet Slow” or in a different order, “Slow Internet China”.

There are also those that show their irritations:

“Terrible slow Internet in China”, “China Internet so slow” and my favorite “China internet slow again”.

I’m afraid I’ll be collecting more insights into the internet users frustrations in the coming time as it doesn’t seem the problem will be totally fixed before Chinese New Year. Just today I have had already 2 complete outages.

Comments (6)

Satellite TV Shanghai

Filed under: Shanghai Life — Shanghai @ 7:56 am

Satellite TV Shanghai Looking out of the window of the bus I noticed there are many satellite dishes attached to the balconies of the big buildings.

In Holland satellite dishes mostly imply that it’s an apartment occupied by immigrants who like to watch tv in their native language.

In Shanghai, I have the feeling, it means seeing more than just the Chinese channels.

Comments (4)

January 19, 2007

Beijing Olympics English Map Launched

Filed under: China Travel — Shanghai @ 6:01 am

You can find now an English Zoomable map of Beijing on the website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.
It’s pretty nice and detailed with main roads, the Olympic locations and other landmarks.

You have the option to download a screenshot of the map (a your zoom level) and I liked the option to draw lines on the map, using the scale option to measure distances between points.

beijing map olympics

Unfortunately the menu bar items, like scale, save etc don’t seem to work in Firefox.
Check it out.