Lot of smoke inside and coming from side of building. Probably not deliberate.

IMESSAGE I’ve installed mountain lion and setup iMessage on both my desktop and iPhone. Now my iMessages (simular to SMS) arrive both on my computer and my phone! If you want to set it up, be sure to enter your apple ID email inside your iPhone > messages settings.

A LETTER FROM MARK ZUCKERBERG: (satire)

Facebook only makes money if people click on its ads. Do you know what Facebook ads are? They’re those things on your Facebook page that you have never clicked on even once. But at Facebook we’re looking to change that. After doing extensive market research, we learned that there is one time when people actually do click on Facebook ads: when they’re drunk. This is the same business model that iTunes is based on. I’m sure a few of you have had the experience of using Facebook late at night, only to wake up and find that you’ve gotten seven auto-insurance quotes or enrolled as a criminal-justice major at the University of Phoenix.

Read more at newyorker.com

About 3 hours after bringing the British patient in we went back to find him still in ER alone. The doctor knew that we were strangers but asked if we could find someone to pick him up eventually. The patient didn’t carry a phone, but we did get the name of his boss.

We left and headed back home, calling the UK consulate again hoping to get a direct number for the doctor in the hospital but they couldn’t disclose information and said that the company is responsible for him, they couldn’t do anything from London until Monday morning.

Back home we went online but found this company had hardly any information online, but found the profile of his boss at linkedin.com however, this business network prohibits contacting strangers directly. Dead end? We decided to put a message on Twitter and Sino Weibo around 6PM. We called out for his boss by name and also mentioned the company.

On Twitter, it got people in HK and UK involved, however, it gained traction on Weibo as some microbloggers started translating and reposting my message to sometimes over 50.000 followers.

At around 10PM, one person on Weibo actually traced a telephone number and called it, but no result. People kept reposting and updating and around 10:30 PM, a customer recognized the company’s name and contacted a sales representative. The sales rep. send me a Weibo message around 11PM, about to contact all the people necessary. In no time, help was under way to the patient in the hospital. We could relax now someone from the company was headed to the hospital, due to weibo. It struck me how Weibo is indeed enabling social participation in this country. For the readers not familiar with the Chinese microblogging service, right now almost everyone online in China is using Weibo:

The Chinese Twitter-like service saw a penetration of more than 88.8% among China’s digital populace aged more than 20 […] almost every Chinese netizen has a weibo account. […] China has more than 538 million Internet users and 388 million mobile Internet users. (Technode, 28 July 2012 )

It reminded me of a BBC radio podcast by Duncan Hewitt I came across recently, regarding a Beijing Weibo user who spotted a truckload of dogs headed for consumption in a morning in April. He took a photo and put on his microblog. Around noon, people starting reposting it, leading to people gathering and blocking the truck. In the evening, the group of Weibo users bought the dogs from the truck driver, they are now safely in a kennel. Be amazed and listen to the full episode on the BBC website or direct link to MP3.

We found a Brit in a pool of blood this morning, on our way to the bakery. He was looking really ill, surrounded by Chinese people, but he was just lying there. At that point he wasn’t able to speak much or move around, later we discovered that he had cut his wrist by accident inside his apartment, where he lost a considerable amount of blood, made his way downstairs and basically fell on the curb where he was bleeding for 30 minutes more.

Ofcourse the group of bystanders, of which two Chinese/New Zealand students, had called an ambulance 30 minutes earlier but they were told that there were no ambulances available. We decided to call again nevertheless but didn’t get through. Luckily for him, the police drove by and they proposed to drop him off at the hospital. We lifted him in the back of a police car, on our way he told me that he felt he was going to die.

I identified his bloodtype incase he would pass out and we got him inside the ER and arranged the paperwork. He didn’t carry much on him but had some ID and insurance info in his pocket. I felt helpless trying to explain the English details to the Chinese staff, they couldn’t understand me. A few minutes later, the two New Zealand / Chinese bystanders arrived at the hospital with my wife to help out. The hospital was sure to confirm insurance before treating him after which he was properly taken care off. We stayed for a couple of hours and saw to it that he got the proper care.

I also called the British consulate, who apparently put me though to the emergency call center in London. The operator didn’t speak Chinese so explaining him the Chinese hospital name and Chinese street details lead to a very confusing call. Seemed like a sluggish system, considering the amount of Brits that live in P.R.C.? Anyway, I have to say that the Shanghai police really helped him out, first of all taking him into a car (taxi wouldn’t allow that) and trying to locate his friend. Anyway, In a situation like this, you cannot depend on the ambulance to come and pick you up. I’ve seen pedestrians hit by cars and eventually put inside taxi’s to the hospitals. It’s not rare if bystanders don’t react. If you see an actual ambulance, they are poorly equipped and drive much slower then they could.

My wife has studied Chinese for quite some time now, she mentioned they studied a lot about culture and history, but never did they talk about what to do in a medical emergency, something that would have been useful. All you foreigners abroad, be sure to carry your ID and insurance with you at all times, preferably with a person to call in case of emergency. Better yet, have cash and a mobile phone with you as well.

Fred Wilson has an interesting writeup about power inside (startup) companies.

He writes that in theory, control rests between the ownership split between founder and investors, in other words: on paper, if the CEO owns >50% of share, he or she is in control of the company. However, Fred writes, in reality, the entrepreneur can earn as little as 5%, if the company is successful, no one will sit in the way. The opposite is also true..

As Fred puts it:

An entrepreneur or hired CEO can own as little as 5-10% of a Company but they can control it like a dictator if they are doing a great job running the business and the company is making a lot of cash flow and has no need for additional capital. An entrepreneur can control 95% of a company and all the seats on the board but they can easily lose control of the business if they company is floundering and they need more money and the only investors who would consider putting up money are the existing investors.

Read the full article here.

Finally I got to sit down and discover what this ‘Responsive web design’ (RWD) is all about.

RWD capabilities are amazing, it can show an enlarged design for iPad, but give a full experience with smaller font to a desktop user, enhancing the experience for users on different devices.

RDW is all about creating a front-end for your site which can adapt to different screen sizes, which is important in a world where mobile phone browsing is quickly growing. Today’s estimations include 2.3B Internet users, of which 1.1B are mobile. (NYT, may 2012)

As a quick start, I decided to refresh my own blog layout, using the open source skin from Per Sandström and adjusted it to my needs. CSS3 is not hard to learn a quick read over at a list apart pointed me in the right direction.

As you can see, my blog theme was updated today, and it’s responsive! Just try to make the browser window little wide and you can see that the layout is changing. As you can read, I’m really enthusiastic about it. Before it was just a hassle, identifying useragents and simply pointing to a different viewer or CSS file. With RDW, management of pages became much, much easier!

One would expect most sites are adapted yet, but only in the last year the transition is slowly happening. Even bigger sites like Twitter, Facebook and blogs like thenextweb, don’t really offer a adjusted version for different screen sizes.

I’m definitely going to dive into CSS3 and RDW a bit further,

*image by themeid

On our way to the moter cycle party

With friends from so many different countries, it seemed fun to organize a potluck party and bring all their best food creations together. Last Sunday we all came together at our house and enjoyed games and various foods. Whilst combining so many dishes could be a risk, it turned out quite ok! [caption id=”attachment_4175” align=”alignnone” width=”600”] Thanks for coming to our house everybody![/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_4173” align=”alignnone” width=”600”] Everybody brought their best dish, our table was soon full of all kinds of delicious meals.[/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_4174” align=”alignnone” width=”600”] Chinese chickenfeet, Italian salad, Spanish Tortilla, Korean Chab chae, Japanese Maze- gohan… all on one plate[/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_4176” align=”alignnone” width=”600”] As always, we ended up at the Cuban bar down our street…[/caption] My actual birthday was on Monday, so Suna took me out for dinner in the evening! We went to a Mexican restaurant called Maya and enjoyed a nice dinner together. In the end, she had a surprise dessert for me! [caption id=”attachment_4177” align=”alignnone” width=”600”] On my birthday, Suna had a little surprise for me! Spicy chocolate[/caption]