Upcoming Beijing Startup Events

This month, there are two interesting startup events happening…  On the same weekend.

iWeekend Beijing bills itself as “a unique experience that brings together technology entrepreneurs and professionals with diverse talents to select an idea, develop the product, and launch a technology-based startup in just one weekend!”  It’s organized by a few of my friends from coworking, with help from the larger iWeekend organization.  iWeekend events have typically been held in Europe before, so they have a history with organizing an international group.  I’m going to be attending this one because it was announced first and my friends are organizing it.

Startup Weekend Beijing is essentially the same thing, actually.  I believe their roots are based more in the US, however.  If I weren’t going to iWeekend on the same weekend, I would definitely check it out.

Crazy Chinese Holiday/Work Day Schedule

A few posts ago, I tried an experiment and asked what people would like my next blog post to be about.  Only three people responded, but I actually thought it was a good start.  Two people voted for a post on coworking, which I wrote on Sunday.  One person voted for a post on life in Beijing, so here’s a short example of something that’s different here.

Mid-Autumn Festival is this Thursday so, naturally, people get a day off work.  This is all well and good, except that in China, one single day off work is not sufficient for any holiday, so the government gave everyone Wednesday and Friday off work, too.  However, they don’t want to sacrifice the extra working days, so now everyone has to work the Sunday before and the Saturday after.  In fact, every holiday in China is like this, and every year they come up with a brand new schedule of working days.  Sometimes, they end up with 7 or more working days in a row, just to get the odd Wednesday off.  This confuses everyone and none of my friends ever seems sure until a day or two ahead of time whether they have to go to work.

The full complexity of this fall’s holiday schedule is explained in this WSJ article.

Of course, as a foreigner who is basically working independently here, I’d be tempted to just ignore the declared work days and continue working Monday-Friday.  I do love my weekends.  On the other hand, Judy wants the time off; she has to work on the weekends, and she needs to rest.  So, overall, it’s tough.  I ended up working on Sunday for 3/4 of the day, and today I’m watching TV with Judy at home while working on and off.  It’s not really productive, but I think I’d feel guilty if I completely relaxed.

Beijing Startup Founders Twitter List

I’ve started a list on Twitter of startup founders in Beijing that tweet – See it here.  Let me know if there are any I’ve missed or if you want to be included!

Beijing Coworking – Making Progress

Last time I posted about Beijing Coworking, I’d had 10 responses to the survey and was starting to evaluate locations in Beijing.  In the meantime, a lot has happened.

Beijing Startup Resources

I recently read a great blog post from Jon O’Shaughnessy that lists all the startup resources in Boston and a similar post by Rob Go provides a todo list for new entrepreneurs in the area.  I thought it was a great idea, so this is my attempt to do the same for Beijing.  Beijing’s startup scene isn’t quite as cohesive as Boston’s, which should make a list even more useful.  I’m going to keep adding to this as I learn more, so please add anything I miss in the comments.

Events and Groups

• Beijing Coworking – Beijing Coworking is a group of independent workers who like to work together better than being lonely working at home.  For the most part, we’re techie/startup people, so the biggest benefit is having other people to talk to about ideas and problems with our businesses.
• Beijing Web Wednesday – Startup and tech folks who meet once a month at Nearby The Tree.  Usually there’s a presentation and then some time afterward for networking.
• iWeekend Beijing – This is part business plan competition, part networking event.  The first one in November was a huge success, and they’re planning to have more later.
• StartupWeekend Beijing – Very similar to iWeekend, except that it focuses on slightly later stage ideas.  At the end of the weekend, there will probably be a few ideas that get funding.
• Beijing HackerLab – Hosted by Yuanfen~flow incubator, the plan is to have an open space every two weeks to give people space to work on random projects.  The first one will be December 11, 2010.
  
• Mobile Monday – I haven’t had a chance to go to this yet, especially since my startup isn’t mobile related, but I hear it’s also exciting

People

• Benjamin Joffe – Twitter Organizer of Mobile Monday and deep thinker about tech in Asia.  I really enjoyed his presentation at the Geeks on a Plane Beijing mixer
• Frank Yu – Twitter Edits the Beijing Startup Digest newsletter
• Lee Kai-Fu – Twitter Ex. Google head and founder of Innovation Works
• Me – Twitter – only partially joking here; I’m trying to learn as much as I can in Beijing as well, so if you’re doing cool stuff, I’d love to follow you.

Newsletters

• The Startup Digest Beijing – currently edited by Frank Yu.  Fairly new, so only about one event per week listed.  I’m sure it will get better and bigger.

Blogs

• Mobinode China 2.0 – This is a big blog that covers tech all around Asia, not just startups.  I linked to the China Web 2.0 category, which has more focused content, but there’s a lot on there.  To be totally honest, I’m not sure how good this will be, as I just added it to my RSS reader today.

Incubators

• Yuanfen~flow This is an art gallery/incubator based in 798.  They host Beijing’s Hacker Lab, and currently have a few projects that they’re incubating.

Angel Investors

• Intuitive Capital – I met a woman from this company at Web Wednesday in August.  She said they’re interested in funding startups that have some traction, but haven’t yet needed to raise any outside money.
• Chris Evdemon – Twitter I saw him on Angellist as an Angel in Beijing.  You can pitch him here.  I believe he also works at Innovation Works.

Venture Capital

• I don’t actually know who the VCs are that are active in Beijing yet…  Add them to the comments!

There are also occasional one-off events, like when Geeks on a Plane showed up, that are great but don’t repeat, so I haven’t included them here.

Finding Deodorant in Beijing

Tonight, Judy and I were standing outside the pharmacy at 10pm when a foreign man walked up and asked if I spoke English.  Of course, I do, so we started talking.  Turns out he wanted to know where to buy deodorant.  (Judy thinks he had a date lined up.)

Luckily for him, I had faced the difficult task of buying deodorant in China myself and knew exactly where to go.  When I moved to China, I didn’t bring any, either.  I figured that it was inexpensive enough that I’d use whatever space it might take up for other more valuable things, and I’d buy some when I got here.  However, I didn’t realize that Chinese men do not use stick deodorant and that it would take me three weeks to find any.

Just in case anyone out there is searching the internet for an answer to this question, let me tell you where it is.  The first place I found some was at April Gourmet grocery store.  It’s close to Gongti West Road (工体西路), at the first intersection north of Gonti North Road.  If you’re walking north, take a right on that first intersection and go about 200m.  It will be on your right with a red and green sign.  The deodorant is only available behind the checkout counter, so you have to ask them for it.  They have two kinds – Axe deodorant and Axe antiperspirant.  Here is a page about them with a map on Google.

The other place to go is K.H.Sam’s.  They have more selection, but I can’t remember exactly what brands, since I didn’t buy any there.  To find it, go to the right side of the first floor in the back.  They are also located on Gongti West Road.  To find them, go across the street from Gongti West Gate (near Pavilion bar) and walk south about 400m.  They’ll be on your left just after the G3 club.  I can’t find a map for them on Google.

Good luck to all – Beijing is hot in the summer, so I hope this keeps you smelling fresh.

UPDATE 2010/10/29:

The BHG Market Place in Sanlitun now carries deodorant as well.  It’s at the front of Aisle 4 near the bottom shelf.

Beijing Coworking Status

A few minutes ago, I sent out an email update on Judy and my coworking idea that I talked about recently in A New Place To Work.  Then, I realized people who aren’t actually going to be able to participate in Beijing might be interested in our status as well, so I decided to post it on my blog, too.  Here you go:

OutdoorsBeijing

One of the first software projects I built in China was an Appspot.com application to visualize the air pollution in Beijing hour-to-hour.  You can see it at outdoorsbeijing.appspot.com.  I did this for a combination of reasons:

A new place to work

On Tuesday, I went to a networking event with Geeks on a Plane, who were visiting Beijing at the time. One of them, Mike Prasad, and I were talking about the startup community in Beijing and I mentioned that it was actually really nice to have the Geeks in town, because I also ended meeting other local entrepreneurs. I mentioned that there aren’t quite as many places and events for startups as there are in places like Silicon Valley.

Mike mentioned that Los Angeles didn’t have much community either a few years ago, but that he and some like-minded people got together to really push it. After enough time, they reached a critical mass and now the community is pretty lively even without them organizing everything. He encouraged me to do the same thing here.