QCon, the International Software Development Conference organized by InfoQ, is coming to San Francisco through Nov 16-18th this year. On day 2 of QConSF 2015 there will be a special track, where technical leaders from top Internet companies in China (Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, etc.) will share their experiences about the technologies behind those massive businesses. This special event - ChinaTech Day brought to you by InfoQ China/GeekBang - is the very first time for China Internet giants to form a team for public appearance in the software technology world.
Why now?
The time has come for China Internet companies to share their technologies. Internet companies in China are mostly young - just like Internet companies around the globe, but are generally growing faster and now at a much larger scale than those in many other countries, as China has a 1.3 billion population base. Official statistics currently estimate over 600 million Internet users in China, and this number is growing fast due to mobile internet. Several Internet services in China are already serving over 1 billion users. Such a scale of business brings technical challenges that most companies won't usually see, and there are even more challenges brought by seasonal events such as Taobao's "Nov 11th Online Shopping Carnival", which produces a daily number of transactions several times larger than Black Friday in the US. The technical experiences of such large scale operations, however, have been limited to be shared among Chinese engineers and hardly heard in the English world.
This situation is changing as more companies in China are embracing open source to a larger extent. More investments are directed to the open source departments in those companies, and engineers from those companies - Huawei and Alibaba in particular - are gaining voices in the international open source community. There are an increasing number of Chinese engineers becoming core committers and maintainers in various open source projects, many of them are doing a great job and gaining good reputations in the community.
On the other hand, as those companies have saturated the domestic market, they now want their business to go abroad, which means they are putting more efforts in pushing their branding to the globe - including their technology branding.
The time has come for those companies to show out their technologies. ChinaTech Day is a milestone of this process.
Who will be there?
The confirmed speakers for this year's ChinaTech Day are:
- Qi Yuan, VP and Chief Data Scientist of Ant Financial (subsidiary of Alibaba)
- Liao Nianbo, Senior Technical Director of Tencent Social Contact Division Back-End
- Xu Ming, CTO of Cheetah Mobile
- Li Kefeng, GM of Mobile Baidu
- Zhuang Zhuoran, Senior Technical Director of Alibaba Wireless Industry Department
- He Gang, Technical VP and Chief Scientist of Jingdong Mall
- Guo Haoran, Foundation Platform Architect of ele.com
- Xu Zhao, Senior Technical Specialist of Alibaba Wireless Industry Department
- Feng Zhongyan, Senior Technical Specialist of Alibaba Sharing Business Department
Ant Financial is an important part of Alibaba ecosystem, a leading business in China's Internet finance. It was their effort that players in the financial market started going online, when Alipay (subsidary of Ant Financial) introduces Yebprod. Ant Financial is more than a PayPal equivalent: it's business is in larger scale and has more complexity, and their technical challenges and solutions will provide a reference for Internet finance companies around the globe.
Tencent is the leading social networking service provider in China. It's business operations model has long been studied by international players, but not too much on the technology side. Tencent is one of the few companies around the globe that can share experiences on serving billion-level online users.
Alibaba/Taobao is the largest domestic e-commerce platform in China, serving over 500 million registered users. Alibaba is already running international business and is relatively familiar to the English world.
Jingdong is another major domestic e-commerce platform in China, which runs a business model similar to Amazon.com. Jingdong has been Nasdaq-listed and is relatively familiar to the English world. They will share how their technology growth path is different from that of Amazon.com.
Mobile Baidu has been Baidu’s core strategy in recent years. As compared to Google's integrated services into Android OS, Baidu's efforts in mobile search might be a better reference for developers.
Ctrip is the leading OTA Bookings platform in China (after the Elong and Qunar acquisition this year). Ctrip used to be a traditional call-center based business, and has now transformed into a matured internet service platform. Ctrip aims to enter the global market to compete with international players such as Booking.com.
Cheetah Mobile is the company behind various popular Android apps such as Clean Master and File Manager.
Ele.com is a meal delivery service platform started 7 years ago, which was valued at over 30 billion dollars earlier this year. They come to SF to share what they see is the current trend in the Internet China.
What else?
ChinaTech Day is more than a track in QConSF. The speakers will also visit Google, Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, Y Combinator and Stanford University to communicate and exchange ideas with engineers in the silicon valley.
"Facilitating the spread and exchange of knowledge in professional software development, this has always been our responsibility since the establishment of InfoQ China. We have done a lot in inviting global technical experts into China to spread their fresh ideas, and we always wanted to introduce Chinese technical experts to go out to spread their experiences to the globe. ChinaTech Day is a good chance to build a bridge for equal communications between technology worlds." says Taiwen Huo, founder of GeekBang Technology and InfoQ China.
Chinese version link: http://www.infoq.com/cn/news/2015/10/chinatech-day