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The next most important start-up hub after SF is Beijing. It's much more affordable than SF, but there are other concerns with hosting conferences there such as
by xiaoma 10y ago
The next most important start-up hub after SF is Beijing. It's much more affordable than SF, but there are other concerns with hosting conferences there such as pollution, speech and media controls and a lot of regulation in general.
edit: I had no idea there was so much China hate here. I'm no fan of certain policies of the government, believe me. I hate the GFW with a passion. But the entrepreneurial community is incredible. There's a lot of skill at the high end and awe-inspiring levels of fearlessness and ambition.
- logical42 10y ago..like being able to use unfiltered internet?
- sharemywin 10y agopollution?
- astrodust 10y agoLike the 20+ hours of travel to get there?
- rahimnathwani 10y agoFrom where does it take 20 hours to get to Beijing? SFO to Beijing is just over half that.
- astrodust 10y agoYou're already on the Pacific coast. Not everyone on the planet is. Under optimal circumstances, not including airport time which can be considerable, flight time between New York and Shanghai is 15 hours. Add in a few hours to check-in, clear customs, plus other nonsense and you're up to 18. Under ideal circumstances.
- xiaoma 10y agoA lot more people on the planet live near Beijing than near Iceland.
- astrodust 10y agoIf you're talking about India and China, sure. If you're talking about America and Europe? Nope.
- xiaoma 10y agoYes, India and China are indisputable giants but also consider Japan (still the #2 or #3 economy in the world depending on the metric), Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore—all advanced economies with extremely educated and technical populaces. Then there's Vietnam, which is very poor but growing over 10% / year and highly educated despite the poverty. There are also hundreds of millions of people in Indonesia and Malaysia. I was speaking not of the US or Europe but the world in general. We don't live in the Eurocentric world of 150 years ago. The center of gravity now spans the Pacific.
- astrodust 10y agoIt will. It does not right now if you're talking about conferences. Participants are still largely from the Americas and Europe. Also this entire argument is utterly absurd. If you're upset about brutal domestic policies the last place you should be arguing in favor of is China.
- stuckagain 10y agoIn what way is Beijing a legitimate counterpoint to an American lurch toward despotism?
- CamperBob2 10y agoSorry, mods can be real asshats on here.
- grzm 10y agoThat only mods are 'dang and 'sctb. Are you referring to them? Or do you mean members who are downvoting? If the latter, please don't refer to them as mods. And regardless, kindly don't resort to name calling.
- nrjdhsbsid 10y agoThat would be great for conferences if it wasn't for everything you mentioned plus high levels of govt corruption and IP theft. The lack of open Internet alone is enough that the vast majority of conferences simply cannot be held there. It's not "China hate" when there's legitimate reasons.
- hueving 10y agoI've been to a conference in mainland China. The firewall made it completely miserable (it was a tech conference). People from the west expect to be able to use Google/gmail/hangouts/github/ssh for more than 5 minute random bursts of connectivity. You can't expect people to go to tech conferences in those garbage conditions.
- patrickk 10y agoDevCon2? Lots of people on /r/ethereum were upset that videos of the talks were not available for weeks afterwards because it was in Shanghai.
- hueving 10y agoNo, it was for developing infrastructure tooling (e.g. K8s, docker, etc), all of which was mainly hosted on github. Sounds like it's not an uncommon problem. Frankly I think the conferences are only as successful as they are because of the volume of mainland Chinese citizens and the novelty of a trip to mainland China for people outside of the country.