Artifacts | Rise of the geeks

Vanessa Moore

Famous for its bespectacled geeks welded to their laptops, smartphones and video games, it’s obvious to everyone living here that Asia’s currently undergoing somewhat of a tech boom, and anyone who’s been bumped into recently by someone glued to their phone screen will attest to that.
The region is fast becoming the new breeding ground for technology start-ups, and Hong Kong’s been looking to muscle in on the action by grabbing its first piece of the virtual pie. Over the weekend start-up entrepreneurs, tech investors and journalists converged on Wan Chai for RISE, a two-day technology conference that brought together 5,000 tech industry leaders and a select group of budding start-ups.
Described as a “Davos for geeks” by Bloomberg, amidst the bright lights and fervent tapping of smart­­phones and iPads, you could almost taste the enthusiasm in the air of the HK Convention and Exhibition Centre. While China’s stock market has been nose-diving, e-commerce is lifting off. The start-up scene is expanding and investors are enthusiastic for private tech companies, especially mobile Internet ones. Naturally it follows that there’s significant money to be made in catering to the app explosion, creating a new service or idea that changes the status quo.
From the crowds congregating around, it was obvious that a wave of eager, new companies were doing their utmost to get noticed. Dozens of booths manned by young, hungry entrepreneurs were all earnestly trying to tempt big fish investors to bite in an effort to raise funds, all to realise their cyber dreams of becoming the next Asian Zuckerberg.
A who’s who of the Asian and Chinese tech glitterati were simultaneously offering up their pearls of wisdom in a series of 15-minute lectures and panel discussions, including Takeshi Idezawa, CEO of irreverent Japanese messaging app Line, Jean Liu, President of Chinese taxi app Didi Kuaidi, Ray Chan, Co-Founder & CEO of HK-based 9GAG, and Melissa Yang, Co-Founder & CTO of Chinese vacation rentals site Tujia to name a few.
From this burgeoning tech scene, it seems that China is recasting its copycat status and innovating. While many of the new breed of mainland apps are primarily geared towards the domestic market, they’re all looking to branch out globally and take on their Western rivals. Aside from leaders like WeChat and Weibo, other apps are increasingly inching towards this goal.
Often compared with Airbnb, Tujia, which means “home on a journey,” is now focusing on expanding into Asian destinations popular with Chinese travellers, giving the Western site a run for its money in Asia. Likewise, mainland photo sharing app Nice is looking to export its brand of stickers and text for photos in a bid to rival Instagram through a different user experience. Where Instagram’s core value is based on beauty, Nice aims to imbue images with meaning through words, trying to connect people sharing similar feelings via tagging.
China may be an excellent breeding ground for these nascent start-ups because the competition in a land of 1.3 billion is fierce, and the entrepreneurial climate has never been so favourable. The tech sector by its very nature can disrupt, undermine and add value to in an exponential way that traditional business practices can’t. Similarly, the mobile age has made the world flatter so these start-ups can now go global almost immediately.
Yet in a nation where iron control and conformity are prized, innovation is a rare animal indeed. To make the transition, people need to be more innovative and that doesn’t bode well for mass control. China’s growth model will have to move beyond state owned enterprises, manufacturing and old behemoths like coal and steel to human capital, but in a country that stifles freedom of expression, it’s hard to see where more innovation will come from.
In the 21st century it’s the geeks who’ll inherit the web, and in this online world demagogues will be the winners and individualism will reign supreme. Whether China can breed them is up for debate, but right now Asian and mainland investors can certainly afford to place a few bets to find out.