Lei Kaibin

raylei21@163.com

TECHCRUNCH Summit, a five-day technology gala, is being held at I-Factory in Nanshan District. The summit, which started Saturday, was convened by two technology media properties — TechCrunch from the United States and its partner TechNode in China.

Hackathon, one of the summit’s conventional activities, where participating teams plan and develop products within 24 hours and present them to the audience, was held over the weekend. During the summit’s official opening ceremony yesterday, TechCrunch’s chief operations officer, Ned Desmond, kick-started the event with opening remarks.

Throughout the day, visitors could walk through the main venue to hear industry insights from startups and entrepreneurs in 12 individual sessions, talk to over 200 Chinese and overseas exhibitors and watch product pitches by innovative companies. Startup companies had a chance to present themselves to more than 30 venture capital (VC) firms with a wide range of investment preferences during a meet-up scheduled for them.

“Apart from Shenzhen’s strength in the hardware business, the reason we chose Shenzhen for our summit this year was because it has a very strong entrepreneurial spirit and it is an international city that attracts worldwide interest,” Desmond told the Shenzhen Daily yesterday. “We consider anyone who’s interested in tech entrepreneurship as our audience.”

TechCrunch China Summit decided “The New Beginning” would be this year’s theme. It is also the first time that the technological blowout is being held in Shenzhen. In the two previous years, the bi-annual event took place in Beijing and Shanghai.

Regarding the selection of speakers, companies and topics, Desmond said that their goal was to reflect on current conversations, such as artificial intelligence, as well as on the development of the technology business.

“Besides minor problems from the air conditioning, we think this event has done a great job. It provided the startup companies like us with opportunities to discover collaboration with other entities and present ourselves to the public,” said an exhibitor, identified as Tim, whose company Breezi is a smart home heating, ventilating and air conditioning device company.

“This is the beginning of our long-term presence in China, [which is a place] we are unfamiliar with. But Shenzhen and our business partners here have made our entrance much more convenient. People here work very differently from the way we do back in the U.S., but they are very efficient and can get things done based on mutual trust,” Tim said.

“The only concern we have is quality, since we get our hardware from Chinese suppliers and we need low-defect products. At the same time, the good thing is our business partners here are very cooperative and have been offering us a lot of help,” Tim said.

To date, approximately 6,000 people have signed up for the summit, among whom a significant proportion are foreigners. Diego Semenzato, the chief operations officer of an e-commerce system integrator named Webformat, said that he came here to learn about new ideas and Chinese technology enterprises.

The summit’s agenda arranged a VIP dinner yesterday and a summit party today, and on both days keynote presentations by both Chinese and American companies, like Meitu and Intel, are being given to the visitors.

Besides cooperation with dozens of media and technology entities, TechCrunch Shenzhen is also supported by dozens of businesses like Uber and TechTemple.

For most tech-savvy visitors, the name TechCrunch catches their attention almost instantly. According to its introduction, the technology media property’s website draws more than 37 million page views per month and its Chinese version officially came online four years ago.

So far, TechCrunch has held six innovation summits in China, and the number of participants has been growing since the event’s debut in 2013. A visitor at the summit, surnamed Lin, who works at a startup, said the summit was well-organized. “I learned about the summit during my visits to several of the previous ones in China, which left me with a deep impression,” Lin said.

The number of Shenzhen’s startup enterprises, currently at 1 million, has put the city atop the country’s rankings for nine consecutive years.