World Internet Developer Summit

The World Internet Developer Summit was organized by Internet Society Hong Kong, Cyberport and Hong Kong Science & Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTPC) which held from 27 to 28 Jun 2013. The first day was held in Cyberport and the second day was held in HKSTPC. It aimed to connect with the greatest minds in the industry with the latest Internet development, news, various development platform techniques, hints and tips. I attended the second day morning session and would like to share the event below.

In the beginning, Prof. Joseph Ng (Vice-Chairman, Internet Society Hong Kong) gave a welcome remarks. He expected industry continued to keep technical speed and Internet development in Hong Kong.

Hon. Charles Mok (Legislative Councilor (IT)) was our guest and gave an opening remarks. He suggested to enhance the higher education on IT and to have more talents in IT field whose contributed in Hong Kong.

Mr. Anthony Tan (CEO, HKSTPC) gave an introduction of Science Park and explained how Science Park infrastructure and software support on the growth of IT industry.

Dr. David Chung (CTO, Hong Kong Cyberport Management Co., Ltd.) also introduce Cyberport programmes which assisted IT start-up companies.

Group photo of organizers and speakers

The first keynote speaker was Mr. Britt Selvitelle (Early Engineer at Twitter (Founding Team); Volunteer Engineer at Obama for America) and his topic named "Comparing and Contrasting Scaling Twitter and The Obama Campaign".

Britt briefed "The Love and Science behind the Growth of Twitter". He mentioned two words "Dopamine", "Norepinephrine" and "oxytocin" to explain how chemical affect human behavior. Then he was talking about Twitter which implied relationship.
After that he asked three questions below.
1. Should this exist in the world?
2. Are these people who can bring it into the world?
3. Are these the people I want to bring it into the world with?

The social reality of a group deals with their opinions and beliefs. Britte then quoted Peter Gollwitzer that "Change happens when people don't think about it." After that Britte introduced their team for Obama Campaign in Canada. He mentioned the different strategies as follow:
Before => GE 3rd Party Vendors
Twitter => Rails & Platform
Obama => Built Platform vs 3rd Party Vendors

Moreover, Britte emphasized to build out an Internal Tools Team. They also need to due with too much data problem. At the end, Britte quoted "Steven Pressfield statement as conclusion that "A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It's only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate."

The second speaker was Mr. Matt Valentine (Enterprise Solution Director, Microsoft Hong Kong) and his presentation entitled "Windows Azure and the cloud computing opportunity for developers".

Matt briefed the transformation of ICT included Cloud Computing, Big Data and Application Development. He also mentioned the digital accelerators of change. For processing power, it doubles every 18 months. For Bandwidth, it is doubling faster than processing power. And Digital data storage is doubling every 12 months.

After that he pointed out characteristics of Big Data included Massive data volumes, New data sources, Real-time and fast moving data, etc. After that he introduced Windows Azure which is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure, created by Microsoft, for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.

Matt said it should be focused on apps, not infrastructure. Windows Azure is an open source. Matt had demonstrated the application on-site and showed the data analysis in Hong Kong as an example.

Afternoon sessions were concurrent workshops.

Reference:
Internet Society Hong Kong - http://www.isoc.hk/
Cyberport - http://www.cyberport.hk/en
HKSTPC - http://www.hkstp.org/zh-HK/Homepage.aspx