A silent yet very real tech revolution is taking place and it is not in Silicon Valley. Where can you find 40 percent of the five largest Internet companies in the world? Where can you find a microblogging site already eight times bigger than Twitter and growing much faster? The answer is China and this trend is not new.
Indeed, seven years ago, after the company I co-founded (TripleHop Technologies) was acquired by Oracle, I left Silicon Valley and spent some time in China. There, I got the same kind of shock I had back in 1991 when, still a student at the Institut National des Telecommunications in Paris, I discovered the Internet. Indeed, I realized that China was fast catching up with Silicon Valley -- both in terms of giving birth to innovation of global impact and as a magnet to attract world-class entrepreneurs.
Based on this vision, I decided to create CHINICT -- an annual conference which has become the largest conference on China tech innovation and entrepreneurship. Beyond being a hub for world-class tech players, investors and entrepreneurs, the CHINICT conference has been destroying one by one so many negative clichés regarding the China tech ecosystem (such as the alleged lack of world-class entrepreneurs, respect of intellectual property, innovation, acceptance of foreign entrepreneurs...).
The eigth annual edition of CHINICT takes place next May 24th & 25th 2012 in Beijing at the legendary Tsinghua University Science Park (sort of a MIT-Stanford-Harvard combined entity) and includes some of the most recognized visionaries and leaders both from China and the West -- such as Facebook's co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Israeli legendary investor Yossi Vardi -- as well as leaders from top-tier Chinese companies such as Tencent, Baidu, Sina, Alibaba, RenRen.