For three years in a row what has now become the biggest RTC conference in the East took place in Beijing. For three years in a row, the audience almost doubled to slightly less than 3,000 attendees, and the number of high-level speakers increased as well.
There were honestly too many interesting speakers to keep track off.
Of course many of the usual suspects were here: dan burnett @ AllThingsWebRTC, lorenzo miniero @ Janus, emil Ivov @ jitsi, varun @ callstats.io.
More interestingly, quite a few new international speakers were also present, illustrating the growth in interest from the rtc ecosystem for China. Slack
I've been looking forward to this for a while: how does @SlackHQ use Janus for #WebRTC? 🙂 pic.twitter.com/rVXs63bT4l
— Lorenzo Miniero (@elminiero) September 22, 2017
and Google (not otherwise present in china anymore), are the ones who strike me as most representative of the American way, while the Singapore-based Japanese CEO of V-Cube (3B+ declared revenues for H1 2017!) was representing Japan.
It’s interesting to see that this is one of the few rtc conference actually growing year over year in the world.
The american and european audiences (and japanese for that matter) seems already educated enough not to attend an RTC only conference. They would focus on business conference, or vertical conference (broadcast, telecom, …) in search for a solution to a specific, well identified problem, and not for information about the technology or what you can do with it.
This is in sharp contrast with What we are seeing in China and Korea for example, where the markets are still new born, and the attendance is showing the same trend we saw in the west 5, 6 years ago. The korean webrtc group is today just a little bit shy of 400 active members, after only one year of existence. That would put them in the 5th position in the largest webrtc meet-ups list, if all the reported meet-up members where active.
There will be more information about the Korea market late November, as we (CoSMo) are co-organising with them a special meeting on Friday November 17th. There will be more news on this blog later this month, and for the non-koran readers in a hurry, feel free to contact me for early infos. 200~250 people venue! and of course, gangnam style:
“TIPS” TOWN (Tech Incubator Program for Startup)
Address : 165, Yeoksam-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Google Map
All in all, RTC Beijing was a great event to attend. The organization was flawless, and the quality of the booth and the presenters is growing each year. Reaching almost 3,000 attendees today, this is more than the biggest RTC event I know about in the USA (with admittedly a different population base). It will be very interesting to see what the event will become next year. Probably growing along the local demand, where the equivalent conference in the west reduce their frequency to keep enough interest.