RISE conference 2019 in Hong Kong. Our view

It has been great 4 days at RISE, Asia’s biggest tech conference! Here are our thoughts on it from North America angle of view.

Full conference 16k+ attendees fits on one floor of Hong Kong Conventional center. It shows the scale of the city. IMO, one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

As in North America, the tech market is so big, the conference audience usually stays self-contained. Here at Rise, the audience is very diversified. You can see a presence from China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Israel, India, Australia, East Europe as well as folks from North America. All of them are competing for the China market.

On the downside, the educational part of the conference has been pretty limited. Speeches were mostly high level and generic. Which I do not think is a big deal as all of that material is primarily available online in a more consumable format. And conference precious days, hours and minutes can be spent better than learning how to spin EKS new cluster.

The rest of the points are pretty positive.

Expo presented a broad technology scope, where AI, BlockChain, and IoT was unsurprisingly top subjects.

Out of 777 startups at expo, it has been plenty of innovation and interesting ideas. I like the most project https://parkingbnb.world based in Hong Kong. Their application allows to find optimal parking and do reservation online.

Another great startup, which cut my eye was https://www.24ttl.ru They provide service for large merchants to optimize their online content via AI.

The PITCH battle, where startups compete for the best idea, been judged by investors was well delivered. Was great to see the fire of passion from many entrepreneurs very professionally delivered.

It is crazy to see [in a good way] a vendor booth price tag at Rise, comparing to North America conferences. And Rise is known for good lead generation, so it is definitely good investment.

Networking has been the best part of RISE, and IMO was better organized than most North American conferences. Whether you are looking for investor, partner, or client, Night Summit created the best environment for that. Ability to find another attendee of your interest and message them directly before the event was also a great help.

And last but not least, it’s interesting to see that while having big regards, how little Asian part of the world understand American market, and even more so other way around. I intentionally want to keep it wide open, as its a subject for a more prominent publication.

Lets make future together – AVM