Could you expand a little on your business background?

I call myself an internet veteran, with 22 years experience. I jumped into the internet industry in 1996, starting in Silicon Valley. That was around the early stage of the internet, just like how we’re at the early stage of blockchain these days. There were plenty of opportunities if you had imagination. I started the first startup in 1999, co-founding ‘Rivalwatch’ in the Valley with two partners as CTO.

Rivalwatch was the first wave of internet companies targeting business intelligence. It used internet crawlers and data warehouse technology to provide competitive advantage data intelligence services to most of the e-commerce companies. The company was in the B2B domain and was acquired by another US company after 10 years. I went back to China in 2005 for family reasons, and also because of the booming business opportunities there.

The second venture was Linktone, which was the first wireless value-added service company for the Chinese market, listed on the NASDAQ. I joined the core team as the VP of technology. The big time was when we worked with entertainment industry partners on the Chinese ‘Super Girl’ show. It was the first reality show in China with cross terminal interactions (mobile phone, TV, PC). Millions of Chinese people voted for their favourite singers by using our SMS voting services.

The third venture was iKang. I joined as the early stage CTO and built the very first online healthcare management platform in China. The company performed well and was also listed on NASDAQ. I then spent three years as CTO at Microsoft MSN China. We built a data center for the North Asia area to boost the performance of Windows Live Messenger and other internet services, localising Messenger in the Chinese mobile market. The mobile MSN in China was two years ahead of the US version. It was a time that I got a chance to delve deeply into social media application and business. I found strong needs from traditional businesses to promote their business and services on social media, then founded StarryMedia, the first wave social media marketing company in China.

StarryMedia provides digital marketing and e-commerce platform services to local business partners, especially in retail, city lifestyle, travel, hotel, and market research industries. We also tried several times to operate our ToC service in the consumer market, but failed. The real hurdle was the established platforms like Alibaba, Taobao, JD, Amazon, etc. They became the powerful middlemen, and were the monopoly on consumer traffic and data. It created an unfair market environment that stifled competition. Instead of trying to share a piece from them, we decided to do something totally different — a decentralised commerce platform. The Elastos project looked to me like a suitable platform to build it on.

I strongly believe Rong’s vision of the Smart Web and ‘You own your data’. So, here we are. We formed a strategic partnership with the Elastos foundation and started the DMA project. I hope to build this DMA service on Elastos as the backbone for decentralised commerce.

How did you get connected with the Elastos team, and what made you want to join the ecosystem?

Rong, Feng and I are all Tsinghua University alumni. Rong’s company was pretty close to my company in Shanghai. I had known about Rong’s operating system project ‘Elastos’ for a decade and really believed in the vision. However, it is not easy to bring a platform project up without big community support and monetisation methods, even though it was technically advanced.

The blockchain revolution wave brought great insights to the industry, and the same to the Elastos project. Obviously I quickly became the community support of Elastos and got to thinking on what we could do to make Elastos great. As Elastos released its alpha, I felt it was the right timing to do the business layer on top of the Elastos infrastructure. Without a powerful middleware layer, it’s hard for application developers to make real commercial apps that run smoothly. That’s also the time the whole blockchain industry was crying out for good applications and debating the suitable solutions

The DMA project was born in September 2018, as a platform project initiative by active community members, which is my team. It focuses on the decentralised digital market and commerce domain, which is our expertise. The meaning of the DMA project is not just an IT project to me. On one hand, it is the enabler of decentralised commerce and we can contribute our 20+ year platform experience to it. On the other hand, once it becomes an Elastos service, my traditional business will also benefit from it — turning our centralised solutions into decentralised applications, with Elastos DMA support.

How many team members do you have currently working on the project?