TechCrunch China 2014 Speaker Lineup: Co-founders from Secret, Bellabeat, and CloudFlare
From August 11th to August 12th, TechCrunch China and TechNode will hold the annual conference in Beijing, with the theme of “Red Hardware”. Popular topics to be discussed at the event include crowd funding, online education, design, among others. We have invited many founders whose products have distinguished themselves domestically or abroad in the tech industry to take to the the stage to give talks or join in panel discussions.
Secret, “Share with friends, anonymously.”
David Byttow is Co-Founder and CEO of Secret. As of now, 9 months after it was founded, Secret is valued at close to $100 million, making it a highly competitive candidate in reaching-nine-figures-valuation within the shortest time. Within a four month period of time, investors’ evaluation of Secret has went up from $40 million to $100 million.
Beder Wechseler stated that China would be one of Secret’s targeted markets. The company is currently working with Tencent that the Chinese version of the app allows users to share posts with their friends and invite friends to join the app through WeChat, the flagship messaging app of Tencent.
There have been over ten similar apps mimicking Secret or Whisper in China. David will share with us Secret’s China strategy and company update at the event.
CloudFlare CDN
Matthew Prince is Co-founder of CloudFlare. CloudFlare provides domain name servers that protect their clients from a wide range of online threats, while also improve page load speed. After it was founded in 2010, CloudFlare gained over 1.5 million clients by the end of 2013, blocked online attacks to its clients for over 50 billion times.
The company raised $50 million in Series B Round by December 2012, valued at $1 billion. CLoudFlare was derived from “honeypot”—a trap set to detect, deflect, or, in some manner, counteract attempts at unauthorised use of information systems. Back in 2013, a DNS malfunction took place on CloudFlare, resulting in loading error for websites such as 4chan and Wikipedia. At that time, there were about 785,000 clients using its CDN and online security services. The company is considering position its Asian headquarter at Hong Kong, instead of Singapore where it was originally planned. The main reason for this change was that the company has received widely acclaimed feedbacks for its recent services to some of the Hong Kong clients.
As an internet security company, how would CloudFlare and Matthew look at the dramatic relationship between mainland China and Hong Kong? And how would they interpret this recent misfortune took place last year? These are some of the topics that we are interested in.
Bellabeat Preganancy Tracking System
Urska Srsem is Co-Founder of Bellabeat. For pregnant women, the frequent visits to hospitals are often necessary yet quite burdensome. It would be a lot easier if they can check on their babies’ health status without even leaving the coach.
The Croatian Bellabeat tracking system allows one to hear and record unborn baby’s heartbeat by connecting the device with your smartphone. You can share the sound of heartbeats with your loved ones, or even make it your phone’s ringtone. In addition, the app also calculates all relevant dates throughout one’s pregnancy so one can sit back, not worrying about remembering different dates and times.
Urska Srsen will share her experience coming out from Y Combinator, one of the best startup incubators in the world, and lead the discussion on how to innovate in the still-expanding health field.