Vancouver writer Jonathon Narvey interviewed Raincity's CEO, Robert Scales and President Kris Krug, and chatted with some of the Raincity Studios crew, for an article in Business in Vancouver magazine.
He discussed the Raincity Shanghai office including the work/lifestyle, communication processes, team building across oceans and technical challenges and advantages of working with a very multi-cultural team.
Having attended open source software and blogger symposiums in Beijing and Shanghai, Krug has seen China’s Web 2.0 dynamism up close. With a team of 13 employees in Shanghai, mostly open-source online publishing software developers, and their CEO Robert Scales, Raincity now has an established beachhead in the country.
The article also explored the size of the Internet market in China and the rise of open source software and inpact on innovation.
“Web 2.0 is exploding in China,” said Raincity Studios president Kris Krug. “The Chinese are totally wired, totally online, using web phones and all the mobile technology we use here.
“There’s a growing middle class wanting to use all these open-source tools, in part because that means they don’t have to worry about using proprietary software and pay licensing fees to western companies.”
He also dug deep into the personal expression issues around the Beijing Olympics - a topic we've discussed a lot recently in the China, Social Media, Olympics, etc. series and Scales' article at Now Public.
“Last time I was in Shanghai, the Chinese government announced they had just hired 100,000 new cyber-police,” Krug said. “That’s on top of however many they had to begin with.”
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Krug has also learned how easy it can be to run afoul of vigilant Chinese cyber-regulators.
“We were running a bar camp (an informal Web 2.0 drupal tutorial seminar), and our wiki was totally open. Anyone could register and write on it.
“Within a couple of days, we received a letter [stating] that we had to change our site in accordance with the rules in China. Users had to be pre-approved, content had to be moderated and we had to make changes on the website. We scrambled to make the changes in 24 hours.”
