I can become stronger by paying salaries. I have one billion employees!

Chapter 252 Zhang Yiming: President Chen, please save me!

"Orange has two syllables, while Alexa has three syllables. From the perspective of simple and easy-to-understand usage, Orange has an advantage, but Alexa has a wider audience overseas, so we asked the legal department to register the trademark first."

Chen Yansen gave the order to Zhou Chuangxi.

In other words, he accepted Daniel's suggestion and was willing to name the smart voice assistant developed by Orange Technology Alexa in overseas markets.

Although the copyright holders of Star Trek have long registered Alexa as a trademark, the scope is limited to film and television and related fields, and does not include smart voice assistant products.

Moreover, Alexa is just an ordinary name in Europe and America.

First come, first served!

They can pay a token copyright fee and still get a huge boost from Star Trek's popularity.

Daniel grinned. Being recognized by the 'Godfather of AI' in his mind made him happier than receiving a job offer with an annual salary of one million US dollars.

"Boss, should we also use Alexa as the product name in the domestic market?" Zhou Chuangxi asked.

"Actually, the name doesn't matter. The wake-up command can be customized to better suit users' habits."

Chen Yansen shrugged, seemingly unconcerned.

We can’t be too rigid in our thinking. While a unified wake word is beneficial for the optimization and training of speech recognition algorithms, it also reduces a lot of fun and user experience.

For example, changing the wake word to your girlfriend's name, your dog's name, or Makka Pakka, Sun Wukong, Pikachu, Calabash Brothers, etc., will guarantee a large wave of organic traffic as soon as it goes online.

"Customized wake words? How come I didn't think of that!"

Zhou Chuangxi's eyes lit up, and he slapped his thigh.

"We still need to decide on a name for the product in the domestic market, let's call it Moss," Chen Yansen said casually.

"Moss?"

"Moss? Moss?"

Zhou Chuangxi and Daniel looked at each other, puzzled as to what the name meant, as it seemed to have nothing to do with intelligent voice assistants.

"It is easy to pronounce and recognize, and has a high wake-up accuracy. Moreover, according to the language habits of Chinese people, the word 'Moss' is rarely mentioned in daily life, which can effectively reduce the probability of false wake-up."

Chen Yansen said earnestly.

Five years later, the hugely popular "The Wandering Earth" had not yet been released, and since Moss was not an original character created by Liu Cixin, there was no need to explain it further.

“Okay, I understand,” Zhou Chuangxi nodded in response.

Moss is fine too; it's much better than a name like Yuxi.

The three had just finished their meeting when Daniel couldn't wait to get back to work, wanting to add a custom wake word feature to Moss as soon as possible.

Chen Yansen stood at the elevator entrance and looked around the office area. The entire floor was filled with R&D engineers, totaling more than two hundred people.

In just a few months, Zhou Chuangxi and Daniel poached a large number of senior engineers in the fields of algorithms, natural language processing, and speech recognition from the labs of UIUC, Johns Hopkins University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, as well as companies such as Microsoft and Google.

If you were to hand it over to a headhunting firm, the efficiency would definitely not be this high.

However, Zhou Chuangxi and Daniel, under the guise of chatting and catching up, poached their mentors, junior students, and even classmates and colleagues.

Upon hearing this, these people learned that a technology company on the other side of the ocean had spent a fortune building a server cluster with a capacity of 1.5 quadrillion floating-point operations per second.

These people flew to the city of Xu without much hesitation.

For the remaining small group of people who were difficult to persuade, Chen Yansen could successfully "persuade" 70-80% of them in just ten minutes of conversation.

Zhou Chuangxi and Daniel both agreed that the group was moved by Chen Yansen's sincerity, superb programming skills, and generous treatment.

In reality, Chen Yansen didn't bother with any fancy tricks. He simply used his mental power to integrate it into his voice, and only about 20-30% of people could withstand this attack.

With Moss about to launch, products equipped with Moss should also be released soon.

However, Orange Technology's new autumn products will have to wait a while longer, as the market potential of Orange C2 and Orange D1 has not yet been exhausted.

Launching products too frequently can actually cause unnecessary losses.

come back to the office.

Chen Yansen dialed Lin Qingbai's number.

"Boss, do you mean to combine audio equipment with a smart voice assistant to create a smart speaker that uses natural language processing, cloud computing, and IoT technologies?"

Lin Qingbai was slightly taken aback, and subconsciously asked for confirmation.

"What problems exist at the system level and in terms of hardware?" Chen Yansen asked in return.

“It can be made, but the BOM cost per unit may exceed 600 yuan. Even if all domestic parts are used, it will still cost more than 400 yuan. From a commercial perspective, the selling price should be at least 800 yuan or more,” Lin Qingbai reminded tactfully.

The implication is that this smart speaker won't sell very well.

"There's no need to worry about profitability; the core market for Moss smart speakers is not in the country."

Chen Yansen replied with a smile.

Before making the call, he already had a plan in mind, intending to make overseas markets the main battleground for marketing and promotion.

It's important to know that back in 2012, there wasn't even an AI voice recognition chip available. The only alternative was to use a general-purpose processor plus a DSP chip plus voice recognition technology, which naturally resulted in high material costs.

However, high costs do not necessarily mean low sales or a narrow audience.

Two years later, Amazon launched the Echo smart speaker, priced at a hefty $199, and still sold 300 million units in a year.

The earlier the Moss smart speaker is released, the greater the impact it will have on the world.

Perhaps in a decade or two, no one will think that intelligent voice assistants are anything new.

But launching it now is like giving a smartphone to someone who has used a feature phone their whole life.

Chen Yansen estimates that the market potential is at least $10 billion annually, which is no small amount. High costs? Then set a high selling price!
Lin Qingbai hummed in agreement, and then delved into Chen Yansen's design needs to facilitate his product planning.

Chen Yansen hung up the phone an hour later.

What's the point of just selling cheap goods?
He had it all planned out: he would team up with Paramount Pictures, the copyright holder of Star Trek, and sell the smart speaker as movie merchandise, so everyone could make a killing together.

Even the product name for overseas markets is readily available: Alexa Smart Speaker.

The dreamlike quality of this film, bringing reality to life, is hard to resist.

3 PM, Pinbei headquarters conference room.

CEO Huang Zheng chaired the meeting, and all department directors were present.

Chen Yansen sat to one side and listened. Since Huang Zheng took office, his work has become much easier, as all the matters related to Pinbei have been handed over to Lao Huang.

"After May, Pinbei will undergo its first UI redesign. The overall direction will remain the same, but the main change will be to permanently display the Kuaipao and Kuaidi Dache entrances in the homepage icon area. In addition, the product department will launch two new features: multi-person group buying and Pinbei Orchard. Zhuang Rui will introduce the specific product plans to everyone."

Huang Zheng spoke eloquently.

Anyone who can start from scratch and build a company into a trillion-dollar enterprise is no ordinary person.

Thirty-two-year-old Huang Zheng has already begun to show his talent on the grand stage of Pinduoduo.

Huang Zheng played a crucial role in Pinduoduo's victory in the 418 e-commerce festival.

The event started early, ended late, distributed large subsidies and red envelopes, and partnered with WeChat, leaving established business giants like JD.com, Suning, and Gome in a state of panic—all of which were Huang Zheng's masterpieces.

This includes the behind-the-scenes manipulation of selling Suning shares, which provoked the anger of Zhang Jindong and Liu Qiangdong.

After all that, Pinbei's middle and senior management realized one thing: Huang Zheng was really outrageously bad, shameless and ruthless.

"Okay, Mr. Huang, let me first introduce the design concept of Pinbei Orchard. Considering that some grassroots merchants have paid promotion needs, and that new customer traffic is about to bottom out, the focus of the product department, operations department, and advertising department will have to shift from new customer acquisition to customer retention..."

Zhuang Rui nodded, picked up where Huang Zheng left off, and continued to add to the discussion.

Currently, Pinbei has accumulated 300 million users, but the problem that comes with this is that the cost of acquiring new users is getting higher and higher, and the difficulty is also getting greater and greater.

With fewer than 600 million internet users nationwide, and excluding those who are not interested in online shopping, Pinduoduo's traffic ceiling in 2012 was at most 500 million.

Therefore, retention is far more important than acquisition.

After listening for a while, Chen Yansen took out his phone and started browsing the news.

Ganji.com and Wowo.com have reached a strategic partnership to jointly operate group-buying business. Wowo Mall has joined Ganji.com and become one of their channels.

These two platforms, one lacking traffic and the other lacking monetization methods, are adopting a deeply integrated cooperation model in order to survive, which is a good approach.

IT Times Weekly published "Unveiling Tao Xiaoer's Extravagant Life After get off work," exposing the dark side of e-commerce to the public.

The Taobao headquarters building is filled with luxury cars, and the nearby shopping malls are packed every night. Merchants treat Taobao Xiaoer like their own father in order to participate in promotions.

In the comments section, people kept sharing their experiences, describing Tao Xiaoer's arrogant behavior and how he secretly demanded payment for his paid search ranking.

Ali quickly responded, stating that it would launch a self-inspection campaign and improve its inspection system starting immediately.

Chen Yansen smiled faintly, saying that unless the power to review and allocate resources is handed over to artificial intelligence, it is impossible to eliminate such situations.

Does Pinduoduo not make money?

there must be!
The third news item is a report about Lingxi Browser, which has accumulated over 100 million users in just two months since its launch.

It's more than ten times worse than Toutiao.

"It seems that preparations on the penguin side are almost complete."

Chen Yansen squinted and muttered to himself.

Zhang Yiming is too impetuous; he needs to be polished before he can be used smoothly.

at the same time.

The Beijing Copyright Association headquarters received a joint complaint from six companies, including Tencent, Sohu, NetEase, and Sina, alleging that Lingxi Browser had scraped their news articles without permission.

Given the special nature and significant influence of the complainant, the Copyright Association immediately decided to launch an investigation.

When Zhang Yiming was scraping data, he made no attempt to conceal it. The product homepage contained news content from major portal websites, making his intention to infringe on copyrights very obvious.

Although ByteDance is now a network technology company with millions of users, it is like an ant trying to shake a tree compared to giants like Tencent and NetEase.

The Copyright Association immediately notified the Cyberspace Administration of China and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and also notified the inspection station to ask the company's representative to come and be questioned.

At 7:15 p.m. that evening, Zhang Yiming received a call from the inspection department at ByteDance headquarters.

"Tencent, NetEase, and other companies have complained that ByteDance infringed on their copyrights? Are they going to the inspection station now?"

Zhang Yiming's face paled, and he asked anxiously.

He originally thought that by the time companies like Tencent and NetEase noticed ByteDance, he would have already completed his initial capital accumulation.

At worst, they can simply delete the infringing content, actively rectify the situation, and pay a fine to resolve the issue.

But what he didn't expect was that Lingxi was targeted by Tencent just two months after its product launch.

Things are in trouble!
Thinking of this, he quickly agreed and then called Chen Yansen.

He knew that Senlian Capital had a good relationship with Tencent, and if Chen Yansen was willing to step in, this matter could be resolved peacefully.

"Mr. Chen, Tencent, together with NetEase, Sina, Sohu, and other companies, has filed a complaint with the Copyright Association headquarters against ByteDance for copyright infringement. Could you help mediate?"

After the call connected, Zhang Yiming got straight to the point.

(End of this chapter)