Zhao Bin, founder of Agora: Make real-time interactions like water and air

Zhao Bin, founder of Agora. Avnet photo

Zhao Bin, founder of Agora: Make real-time interactions like water and air

May 15 (Xinhua) -- The covid-19 pandemic has hit the global economy hard, but it has also spawned many opportunities. Online real-time interaction has become an indispensable and important means of work, life and learning during the epidemic. Online education, online office, online medical treatment, online shopping, cloud fitness, etc. have become the "new normal" and new trend of Internet social networking and people's lives in less than a year.

The Internet industry is showing the trend of "combining online and offline", and real-time interconnection interaction has become a trend and necessity online, from the initial text and pictures to audio and video, to the latest online real-time interaction, real-time Internet as a new track in front of people. And Vogue Network Agora is the frontrunner on this track.

Founded in 2014, Agora is the global pioneer and leader in real-time interactive cloud services. Developers can simply call the Agora API to build a variety of real-time audio and video interactive scenes in the application. In the goal of Zhao Bin, the founder of Agora, the hope is to make real-time interaction an indispensable existence in people's lives in the future like water and air.

When the sound network Agora was founded, Zhao Bin had passed the age of confusion, and in the eyes of outsiders, Zhao Bin at this time had some "axis". At that time, the real-time interactive technology advocated by Zhao Bin was rarely understood. Zhao Bin stressed more than one occasion that the essence of real-time interaction is not a function, but a service. This sentence may only be explained clearly in Zhao Bin's own heart in a thousand words. But behind the demand is the effort and wait in the process of large-scale verification, until 2017, SoundNet's revenue was very small.

Zhao Bin recalled that at the beginning, there was a considerable amount of time, we were all in a relatively pure investment stage, invested a lot of energy and resources, spent a lot of time to continuously optimize algorithms and programs, do network deployment, in fact, there is a long time we are very wandering. At that time, every time Zhao Bin saw Liu Qin, an old friend of an investor he had known for many years, he was "Alexander" because the company did not make any progress.

Liu Qin once recalled that he once suggested Zhao Bin to do video conferencing, but Zhao Bin refused, he did not do the application, but insisted on doing the infrastructure behind the application. Zhao Bin chose to stick to his faith.

Finally, on June 26, 2020, SoundNet ushered in its own highlight moment, this day Sound Network Agora was officially listed on the NASDAQ in the United States, the first day of listing, the opening soared by 152.5%, and on the same day, with a market value of 5.06 billion US dollars (equivalent to 35.73 billion yuan), it became one of the top ten Internet companies in Shanghai, becoming the "first share of the global real-time interactive cloud".

"Today, SoundNet looks as if all aspects are starting to go smoothly. Many people seem to have an element of luck. But my feeling is that the real opportunities are all that visionary people wait with great enthusiasm and patience. Liu Qin commented.

Today, SoundNet's real-time interactive technology services cover more than 200 countries and regions around the world, and in 2020, the world's first real-time interactive experience quality standard XLA was launched, and companies using SoundNet services include Xiaomi, Momo, Douyu, Bilibili, New Oriental, VIPKID, Good Future, The Meet Group, Kumu, Bunch, etc.

For the future of the real-time Internet industry, Zhao Bin believes that it is still in a relatively early stage and still has a huge market space. "Real-time interaction can subvert more vertical industries, in addition to the online education, social live broadcasting, video conferencing and other fields often exposed in daily life, in fact, real-time interaction can empower more scenarios, such as the IoT industry, in the past may be in smart watches, smart monitoring, smart speakers and other hardware to add real-time interaction functions, and now in intelligent robots, vehicle hardware, drones, AR glasses to add real-time interactive functions to become a new trend."

Zhao Bin said that 5G technology has also opened up more imagination space, making many things that were impossible to achieve in the past possible. 5G allows developers to build new application scenarios on wireless devices in a more flexible way, and the most attractive thing is perhaps to achieve higher fidelity video and audio experiences, such as improving video resolution and picture quality, and adding more channels to audio communication or audio path interaction to improve the user experience.

In addition, Zhao Bin believes that real-time interaction is currently more concentrated in large cities and first-tier cities, but this trend will continue to spread to remote areas, so that students in underdeveloped areas or countries can also enjoy high-quality teaching resources. (End)

Source: China News Network