On the opening of Rakuten Technology Conference 2013

That exciting time of the year is coming again. It’s Technology Conference. This year marks the seventh anniversary of Rakuten Technology Conference which we have been hosting with your continuing support since 2007.

You are still in the age of the internet revolution continuing to grow. You can see many exciting things. More and more services are emerging which start-up ventures and young engineers generate all over the world. The upheaval of BigData with many actual and useful cases have been reported (that was one of our themes two years ago). The popularization of smart devices, superior exceedingly to feature phones,and, the progress of ubiquitous computing (which might bring us back). You are living in the exciting and shining time of technology change.

The year before last year, the theme of the conference was "Embrace Big Change!" Mr. Kent Beck, a great master of agile development, set up the concept: “Embrace Change” in eXtreme Programming. We combined that concept and our resolution to face the big change now and in the future, and expressed it as a theme. Last year, we set up a slogan named “It’s a small world.”, to share how we feel in the present age where we are globalized and connected. The world is vast, though, it’s not too big to challenge it. Even though the project is small at the beginning with some kindred friends, you can be connected to people all over the world via the internet and have a ground swell changing the world itself. Globalization is pushing you. It’s becoming natural to unite with people globally and achieve great things together. You can say, it’s a small world. That is how engineers and we feel in the present age.

And then, it’s the year 2013. We will have the seventh Technology Conference. We challenged the “big” change and saw how “small” the world is, when we discovered the universal value and the timeless significance again. We think, therefore, we have to plan it from the starting viewpoint. That’s why we set up the theme “We are Engineers!” for this year. Looking back, the first technology conference we held in 2007 was an event to show our various technologies and development styles which we had cultivated since establishing Rakuten. We wanted to convey our feelings that engineering was one of the significant engines for our growth. So, we made many sessions from scratch by ourselves. That was where we shared the strong passion as an engineer. Now, we have expanded globally and developed services in collaboration with many locations in the world. We would like to make sure to re-focus on the core that we are engineers, and to show you the process our technology and engineering grew up, at the seventh Technology Conference. It is an engineer that creates a product not existing before. It is also an engineer that challenges the technology world. We would like to admit that it is an engineer with pride that have created products and developed services until now, and this will be the same for the future, anytime and anywhere. We will go with the theme of this year implicating those feelings and offer a conference for sharing widely our challenge over the world and experience collaborating with members in a global way for the past few years.

We are Engineers!

Under this theme, we will be picking up various technologies and hosting many topics on actual cases of engineers challenging the world. For example, the activity of Smart Device Department with engineers from a variety of countries, the agile development way by product management collaborating all over the world, the inside of Rakuten Private IaaS and PaaS supporting the development, the building and operation of infrastructure handling with the massive transactions for Rakuten SuperSale, the thorough effectiveness measurement by web metrics, SuperDB, our huge datawarehouse, and realtime analytics platform and online machine learning of BigData Department, the achievements by data scientists with the background not only of computer science, but also of physics, economics, etc, etc, the up-to-date research report by RIT, R&D institute, and so on. We would like to talk about how and what we do thoroughly. Furthermore, we’re planning to have an experience-based workshop which is significant to engineers. Of course we will also be hosting the ever popular lightning talks, so if you have a topic you want to share please contact us on the email below.

Please come and share this energetic atmosphere of “We are engineers!“ with us and hopefully you will get new insight, feel the excitement and gain the engineering power of creating something new that had never existed before.

We are looking forward to seeing you.

Rakuten Technology Conference 2013
Executive Committee Chair
Masaya Mori