On the opening of Rakuten Technology Conference 2014

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

This event has been the event of the engineers, by the engineers, for the engineers with the concept that Rakuten engineers voluntarily plan and operate an exciting conference by themselves. Every year, we prepare this event by finding a theme relative to the trend surrounding engineers.
In recent years, we have set the themes featuring the globalization of Japanese engineers and Rakuten group. For example, we had the theme “Embrace Big Change” 3 years ago. It meant, be prepared for the upheaval of BigData, SmartDevice, Agile Development and Internationalization of engineer’s environment. We set up a slogan named "It's a small world!" 2 years ago. Don’t be afraid to step into the global market. The world is vast, though, it's not too big to challenge. Even though the project is small in the beginning, you can be connected to people all over the world via the internet and have a ground swell changing the world itself. You can say it's a small world. That is how engineers and we felt then. After that, we went through experiences working together with many overseas engineers actually, came to a conclusion that it’s universal and essential to keep engineer’s passion all over the world, and so set the theme “We are Engineers!” last year.

And then, it's the year 2014. We will have the eighth Technology Conference. We challenged the "big" change and saw how "small" the world is, when we discovered the core value again. We thought, therefore, we had to plan from the pure viewpoint as “engineers”.
Speaking of the theme of this year, the world is already globalized and interconnected more than you expect. You travel from country to country in a day-to-day life and work remotely, closely and globally with great engineers. What’s important is that you always get back to the starting passion as an engineer. And then, what’s also important is you engineers make the world your stage, are as bright as gold and achieve great things. Let’s spark and stay gold! With that in mind, we set up the theme “Sparkling Gold!” for this year.

We engineers are always worried about many things and struggling with a bunch of issues and problems in daily business, in daily development, in daily testing and in daily operation. Sometimes, we have a tendency to look for a powerful solution to problems, a so-called veritable panacea or “Silver bullet” in spite of ourselves. However, in each case we recognize that there is no solution to resolve all problems. There is no “Silver bullet”. There is no answer outside. It’s the other way around. The answer is inside. Engineer has got a key internally. Alchemist found gold here. Make your internal idea real. Spark it. That’s a true solution.

You are still in the age of the internet revolution continuing to grow worldwide. You can see many exciting things. More and more services are emerging which start-up ventures and young engineers generate across the globe. You engineers feel inspired from them and then move forward to develop new things by yourselves. You develop it. You spark it. And you inspire other engineers again. It’s happening all over the world. You are performing in the exciting and shining field of technology world. The Dorok famous prophecy said: "And that one shall come … descending upon a field of gold..." Yes! You are the one. You are the engineer, standing on a global field of gold.

Sparkling Gold!

We would like to reflect the theme that you spark globally, for the sessions of this conference. For example, we will have satellite venues in Singapore in addition to Sendai and Osaka in Japan, and host sessions from Singapore office. The presentation will also change from the classroom style to the open style like TED presentation, for presenters to be brighter. And, we will be picking up various services and technologies and hosting many topics on actual cases of engineers challenging the world. The invited speakers are very cool. Mr. Satoshi Nakajima, a legendary architect and Mr. Tom Fifield from Open Stack community will take the stage for keynote speech to send hearty cheers to engineers. Other than them, great speakers from Docker, Chef, Box, and famous wearable devices startups and so on will deliver a presentation. It should be very exciting. There’s more, many speakers on Rakuten side will hit the stage to give a talk. The system of Viki getting popular in over 160 countries, the activities of engineer girls, the inside story of Rakuten SuperCloud supporting development, the building and operation of infrastructure handling massive transactions for Rakuten SuperSale, 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, the 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 Hackathon with award 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 at the email address on the bottom of the website.

Please come and share this blinding atmosphere of “Sparkling Gold!“ 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 2014
Executive Committee Chair
Masaya Mori