The annual CSDN Conference of 2008, the largest independently organized developer conference in China, took place from December 4th to December 6th, 2008 in Beijing with more than 1,000 attendees from the software and IT industry. Dozens of companies participated in this event as sponsors and brought their engineers and marketers to perform product demonstrations and present their product roadmaps to the conference attendees. Among them the notables multinationals were: Google, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Nokia, nVidia, and Sun Microsystems. Google provided Gold Level sponsorship to demonstrate its full support for the healthy development of web technologies in China. Many leading Chinese web companies were also there to showcase their innovations.

CSDN, recognizing the strong desire among the web developers in China to learn the latest Google technologies, organized a special track of Google developer technology sessions. Google China's Developer Relations and engineering teams presented to the audience introductions of Google Maps API, Google Gadgets, Google iGoogle APIs, and the upcoming new Android mobile platform. As the event participator from Google, it was very gratifying for me to see so many of you showed up at the Google's sessions, asked a lot of questions, especially nearly 100 people stayed until the very last moment of the conference on December 6th, a Saturday afternoon, to hear the Android session. Nearly 1,000 people listened to the keynote speech by Baogang Yao, and close to 2,00 people showed up at my Google developer relation introduction session. We very much appreciated your enthusiasm and interests.

Even though we had a very scant display at Google's booth, we still saw a large crowd of developers showed up to take our fliers and chat with us. We appreciated the opportunities of directly engaging with you at events like this, and in the future similar events, we will try to make it better in our display booth.

For additional information, please refer to the following

• CSDN Conference news web site:
• CSDN Conference video clips ;
  
• CSDN news report on Google China Engineering Director Baogan Yao's keynote:
• CSDN news report on my DevlRel Introduction session:

Background:

• CSDN is the largest developer network and IT publication powerhouse in China, with 2.7 million registered users and 1.6 million active on its web site, 100,000 blog authors, 10,000 active Experts, and 4 million page views. CSDN web also has 40 million tech topics, 1 million tech articles, 1,000 tech books published.

Hope to see more of you there at next year's CSDN Conference, as well as at many other Google events across the Asia Pacific in 2009!

Bill Luan

Technical Program Manager

Developer Relations

Google China

For developers who read Japanese or Simplified Chinese, we have some year-end updates for you on code.google.com:

• OpenSocial documentation for 0.8 is available in Chinese and Japanese.
  
• The documentation for OpenSocial 0.7 has been updated with the latest English changes.
• For Japanese readers, there's a new translation of the Apps API.
  
• Finally, the site directory and API homepages are all updated -- you can now learn about Chromium, Google Custom Search API, V8, and other new APIs.
  

If you have your browser preferences set for Chinese or Japanese, you should see the translated pages automatically when you visit code.google.com. Or, use the language selector in the top right corner of the page to choose the language that you want to use to view code.google.com. You can change your language selection at any time.

We're looking forward to posting more translated content soon, in 2009.

Naomi Bilodeau, Google Code Team

What an exciting couple of weeks it's going to be for OpenSocial in Asia Pacific.

This weekend, there will be 3 OpenSocial hackathons happening simultaneously in Vietnam, Singapore, and Australia. Organizers are expecting the combined attendance of all three hackathons to be 100 developers. The emphasis for the events in Hanoi and Singapore will be on creating applications to be submitted to the OpenSocial contest for Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, the hackathon in Australia will focus on creating iGoogle applications, then throwing in the social elements. Big thanks to eXo Platform, WebPal Networks, and e27 for all of their help in organizing these hackathons. Unfortunately, the Singapore event is closed for signups. If you'd like to register for the Sydney event or the Hanoi event, please be aware that space is extremely limited so sign up quickly! The organizers will do their best to accommodate as many people as possible. More details on the agenda for each country can be found here for Vietnam, Singapore, and Australia.

Next week, Google China will be hosting OpenSocial hackathons in Beijing (12/16) and Shanghai (12/18). Space is extremely limited and filling up fast, so if you're in China and want to join us for either of these two events, please register here. We'll spend the mornings talking through application demos, code samples, container updates, and then we'll dive into coding. During the evenings, we'll see an overview of branded application opportunities from Mentez, plus a presentation from Google's AdSense team. Mentez is a partner company working towards the promotion and development of successful Internet applications, mainly geared towards social networks.

In China, we're looking forward to seeing attendees develop high quality OpenSocial applications for leading social networking sites in China such as MySpace.cn, Xiaonei, 51.com, YiQi.com, and Tianya. There will also be quick updates of OpenSocial support from those same leading sites, followed by topics of interest to all developers such as best practices for Chinese and foreign app developers, monetization opportunities, consulting partnership, and hosting solutions. The hackathons will last from 9:30am to 8pm (or later), culminating in a contest to determine the best apps, as voted on by participating developers. First prize winners will receive an iPod Touch.

There will also be an OpenSocial hackathon for developers in Japan on 12/18. If you'd like to register, you can do so here. This event will feature OpenSocial partners MySpace Japan and Recruit. The goal for this event is to prototype high quality applications for the Japanese market.

It's really exciting to see both OpenSocial's adoption in Asia, as well as tremendous interest from developers to make the web more open and more social.


Jason Costa & Shawn Shen, Developer Relations, OpenSocial

The fellow Google App Engine developers in Shanghai is organizing the second Google App Engine Camp on November 22nd at Google's Shanghai office.

The event will start with a round of lightening talks, after which you can meet other Google App Engine coders to discuss and develop your App Engine projects.

For more details, please visit the website and join the local discussion group.

Vivian Li, Developer Relations, Asia Pacific

What a couple of weeks it's been! We completed the first two stops of the Google DevFest tour in Beijing and Shanghai with a total of 150 developers in attendance.

There were some great presentations on OpenSocial, the Google Maps API, and Google App Engine. These presentations were given collaboratively between our local product engineers in China and engineers that flew out from the Googleplex in Mountain View for two weeks. The presentations
can be found here:

Maps: http://tinyurl.com/6yavmf
OpenSocial: http://tinyurl.com/6dceq6
AppEngine: http://tinyurl.com/5jn5yx

There were also two presentations given entirely in Chinese, so for those that can read them, here those are:

OpenSocial: http://tinyurl.com/6x3pjo
AppEngine: http://tinyurl.com/56q8ux
**The Maps talk was translated on the fly, so there is no presentation in Chinese for that.

At our event in Beijing we also saw an announcement from 51.com, a very large social network in China, about their support for OpenSocial v0.8. 51.com hosted their own developer day the following week at their office in Shanghai. Pretty exciting stuff for OpenSocial!

Pictures from our DevFest event in Shanghai are here. The DevFest event in Beijing pictures are here.



Thanks to everyone who came out!

Jason Costa, Developer Relations, Asia Pacific

As we wrap up the Google DevFest Tour in Asia Pacific (six cities in five countries), we are very excited to share that 51.com has launched OpenSocial support on the 51.com Developer Platform to their 31M+ users in China.

This launch is a significant milestone in the Asia Pacific region and welcome news for tens of thousands of developers in the region because 51.com is one of the leading social networks in China. Their support of OpenSocial immediately enables developers to write OpenSocial applications, which offers many benefits..

First, developers can develop apps that serve and reach a large user base with established viral channels in 51.com's vibrant online communities. Second, developers can migrate their OpenSocial apps with ease to any other social network that supports the OpenSocial standard. Lastly, developers building OpenSocial applications may choose to monetize their applications (e.g. through ads or virtual currency) resulting in sustainable long term business in an emerging ecosystem.

To learn more about OpenSocial application development on 51.com, go to the OpenSocial developer community on the 51.com Developer Platform.

Shawn Shen, Developer Relations