Live in China
Chinese partnership launched with the help of the Scottish First Minister

By Kevin Miller

I'm just recently back from a trip to China where we went to launch a subsidiary and joint venture to promote LiveCode in the greater China area. It was a fabulous trip. We met with our new Chinese partner, Andy Parng. Andy has an outstanding track record as a serial entrepreneur within the software industry. He is also a longstanding customer who understands the value and USPs of the LiveCode platform in depth. Andy is based in Beijing and brings a wealth of local knowledge and internationalization experience.

Beijing. Photograph courtesy of wikipedia.

Our launch ceremony was done in conjunction with Alex Salmond, Scottish First Minister. You can see the signing ceremony and reception in the photos. The First Minister did a fantastic job promoting Scottish business and our company in particular. We invited several potential new Chinese partners to the event and introduced them to the First Minister. We launched a Chinese version of the website that covers the core content on the site. Over time we'll expand out and localize the documentation and supporting materials. And we have identified where our first office will be in Beijing.

Kevin Miller, CEO RunRev, Alex Salmond Scottish 1st Minister, Andy Parng, RunRev China Partner, Ben Beaumont LiveCode Product Manager.

Signing the documents. Kevin Miller, Alex Salmond, Julian Taylor of Scottish Enterprise, and Andy Parng. Click to zoom.

We come to China at a truly exciting time. The Chinese economy is now the second largest in the world and growing at a steady pace. Smartphone penetration is now not that dissimilar to the USA. And there is a real drive towards modernization and the continued opening up of the economy. Andy is currently attending MDCC, the largest mobile developer conference with over 10,000 attendees. He is demonstrating how to build a Chinese version of Sheep Herder, Battles of Chinese Zodiac which involves herding zodiac animals instead of sheep.

Battles of Chinese Zodiac, click to zoom.

We also have our very first article about LiveCode in Chinese:

http://www.csdn.net/article/2013-11-06/2817411-LiveCode-RunRev-IDE

Thanks very much to our new friends at CSDN for making all of this possible. And thanks to Scottish Enterprise for coordinating the engagement with the First Minister.

It is an equally exciting time for us as our newly refactored, Unicode aware platform is almost ready to begin testing. The dust is just starting to settle on the intense effort that has gone into the refactoring of the platform since our Kickstarter campaign earlier in the year. We are aiming to have a first internal developer preview build towards the end of November and with a following wind will have the first public DP of LiveCode 7, with full and transparent Unicode support, this side of Christmas. It will take some time after that to go through the DP process and stabilize the release as virtually the entire engine has been altered in some way. I know we can count on your support to help put it through its paces and give us feedback. Once it is done we'll be ready to go from company launch to product launch in China (and other key Asian territories).

A prototype of the Script Editor accepting international characters in an internal build, click to zoom.

There is a lot of core refactoring under the hood in 7. That effort will enable us to bring you 8.0 hot on the heels of 7. Included in 8 will be the remaining refactoring to bring open language and full native theme support. I'll keep you posted as we make progress.

No trip to China is complete without a visit to the Great Wall. It is a truly amazing construction, visible from space and stretching thousands of miles. Just the tiny restored section we saw was impressive:

Click to zoom

Even this astonishing edifice must have started with a single brick. Signing this contract in China is just the start, the very first brick. Exciting times indeed.