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The next day, Zhou Buqi set off for the United States.

On the plane, I was still lamenting that each of the Shi sisters was really more difficult to handle than the other. Shi Jinglin alone was having enough trouble, and her two sisters also rushed forward.

What to do?

All the men in the world are dead, so why are you so sure that I am Zhou Buqi?

That's it for Shi Jingmei. She is single but not married. She is lonely and misses men, which is understandable. Shi Jingyue is too much. She is already married and has two children, and she is still trying to get better. You want to invite yourself to cheat on someone and do something permissive.

Although there is a lot of wool, you can't just focus on one sheep, right?

An iron pestle may seem indestructible, but it can also be ground into a needle!

Zhou Buqi didn't agree to anything, and adhered to the nature of a good man to keep his integrity. That night he just stayed in the room of two secretaries, Mai Feixue and Han Yalan, and did not accept the temptation of the two sisters.

I left Shanghai for the United States the next day.

He set out here, and South Korea also took action.

For this reason, Ning Lu specially dispatched a private plane owned by the Zhou family from the United States, picked up a group of more than a dozen people, and went to the Western Bay Area together.

Zhou Buqi's schedule is relatively tight. Ziweixing is going to be listed on Nasdaq soon. He has to go to New York as soon as possible. So for the work on the West Coast, he was not polite and directly called Jason Kilar from Purple Star Global and Ann Sarnoff from Lucasfilm.

I called from Los Angeles to the office park of Ziweixing International in Silicon Valley.

In the office, Zhou Buqi first met Lu Qi, Alex Jones, Gore Lewis and others, mainly focusing on an investment project. After a year of negotiations, audits and reorganization, Yahoo's The asset Flickr has finally been merged into the image social company Pinterest.

After the merger, Ziweixing International’s shareholding in Pinterest reached 48.7%, and the company’s valuation reached US$2.57 billion.

Pinterest will remain an independent company.

Pinterest is a picture social product. Compared with Ucgram, a picture social product owned by Ziweixing International, there are obvious differences between the two.

The former is more fashionable, feminine, and professional, and its user base is mainly women. A startup company "Little Red Book" has recently emerged in China, imitating Pinterest.

Ucgram is more popular, it is an interesting picture sharing, and its user base is mainly young people. With these two products as the foundation, Ziweixing International has become more competitive in the field of social products.

Zhou Buqi said: "Don't interfere with daily operations and let them maintain their independence. At the same time, we should try our best to form collaborations with social products such as Pinterest, Ucgram, Snapchat, Helo, and Yahoo Messenger to reduce repetitive expenses. Save money. It’s impossible for Pinterest to refuse.”

Of course this is about more than just saving money.

Pinterest is not a subsidiary of Ziweixing International.

There is even some competition with Ucgam.

The Pinterest team is not willing to become a vassal of Ziweixing International. They demand to maintain their independence and compete freely in the market.

This is not very friendly to the employer.

You can't interfere too much.

The method is also simple to save money on Pinterest. As long as Pinterest is tied to these products of Ziweixing International, it will save them money... and they will not be able to separate it if it is tied for a long time.

I no longer have the desire to maintain my independence.

It will gradually become a subsidiary of Ziweixing International and become a very important traffic resource that Boss Zhou can control.

Gore Lewis, the chief product officer, said with a smile: "There is already a solution. It is a strategy in cooperation with Ziweiyun to confirm images through hash values ​​to reduce server space usage and reduce costs."

This long list of English words requires more than thirty words.

Zhou Buqi thought that his English was good enough, but he didn't understand. He opened his eyes wide and didn't know why.

Lu Qi quickly helped explain.

This is actually a technical solution.

Pinterest uses the service of Ziweiyun. Most of the pictures on Pinterest are beautiful, beautiful and professional. Such ultra-high-definition pictures are very large, 10M and 20M are normal.

On Pinterest, users upload or transfer tens of thousands of pictures to each other every day. How much server space does this take up?

The more space it takes up, the more it costs you!

This is also the reason why all picture social products have failed in the past ten years, because the cost is too high and no one can afford to make ends meet.

However, the popularity of cloud computing can greatly reduce costs.

You can design a "hash value" for each picture.

The so-called hash value is a number.

All pictures stored in Ziwei Cloud have their own hash value numbers.

In this way, if user A sends 10,000 pictures to user B, there is no need to actually send the pictures, because these pictures are stored in the cloud server rented by Pinterest.

When sending, you only need to calculate the hash value of user A's picture, then find the corresponding picture from the server through hash value encoding, and then display the picture to user B.

The hash value is a number, probably only 1K in size.

This greatly reduces the waste of storage space, and does not repeatedly store pictures in the cloud. The picture libraries of Pinterest, Snapchat, Helo, and Ucgram are all placed in one "big package" of Ziweiyun, with a complete set of Haha Hash value encoding.

If a user uploads a certain picture to Ziweiyun's server through Helo, and the Pinterest user posts this picture, there is no need to upload or store the picture anymore, it is directly the calculation and dissemination of the hash value. .

This is such a waste of money.

Gore Lewis said: "If it's just about saving money, Pinterest's entrepreneurial team may not be able to accept my plan. The bundling nature of our plan is too strong, and they should be able to see it. However, in this plan, it can be Greatly optimizing products and bringing huge improvements in efficiency to users is the fundamental reason."

Zhou Buqi asked: "How to say?"

"Because..." Gore Lewis coughed, feeling a little embarrassed, "Instrument, what do you think? This seems to be more complicated."

After all, English is not Boss Zhou’s native language.

Talking about daily communication and business dealings, this is no problem. But Gore Lewis didn't think he could explain some technical plans clearly in English.

It's better to let Lu Qi communicate with the big boss in Chinese.

Lu Qi explained in Chinese and said with a smile: "It's actually simple. This solution reduces the waste of users' mobile phone data, greatly improves the transmission efficiency of high-definition pictures, and can provide users with an excellent user experience." "

"flow?"

Zhou Buqi raised his eyebrows.

It’s only 2013, and the cost of traffic information is still very high. Many countries in Europe and the United States have popularized 4G networks, but many young people joke that if they accidentally fall asleep while watching a movie on a 4G network, they may lose a month's living expenses when they wake up.

Picture social products have a big development constraint, which is traffic.

The pictures are too big.

A user's 100MB of traffic per month is used up by sending twenty or thirty photos. With such a waste of traffic, it will naturally be difficult for photo-based social products to be popularized.

Lu Qi said: "Well, traffic. Through the integration of picture libraries and the encoding of hash values, as long as the pictures are repetitive, the hash value can be used instead of the actual picture transmission, and the traffic will be greatly reduced."

"That's right!"

Zhou Buqi's eyes lit up.

I feel very excited!

For example, a user A wants to send 10,000 high-definition pictures to friend B.

If we really follow the traditional method to send pictures one by one, it may consume 100GB of data, which consumes too much mobile phone data.

The transmission speed of key networks is not that fast, and a 100G picture cannot be transmitted in a day or two.

Using hashes instead makes the world completely different.

User A did not send a high-definition picture, but actually sent 10,000 hash values. This is very small, the total size is only about 1MB, and the transfer is completed in a few seconds.

In fact, the hash value is transmitted to the cloud, and the cloud then sends the hash value corresponding to these 10,000 photos to friend B.

There are more technology applications on Ziweiyun.

Such as preview.

A high-definition picture is 10M, and the cloud can compress it to a size of about 10K, allowing user B to take a rough look at it first. If you like it, download the complete high-definition picture from the cloud. If you don't like it, don't download it.

This greatly saves waste in screening.

User B downloads the image directly from the cloud instead of receiving it from User A.

This makes it more stable.

You can also interrupt and start at any time without being restricted by user A.

The experience of using this picture social product has been greatly improved.

This is indeed product innovation driven by technology. This type of innovation can only be achieved by Silicon Valley companies. What we do in China is more innovation in design and business.

Zhou Buqi felt very excited.

He has also used QQ, Helo, WeChat, etc. to transfer files before, and he has encountered trouble. The other party suddenly went offline, causing the transfer to fail.

The main reason is that such transmission is point-to-point and not stable enough. If there is a problem on one side, the transmission will be terminated.

If it is changed to the "point-cloud-point" mode, it will be more stable. Even if the other party is offline, because the files are in the cloud, the other party can successfully receive them.

Such a technical solution can greatly improve the experience of using picture social products like Pinterest, and they have no choice but to accept it.

If Ucgram, Helo, and Snapchat can quickly and easily transfer images, but Pinterest cannot do so due to technical limitations, users will definitely abandon them.

Lu Qi said: "This is actually a good technological innovation. I have told the country about it, but Zhang Yiming and Guo Pengfei don't really agree with it."

"Well……"

Zhou Buqi's excitement hadn't passed yet, but he didn't expect that the domestic side had already denied it.

Lu Qi said: "It doesn't seem to be a technical reason."

Zhou Buqi nodded, "Yeah, I understand. Internet companies in Silicon Valley can compete with operators, but not in China. Domestic operators don't make money in the first place, so they count on Internet products to bring more users." Spend some traffic and earn more traffic fees from ordinary people."

Lu Qi smiled and said, "I'm not sure about that. The technical aspect shouldn't be too difficult. The main thing is the collaboration between the product ecosystem and smoothing out the partnership between the product and the cloud computing platform."