Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

”Orange has two syllables, and Alexa has three. For simplicity and ease of use, Orange has the edge. But Alexa has a broader audience overseas, so have the legal team register the trademark first.”

Chen Yansen instructed Zhou Chuangxi.

The implication was clear: he was adopting Daniel’s suggestion and was willing to name the smart voice assistant developed by Orange Technology ”Alexa” for the overseas market.

Although the copyright holder for *Star Trek* had already registered Alexa as a trademark, its coverage was limited to film, television, and related merchandise. Smart voice assistant products were not included.

Besides, in Europe and America, Alexa was just a common name.

First come, first served!

They could pay a symbolic licensing fee later and ride the massive wave of *Star Trek*’s popularity.

Daniel grinned. Earning the approval of the man he considered the ’Godfather of AI’ made him happier than landing a million-dollar-a-year contract.

”Boss, will we use Alexa for the domestic market as well?” Zhou Chuangxi followed up.

”The name itself isn’t that important. What’s crucial is adding a custom wake word feature. That will better align with user habits.”

Chen Yansen said with an indifferent shrug.

’One can’t be too rigid,’ he thought. ’While a uniform wake word helps with optimizing and training the voice recognition algorithm, it takes away a lot of the fun and diminishes the user experience.’

For instance, people could change the wake word to their girlfriend’s name, their dog’s name, or even Makabaka, Sun Wukong, Pikachu, or Huluwa. This would guarantee a huge wave of organic traffic as soon as it launched.

”Custom? Personalized wake words? Why didn’t I think of that!”

Zhou Chuangxi’s eyes lit up as he slapped his thigh in a moment of revelation.

”We still need a name for the domestic market. Let’s go with Moss,” Chen Yansen said casually.

”Moss?”

”Moss? As in, the plant?”

Zhou Chuangxi and Daniel exchanged glances. Neither of them could figure out the name’s significance; it seemed completely unrelated to a smart voice assistant.

”It’s easy to pronounce and recognize, which means a high wake accuracy. And based on the linguistic habits of people here, the word ’Moss’ is rarely used in daily conversation, which will effectively reduce the chances of a false wake.”

Chen Yansen explained seriously.

’The hit movie *The Wandering Earth* wouldn’t be released for another five years,’ he thought, ’and besides, Moss wasn’t even an original character created by Liu Cixin. There was no need to explain any further.’

”Alright, I understand,” Zhou Chuangxi replied with a nod.

’Moss is fine,’ he thought. ’It’s way better than a name like Yuxi.’

The meeting had just ended when Daniel rushed back to work, eager to add the custom wake word feature to Moss as quickly as possible.

Chen Yansen stood by the elevators and surveyed the office area. The entire floor was packed with R&D engineers, well over two hundred of them.

In just a few short months, Zhou Chuangxi and Daniel had poached numerous senior engineers specializing in algorithms, natural language processing, and voice recognition from UIUC, Johns Hopkins, Huake University, and the labs of companies like Microsoft and Google.

A headhunting firm could never have been this efficient.

But under the guise of just ”catching up,” Zhou Chuangxi and Daniel had poached everyone from their former professors to their underclassmen, not even sparing classmates and colleagues.

The moment these people heard that a tech company across the ocean had spent a fortune on a server cluster capable of 15 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, they were hooked.

With little to no hesitation, they were on planes to Xucheng.

For the small handful who were harder to convince, a ten-minute conversation with Chen Yansen was usually enough to ”persuade” seventy to eighty percent of them.

Zhou Chuangxi and Daniel both agreed that these people were won over by Chen Yansen’s sincerity, his superb programming skills, and the generous compensation packages.

In reality, Chen Yansen couldn’t be bothered with such trifles. He simply channeled his Spiritual Power, infusing it into his voice. Barely twenty to thirty percent of people could resist his ”persuasion.”

Moss was about to launch, which meant the products that would feature it needed to be ready for the market as well.

However, Orange Technology’s new autumn lineup would have to wait. After all, the market potential of the Orange C2 and Orange D1 hadn’t been fully tapped yet.

Launching new products too frequently would only lead to unnecessary losses.

Back in his office, Chen Yansen called Lin Qingbai.

”Boss, you mean we should combine a speaker with a smart voice assistant to create a Smart Speaker that utilizes natural language processing, cloud computing, and IoT technology?”

Lin Qingbai was taken aback and asked for confirmation.

”What are the challenges on the system and hardware side?” Chen Yansen countered.

”We can build it, but the bill of materials cost for a single unit could exceed 600 yuan. Even if we use all domestic components, it would still be over 400 yuan. From a commercial standpoint, the retail price would have to be at least 800 yuan,” Lin Qingbai tactfully reminded him.

The unspoken message was that this Smart Speaker wouldn’t sell very well.

”Don’t worry about profitability. The core market for the Moss Smart Speaker isn’t domestic.”

Chen Yansen replied with a smile.

He already had a plan in mind before making the call: the overseas market would be the main battleground for marketing and promotion.

After all, in 2012, dedicated AI voice recognition chips didn’t exist. The only option was a workaround using a general-purpose processor, a DSP chip, and voice recognition software, which naturally kept material costs high.

However, high cost didn’t necessarily mean low sales or a narrow audience.

Two years from now, Amazon would launch its Echo Smart Speaker at a steep price of 199 US dollars, and it would still sell three million units in a single year.

The earlier the Moss Smart Speaker was released, the greater the shock it would send through the world.

Perhaps a decade or so from now, no one would find a smart voice assistant to be anything special.

But launching it now would be like giving a smartphone to someone who had only ever used a feature phone.

Chen Yansen estimated the market had a potential of at least one billion US dollars annually, which was no small sum.

’If the cost is high, then set the price high!’

Lin Qingbai grunted in acknowledgment and then delved deeper into Chen Yansen’s design requirements to help him formulate a product plan.

An hour later, Chen Yansen finally hung up.

’What’s the point of just selling cheap stuff?’

He already had it all figured out. He would partner with *Star Trek*’s copyright holder, Paramount Pictures, sell the Smart Speaker as movie merchandise, and they would all cash in together.

Even the product name for the overseas market was ready-made: the Alexa Smart Speaker.

That dreamlike feeling of a movie becoming reality would be hard for anyone to resist.

「3:00 PM. Main conference room, Pinbei Headquarters.」

CEO Huang Zheng presided over the meeting, with all department heads in attendance.

Chen Yansen sat on the side, just observing. Since Huang Zheng had taken over, his own workload had lightened considerably; he had offloaded all Pinbei-related affairs onto Lao Huang.

”After May, Pinbei will undergo its first UI redesign. The overall direction will remain the same. The main change will be fixing the Kuai Pao and Fast Taxi icons to the homepage. In addition, the product department is launching two new features: ’Multi-Buy’ and ’Pinbei Orchard.’ Zhuang Rui will now present the detailed product plan.”

Huang Zheng spoke with confidence.

’Anyone who can build a trillion-dollar company from scratch is no simple fool.’

At thirty-two, Huang Zheng was already beginning to show his formidable prowess on the grand stage of Pinbei.

Huang Zheng’s contributions were indispensable to Pinbei emerging as the ultimate victor in the ”418 E-commerce Festival” battle.

Starting the event early, ending it late, distributing huge subsidized ”red envelopes,” and teaming up with WeChat to throw old Business Community veterans like Jingdong, Sunning, and Gome into disarray—it was all Huang Zheng’s handiwork.

It was also his machinations that led to the dumping of Sunning’s stock, which in turn provoked the ire of Zhang Jindong and Liu Qiangdong.

After this series of maneuvers, Pinbei’s mid- to high-level management came to a single conclusion: Huang Zheng was a devious, shameless, and utterly ruthless man.

”Okay, Mr. Huang. I’ll start by introducing the design concept for Pinbei Orchard. We’ve considered that some of our lower-tier merchants need paid promotion options, and new user traffic is about to hit its ceiling. Therefore, the focus for the product, operations, and advertising departments must shift from user acquisition to user retention...”

Zhuang Rui nodded, picking up where Huang Zheng left off.

Pinbei’s total user base had already reached three hundred million, but this brought its own set of problems: the cost and difficulty of acquiring new users were steadily increasing.

With fewer than six hundred million internet users in the entire country, and after factoring out those uninterested in online shopping, Pinbei’s user ceiling for 2012 was five hundred million at most.

Therefore, retention had become far more important than acquisition.

Chen Yansen listened for a bit before pulling out his phone and scrolling through the news.

Ganjie.com and WoWo Group had formed a strategic partnership to jointly operate their Group Buy businesses. WoWo Mall was now integrated into Ganjie.com as its own channel.

One platform lacked traffic, the other lacked a means of monetization. For the sake of survival, this kind of deeply integrated partnership was actually a pretty good solution.

*IT Times Weekly* published an article titled ”The Lavish After-Hours Lives of Taobao Managers,” exposing the dark underbelly of e-commerce to the public.

The Taobao headquarters was surrounded by luxury cars, and nearby karaoke bars were packed every night. To get their products featured in promotional events, merchants treated the Taobao managers like gods.

In the comments section, people flooded in to share their own experiences, describing the arrogance of these managers and how they would secretly demand fees for better search rankings.

Ah Li quickly issued a response, announcing they would immediately launch an internal investigation and improve their oversight systems.

Chen Yansen just smiled faintly. ’Unless the power of auditing and resource allocation is handed over to an AI,’ he thought, ’it’s impossible to completely stamp out this kind of corruption.’

’Are there no grafters at Pinbei?’

’Of course there are!’

The third news story was about the Lingxi Browser. Two months after its launch, its cumulative user count had surpassed one million.

That was more than ten times lower than Toutiao’s numbers.

”Penguin must be just about ready to make their move,” he mused.

Chen Yansen narrowed his eyes and muttered to himself. ’Zhang Yiming is too sharp-edged right now. He needs to be polished down a bit before he’ll be truly useful.’

「At the same time.」

The Yanjing Copyright Association headquarters received a joint complaint from six companies, including Penguin, Sohu, NetEase, and Sina, accusing the Lingxi Browser of scraping their news content without permission.

Given the high-profile nature and influence of the complainants, the Copyright Association immediately decided to open an investigation.

Zhang Yiming hadn’t bothered to hide his tracks when scraping the data. The browser’s homepage was filled with content from the major news portals, making the infringement painfully obvious.

Although Byte was now a tech company with a million users, compared to giants like Penguin and NetEase, it was like an ant trying to shake a tree.

The Copyright Association immediately notified the Cyberspace Administration Association and the Industry and Information Technology Association. They also gave the Inspection Institute a heads-up and requested that the head of the company come in for questioning.

At 7:15 that evening, at Byte headquarters, Zhang Yiming received a call from the Inspection Institute.

”Penguin, NetEase, and the others filed a copyright complaint against Byte? And I have to go to the Inspection Institute now?”

Zhang Yiming’s face went pale as he asked, his voice filled with anxiety.

He had assumed that by the time giants like Penguin and NetEase even noticed Byte, he would have already built up his initial user base and resources.

Then, worst-case scenario, he could just delete the infringing content, promise to make corrections, and pay a fine to make the problem go away.

But he never expected that just two months after launch, Lingxi would already be in Penguin’s crosshairs.

This was big trouble!

Realizing this, he quickly agreed to their request on the phone before immediately calling Chen Yansen.

He knew that Senlian Capital had a good relationship with Penguin. If Chen Yansen was willing to intervene, he could make this big problem small, and this small problem disappear entirely.

”President Chen, Penguin has joined forces with NetEase, Sina, Sohu, and others. They’ve filed a complaint with the Copyright Association headquarters against Byte for infringement. Can you please step in and help mediate?”

Zhang Yiming got straight to the point as soon as the call connected.