Rita Huang and Natalie Yang (both MDEI '15) closely follow Waterloo Region's growing technology sector and write stories in Chinese that are published on their WeChat account.
Natalie Yang, left, and Rita Huang of W.I.T. Insider write about Waterloo Region's technology sector for audiences in China. - David Bebee, Record staff
They founded W.I.T. Insider in July 2016 to tell stories about the startup scene in this region to audiences in China. Their main outlet is a subscription account on WeChat, the Chinese mobile platform with 938 million active users. Their account has about 1,000 subscribers a little more than a year after W.I.T. Insider was founded.
"We found there is no Chinese media dedicated to reporting the tech innovation happening here, and this is becoming Silicon Valley North," Yang said during an interview at the Communitech Hub in the Tannery building in downtown Kitchener.
Huang and Yang both graduated from the University of Waterloo's Stratford campus in 2015 with master's of arts degrees in digital experience innovation. They studied business, project management, user experience design and social media marketing.
After graduating, they heard about a Chinese language website that covered Silicon Valley.
"We connected with them and they told us a lot of tips about how to do this," said Yang.
The duo interviews startup founders, attends pitch competitions and organizes social gatherings for Mandarin-speaking entrepreneurs. They want to build a sense of community among startup entrepreneurs in this area who are from China. And they want to help entrepreneurs from other parts of the world establish a presence on social media in China. [...]
Credit: Story as original published at www.uwaterloo.ca/arts
Read the full story in The Record.