TechNode is the leading English information source for news and insight into China’s tech and startups. Having lived in Beijing for almost a decade, John was previously Director of Technical Communications at CSOFT and a radio host and Assistant Programs Director at China Radio International. He loves talking about innovative products and business models, big ideas that are changing the world, and compelling communication in various mediums. He currently hosts the podcast called China Tech Talk.

Vineet Budki is the CEO & Founder of Guiddoo World. He founded Guiddoo, initially an audio guide that later pivoted to a marketplace for tours and activities in 2013, with the objective of giving Indian Travellers great In-Destination Experiences, ie. tours and activities, dining, shopping and entertainment.

Vineet has developed a deep understanding of the travel and leisure sector, having spent the last 15 years immersed in technology, travel and the airline industry, working with like Rocket Internet, Emirates Airlines, Paytronic Networks and Tata Consultancy Services. He started his first company, Butel, in 2009 - an online comparator for destination, travel and hospitality services - which later became the online arm of Videocon d2h.

Vineet is well-known in the start-up and travel community and is a great orator. Successful stints include speaking at “TravelTechMe – Dubai”, “Travel Tech MENASA – Dubai”, SATTE Conference - India, IITT Conference India, Mekong Tourism Forum - Vietnam, Cambodia, and splits his working life between India, Singapore, UAE and now China.

He completed his B.Tech in Civil Engineering at NIT Calicut, and pursued his MBA at IE Business School & Cornell University.

Barbara Ex is the Founder and CEO of WhiteSpace, a sharing economy business that offers flexible, affordable short-term meeting and training room space. WhiteSpace has been profitable since the day it opened its doors and is now scaling to become the complete O2O platform for meeting and training support in China. Barbara’s lifelong interest has been the application of cutting-edge technology to open new markets, enable strategy and transform existing business models.

Before moving to the start-up world, Barbara served as Executive Director of Business Transformation at Lenovo in Beijing, where she led internal transformation teams which included CRM, Industry 4.0, Supply Chain and Marketing Analytics. Earlier, she was a Principle Consultant at IBM, where she led many of the first company-wide e-business projects for European MNCs.

Barbara moved to China in 2005 and has almost 15 years of experience working in both multinational and Chinese companies. She holds an MBA from London Business School and both Bachelor and Masters’ Degrees in Chemical Engineering from MIT.

An Englishman by birth who spent his childhood in Asia, Lewis Harding has over 10 years of career work experience in international business and trade, spanning China, Africa and Latin America. He started life as a banker at Barclays based in London before moving back out to Asia. A serial entrepreneur with a deep passion for coffee, Lewis believes in creating businesses that provide real, positive value to their stakeholders and the world in general as the key to long term success.

Lewis founded The Coffee Exchange to develop technologies that streamline and increase transparency in critical supply chains in the global coffee industry. The Exchange platform utilizes IoT logistics tracking to enable full traceability, blockchain to ensure authentic sales records for farmers, which then provides pre-financing and liquidity, as well as data sets for AI ranging from coffee characteristics to supply chain efficiency. The platform is transforming coffee pricing and the supply chain.

When not marketing coffee in China, Lewis can be found at the company’s operations in Rwanda and Ecuador. Lewis is a graduate of Queen Mary University London with a M. Science Degree in Business Economics. He is also an avid traveller, having visited over half of the world’s countries.