Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

Outside the window, the autumn rain drizzled steadily, creating a bleak scene.

With the hot sales of products like the Orange Mobile Phone, the Moss (Alexa) Smart Speaker, and power banks—complemented by offline channels like the Orange Intelligent Life Halls and Cloud Speed Express Service Stations, as well as OEM orders from Xiaomi, 360, NetEase, and Huawei—the production capacity of Luzhou Factory No. 4 was nearing saturation.

During the morning meeting, after speaking with Cao Dahua and Cai Jingming, he planned to purchase a plot of industrial land near Luzhou Factory No. 4 this month. The goal was to convert it into a new production base in preparation for 2013.

In short, the Orange Phone Factory’s workforce would expand once again, creating an estimated 20,000 new jobs.

When Tao Jingwen heard the news, he immediately vowed to personally handle all the paperwork and policy issues, guaranteeing that the Luzhou Factory’s new production line would be operational before Q2 of next year.

Chen Yansen chuckled, exchanged a few pleasantries, and hung up the phone.

He had just learned from Tao Jingwen that he had been given the title of executive director of the Huian Chamber of Commerce.

He knew exactly what those old geezers at the chamber of commerce were like. ’They can give me a title, but they shouldn’t expect to get a single cent of benefit out of me.’

’Want resources? No problem!’

’Bring me something of value in return!’

Half an hour later, the rain stopped. A gentle breeze blew by, and the sky began to brighten.

Chen Yansen pushed open his door, about to head downstairs, when he ran right into Gao Weilin, who was on his way in.

"Boss, Cao Weiguo from Sina has announced that they plan to open a financing round for Weibo. Should we buy a stake?"

Gao Weilin stopped and spoke slowly.

’Weibo?’

Chen Yansen thought for a moment, then shook his head and declined.

In his view, Weibo’s ability to monetize was extremely weak. If the only value was in user data, strengthening their social media presence, or expanding traffic gateways, there was no need to invest. Senlian Capital already had better alternatives: Toutiao and the Lingxi Browser.

Furthermore, a short-video project was already in development. Liang Bo was preparing to establish a branch in the Lighthouse Country in early December to compete with the internet giants in Europe and America for market share in the short-video space.

"Yes, Boss. I understand," Gao Weilin replied with a nod.

"Come take a walk with me."

After speaking, Chen Yansen started walking ahead on his own.

Gao Weilin acknowledged and hurried to catch up.

...

...

「Five days later, at 10:00 AM.」

Orange Technology, in partnership with the YY Platform, held its first-ever live stream to introduce its new products to users.

Li Ling, the founder of YY Live, did them a huge favor. He charged only a nominal advertising fee before pushing over ten million impressions to Orange Technology’s stream.

The homepages of Toutiao, Lingxi Browser, and the Orange Application Mall all featured a link to the live stream.

External traffic reached the 20-million level!

So, as soon as the clock struck ten, the number of viewers in the stream skyrocketed, quickly surpassing one hundred thousand.

At that moment, Wang Teng, dressed in a blue suit, walked onto the stage in the Sky Garden’s banquet hall and smiled at the camera.

Suddenly!

The stream went black, and over a million people were disconnected at once!

"Hello everyone, I’m Wang from Orange Technology..." Unaware of the situation, Wang Teng began his opening remarks at a steady pace, following the script.

"President Wang, sorry, please wait! The server crashed! The technical department is making emergency adjustments," a staff member from YY Live shouted from below the stage, waving his hands.

’The server crashed?’

Wang Teng froze for a second before it registered. He couldn’t help but ask curiously, "It crashed with just a hundred thousand users?"

After all, when he had spoken with Li Ling, the man had sworn up and down that during last year’s YY Annual Gala, the main stream had peaked at as many as one million concurrent viewers.

With YY Live’s back-end encoding efficiency, distributed architecture, CDN coverage, and other technologies, it should have been more than enough to handle Orange Technology’s online launch event.

’But now, before he could even finish a sentence, the stream had actually crashed?’

"President Wang, between 10:00 and 10:03, over 1.2 million viewers flooded in all at once, far exceeding the server’s maximum capacity," the YY Live employee replied sheepishly, feeling utterly humiliated.

「Meanwhile.」

After receiving the news, Li Ling rushed to the technical department, called over the person in charge, and demanded, "Can you fix it? When will it be resolved?"

Orange Technology was backed by Senlian Capital. Its status and influence in the domestic internet investment circle were in no way inferior to established investment firms like Siwei, Gao Ling, or Qiming.

If they messed up this collaboration, a single word from Chen Yansen could influence how the entire investment community viewed YY Live.

Moreover, YY Live had just gone public a few days ago. If this news got out, their stock price could take a hit.

"President Li, this is a bit tricky. In the past, we used multi-line CDN nodes, server cluster optimization, and client-side caching strategies to barely manage million-viewer level traffic distribution. But the latency was high and the buffering was severe, as you probably know."

The head of the technical department said with a troubled expression.

Before the popularization of 4G networks and the maturation of cloud service technology, a million concurrent viewers was the load limit for a single stream.

"Are you telling me that the number of viewers in Orange Technology’s stream exceeded one million?" Li Ling asked in disbelief.

You have to understand, to boost platform traffic, YY Live often invited second-tier or even first-tier singers for interactive live streams, hosting events like new song releases and fan meet-and-greets. But even then, a single stream would at most get 700,000 to 800,000 viewers.

"To be precise, it was 1.267 million. If the server hadn’t crashed, it probably would have surpassed two million," the department head explained.

"I want to hear solutions," Li Ling said with a wave of his hand, questioning urgently.

"Split the stream! We can push Orange Technology’s video feed to multiple channels. However, we’ll still have issues with latency and buffering, and the consistency of the interactive experience will be greatly diminished," the department head blurted out.

"Is there no other way?" Li Ling asked again, his brow furrowed.

"Actually, the best solution would be to pre-record and then offer it as video-on-demand. That would solve the network latency issue and also improve the video quality."

The department head hesitated for a dozen seconds before proposing a new idea.

"Fine. Let’s go with splitting the stream for now," Li Ling chose the first technical solution.

’As for pre-recording? He was too embarrassed to even suggest that to Wang Teng! If they were going to pre-record it, why would Orange Technology even need YY Live? Couldn’t they just use Penguin Video or Youku?’

"Understood, President Li," the department head nodded.

In reality, he had already worked out a technical strategy with his subordinates before Li Ling had even arrived.

The Orange users in front of their computer and phone screens were still waiting!

Keywords like "YY Live server crashed," "YY only lasts three minutes," and "Orange Technology live stream" shot up the trending topics lists, and the comment sections were filled with angry posts.

"It’s been fifteen minutes. Can YY Live handle this or not?"

"Customer service told me to wait a moment."

"@LiLing @YYLive Either you can do it or you can’t. What’s this ’wait a moment’ nonsense?"

"I heard today’s launch is for two new products: a tablet and a laptop."

It wasn’t until 10:39 AM that Orange Technology’s stream finally came back online. Netizens immediately clicked to enter.

For every 500,000 viewers, the YY Platform would automatically split the stream.

The launch, originally scheduled for 10:00, ended up being delayed by a full 40 minutes.

’3.94 million?’

Li Ling stared at the back-end data and subconsciously swallowed. He suddenly felt that collaborating with Orange Technology was the wisest decision he had ever made.

After the event, he could add another million to that number and publicly announce that a single YY Live stream had broken the 5-million-viewer record. Not only would that let them cash in on the hype, but it would also boost their stock price.

"Sorry to keep you all waiting. Next, I will introduce two new products from Orange Technology: the Orange Pad 1 and the Orange MagicBook laptop."

Wang Teng reappeared on screen and said with a smile.

The Orange Pad 1 was equipped with a quad-core Tegra 3 processor and featured a 9.7-inch touchscreen with a resolution of 2048x1536. The standard memory configuration was 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. It supported 1080P video playback, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, multi-touch, GPS, and gravity sensing functions.

The operating system was a deeply customized Aurora OS 1.46, with the embedded Moss voice interaction engine. It had a 5-megapixel front-facing camera and a 12-megapixel rear-facing camera.

Wang Teng went through the features one by one, comparing the core specs of the Orange Pad 1 with Apple’s iPad 4 and Mountain Star’s N8000.

The screen size was on par with the iPad 4 and slightly smaller than the Mountain Star N8000.

The camera’s pixel count completely crushed Apple and Mountain Star. Plus, Orange Technology’s camera algorithm was nothing to scoff at, producing imaging quality that was in no way inferior.

Its massive 7000mAh battery provided an ultra-long standby time of 600 hours. Under heavy use, it could last for 11 to 13 hours. The battery life was astounding, more than 10% longer than that of the iPad 4 and the Mountain Star N8000.

"The price for the 16GB standard edition is 1999 yuan!"

An hour later, Wang Teng slowly revealed the launch price.

The moment he heard the price, Yu Chendong, who was watching the live stream, felt the corner of his mouth twitch as he sucked in a sharp breath.