MOCOM2020

Alvin Graylin is CEO and Co-founder of mInfo Inc., the leader in mobile search in Asia. Alvin is a seasoned technology entrepreneur and business leader with over 16 years of management experience, eight of which are in Greater China. Alvin was born in China, and emigrated to the United States when he was nine. Growing up as the son of a Chinese artist father and Eurasian ballerina mother, Alvin has been exposed to a multicultural environment and personal creativity his whole life. He grew up in the US and graduated top of his class with a BS in Electrical engineering from the University of Washington, earned his MS in Computer Science from MIT, his MBA from MIT's Sloan School of Management. Mr. Graylin started his career on the technical side with IBM and then moved to Intel. Alvin is fluent in English, Mandarin and Cantonese, which has been invaluable in his ability to be productive in China. In 1994, he shifted to a more business track and returned to China to develop his career. He took on a 3 year assignment with Intel to help startup their Shanghai office and drive the consumer PC business this emerging market. He grew the business 6 fold in three years. Alvin later went on to oversee Asia Marketing for Intel Online Services, and soon after switched companies to drive the global Enterprise and Consumer divisions for Trend Micro while based in Taipei. In addition to his long corporate management track record, Alvin also has a rich history of entrepreneurial experiences having been the founder and CEO of three venture-backed technology start-ups. Two were in the US and mInfo based in China. Alvin co-founded mInfo in early 2005 with a long time friend, Derek Huang, after months of reviewing a number of potential start-up ideas related to the China market. The basis behind mInfo leveraged the skills and experiences of both founders and targeted a void in the market that would become quite sizable in the next few years. mInfo is now China's leading Mobile search and pull-based advertising company. mInfo services millions of Chinese users, thousands of advertisers and was recently named the official mobile search provider to the Beijing 2008 Olympics.

During the last 15 years, the real innovation on the internet in terms of applications, technology, and business model have primarily come out of the US. It’s not surprising that’s the case, as the Internet was started there and the US had more internet users than any other country in the world. (Although [...]