The Byte Pico team has dug up another “Xiaomi person”.
On July 22, according to media reports, former Xiaomi design director Nan Dier has now joined ByteDance. At present, the public information of Maimai App shows that Nandier’s personal authentication has been changed to: ByteDance Pico social design director.
Interestingly, just last month, Ma Jiesi, the former head of Xiaomi VR and founder of the virtual image social entertainment application “Vyou”, was also revealed to have joined ByteDance. It is reported that as early as May, Ma Jiesi had changed Maimai’s personal authentication to “Head of ByteDance Pico Social Center”.
In addition to Ma Jiesi himself, the wave particle technology he founded was also acquired by ByteDance. And his original team of more than 50 people has also been integrated into the Pico social center.
Leifeng.com learned that since August 2021, ByteDance spent 9 billion yuan to acquire Pico, and it has begun to increase its investment in the field of VR content.
At the personnel level, ByteDance continues to recruit troops for Pico on a large scale.
One is to poach relevant professionals from big companies such as Xiaomi;
The second is to transfer personnel from within Byte and transfer them to Pico to be responsible for related business;
The third is to release recruitment positions on a large scale. It is reported that there are as many as 291 recruitment positions for Pico, which are distributed in Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao and other regions. The positions involve server-side development engineers, ergonomics experts, visual perception algorithm engineers, software testing, Battery experts, etc.
Judging from the information that has been exposed so far, the Pico team has a strong lineup of executives.
As mentioned at the beginning of the article, Nan Dier and Ma Jisi, two former Xiaomi people, joined Pico one after another, and they are also responsible for Pico’s social business, which has caused a lot of discussion in the outside world.
Not only that, the work background of the two people in Xiaomi is also highly related to the VR business.
According to the data, Nandir joined Xiaomi in 2016 and served as the design director during the period. He has set up a Xiaomi Technology intelligent hardware design team, responsible for the experience design of three platform-level core product lines: Xiaomi AI speaker, Xiaomi VR and Xiaomi router. Among them, he led the brand naming, design and IP operation of Xiaomi voice assistant “Xiao Ai”. .
In the early years, Nandier also worked in Rococo Design, serving as ID designer, service designer and interaction design leader. He joined Baidu around 2012 and was responsible for the experience design of Baidu Netdisk, Baidu Smart Hardware and other projects.
Ma Jiesi also served as the senior director of VR and AR at Xiaomi.
As the helm of Xiaomi VR, Ma Jiesi led the cooperation between Xiaomi and the international VR headset giant Oculus, and jointly launched the Oculus GO China version, the Xiaomi VR all-in-one machine. In 2016, Ma Jisi started to develop a VR social product called “Mi World”.
The resume shows that Ma Jiesi graduated from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics with a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree from Peking University, and a doctorate from George Mason University in the United States. In the early years, he was an early member of Geling Shentong, and later joined HTC VIVE as the head of VR industry applications.
In addition to introducing external talents, since March this year, ByteDance has successively transferred a number of Douyin executives to Pico to build content and marketing teams.
In other words, bytes are vigorously increasing the code element universe, and internal resources are also synchronously tilted towards the Pico department.
These transferred executives include: Ren Lifeng, head of Watermelon Video, Song Binghua, head of Douyin Variety Show, Wu Zuomin, Douyin Entertainment Director, and Ji Liyue, Douyin’s product design director, etc. They have all been transferred to the VR product department one after another.
Ren Lifeng is the earliest old employee of Byte and one of the founding teams of Douyin.
When TikTok was launched in 2016, the original person in charge was Ren Lifeng, who was the head of Douyin operations at the time, and was deeply involved in the construction process of Douyin from scratch. In 2018, Zhang Nan was in charge of the new TikTok after the merger of TikTok and Musical.ly. During the organizational adjustment in March 2020, Zhang Nan (male), the former head of Watermelon Video, was transferred away, and Ren Lifeng was in charge of Watermelon Video.
In March this year, according to a late report, Ren Lifeng was transferred to the Pico business, reporting to Pico founder Zhou Hongwei (internally known as “Henry”). The overall business of Pico is currently under the technical director Yang Zhenyuan.
And Song Binghua, who was the general manager of the Great Youku Variety Supervision Center of Ali Entertainment Group, served as the project leader of Youku Variety “Acting School”, “This! It is the director of popular programs such as Hip-hop” and “Mars Intelligence Agency”, and then transferred to the person in charge of Douyin variety show.
In addition, Ji Liyue, the original product design director of Douyin, had participated in the design of many important functions of Douyin products. After transferring to Pico, Ji Liyue participated in the virtual reality shooting interface, VR scene barrage interface and other functions. design.
Judging from the resumes of these people, these executives are all powerful players under Douyin. After ByteDance transfers them to Pico, there will be a major adjustment to Pico’s content ecology.
It is understood that the total number of Pico team has increased from 200 in September 2021 to more than 300, which is also the business that ByteDance will soon expand on a large scale in addition to Feishu and e-commerce.
Since 2021, ByteDance has made frequent moves, and two of the acquisitions have set industry records.
One of them was the acquisition of Mu Tong with US$4 billion, which became the largest acquisition in the history of domestic games. Another acquisition of VR company PICO for 9 billion let the outside world see Byte’s ambition to break through Tencent’s game defense line through the metaverse.
According to incomplete statistics, ByteDance has invested more than a dozen times in games, its territory is constantly expanding, and its categories are becoming more and more diverse, ranging from placement, SLG, MMO, shooting, chess and cards, etc. The Birth of a New Generation” created a turnover of 509 million yuan in less than 3 months.
Around the upstream and downstream of the VR industry chain, Byte has also made a careful layout.
He has successively invested in three chip companies including Guangzhou Semiconductor, Juxin Microelectronics, a provider of intelligent audio and optical solutions, and Zhongqu Technology, a VR digital twin cloud service provider.
In addition, Byte has partnered with XR chip supplier Qualcomm to develop future Pico XR products on Qualcomm’s development platform, Snapdragon Spaces.
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