DEF CON is one of the largest and oldest security conferences in the world. Last year, it launched a beta event in China in hopes of bringing the local security communities closer together. This year, the organizer made things official by introducing DEF CON China 1.0 with a promise to build a forum for China where everyone can gather, connect, and grow together.

Themed "Technology's Promise", DEF CON China kicked off on 5/30 in Beijing and attracted participants of all ages. Watching young participants test, play and tinker with new technologies with such curiosity and excitement absolutely warmed our hearts!

It was a pleasure to participate in DEF CON China 1.0 this year and connect with local communities. Great synergy as we exchanged ideas and learnings on cybersecurity topics. Did I mention we also spoiled ourselves with the warm hospitality, wonderful food, live music, and amazing crowd while in Beijing.

Event Highlights: Cloudflare Team Meets with DEF CON China Visitors and Organizers (DEF CON Founder Jeff Moss and Baidu Security General Manager Jefferey Ma)

Meet our youngest and cutest attendee today at BugZee village. Meet 8 year old "Joy" from Beijing who did phenomenal soldering. Amazing crowd at @defcon China. pic.twitter.com/ub1qpGyGso

— Abhinav SP | #BugZee, DEFCON China (@TweetsFromPanda) May 31, 2019

Youngest DEF CON China Participant Explores New Technologies on the Eve of International Children's Day. (Source: Abhinav SP | #BugZee, DEFCON China )

All my root lights are on! #unlocked #DEFCONChina 1.0 @defcon #badgelife @Hyr0n1 ?? pic.twitter.com/YXJDW0vuds

— donds (@donds) May 31, 2019

The Iconic DEF CON Badge, Designed by Joe Grand, is a Flexible Printed Circuit Board that Lights up the Interactive "Tree of Promise".

The Capture The Flag (CTF) Contest is a Continuation of One of the Oldest Contests at DEF CON Dating Back to DEF CON 4 in 1996.

Founded in 2009, Cloudflare is a global company with 180 data centers across 80 countries. Our Performance and Security Services work in conjunction to reduce latency of websites, mobile applications, and APIs end-to-end, while protecting against DDoS attack, abusive bots, and data breach.

We are looking forward to growing our presence in the region and continuing to serve our customers, partners, and prospects. Sign up for a free account now for a faster and safer Internet experience: cloudflare.com/sign-up.

We are a team with global vision and local insight committed to building a better Internet. We are hiring in Beijing and globally. Check out the opportunities here: cloudflare.com/careers and join us at Cloudflare today!

The Cloudflare Team from Beijing, Singapore, and San Francisco

Earlier this year, we launched a team to focus on global expansion and growth. In June, we presented our agile global market expansion experiment framework at LocWorld Barcelona and wanted to report back on how things were going.

"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart" – Nelson Mandela

At Cloudflare, we are motivated by our users from all around the world. Of our top 15 countries by traffic volume, 10 have official languages other than English. As a large part of our users do not speak our primary language of business, our priority is to reach and engage with these users in their native languages through localization.

As a growing company, we wanted to build a scalable and repeatable experiment framework and use data to inform our localization strategy. Therefore, we took our highest performing campaign and localized the core content into three languages spoken in our top traffic sources and revenue markets: French, German, and Spanish. We then ran the campaign as a split test in these target markets in English (control) and the local languages (variation).

As illustrated in the charts below, the localized campaign has far outperformed the English campaign in the target markets across all metrics: engagement, conversion, and cost savings. This validates our hypothesis that localization drives better reach, relevance, and resonance and is highly effective in satisfying our growing international demand.

This quick win helped us to benchmark and further build our localization investment case. From here, we will continue to take an agile and performance-based localization approach to guide our users from campaigns to our site, and further into our onboarding flow in the three core languages. In addition, we are running similar tests in four more languages: Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and Italian, to capture the increasing demand in emerging markets.

In order to prioritize localization investments and maximize growth, we follow the 80/20 rule to cover core vs. new emerging markets. We also use a handy formula to keep track of ongoing localization ROI and avoid investing in wrong areas with diminishing returns:

What has your experience been in going global with localization? Drop us a line or e-mail Claire at: claire@cloudflare.com. We will be sharing more updates and learnings at the upcoming LocWorld Silicon Valley in November and look forward to seeing you there!

We have some exciting new positions open globally. Check out Cloudflare’s latest job opportunities here and apply to join our dynamic team today!