The first day of the 6th edition of the CHINICT kicked off with CHINICT President Franck Nazikian onstage, welcoming everyone. After welcomes from CHINICT President of Honour Senator Michel Guerry (from the French Senate), Jing Rui (Zhongguancun Science Park Project Officer), Jerome Broche (EU Trade Counselor (ICT) to China & Mongolia) and John Chiang (President, US IT Organization – USITO), things got off to a good start for the morning.

Franck (@franckn5) and Jeremy Goldkorn from Danwei (@goldkorn) interviewed people in charge of a who’s who of Chinese IT bigs — starting off with Feng Jun’s Aigo with his story of building Aigo from keyboards to next-generation multimedia players (MP7s, anyone?). Wukong, Exmart, Borqs, Ushi.cn and Tencent were also interviewed. Lunch came early, and was a great chance to interact with fellow conference people, especially those on Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare.

In the afternoon, CNN.com’s Lara Farrar kicked things off first with an interview with Kaixin001, before Franck and Jeremy interviewed 3g.cn, KookyPanda, PPLive, Yeepay and 360.cn, more names in the Chinese IT industry. The highlight of the afternoon were Franck’s interviews with Dave McClure (@davemcclure) and Mark Suster (@msuster), flying in all the way from the US.

Tomorrow the event continues with Kai-Fu Lee kicking things off in the morning. As usual, techblog86 will be covering the whole event. Meanwhile, here’s a selection of the action outside…