I recently spent time meeting with startup founders, employees and investors in Beijing and Shanghai to get a better sense of what the tech community has been talking about. It’s a great time of year to take the pulse. Friends and co-workers gather for lavish parties for the Chinese New Year, which was celebrated Feb. 16 and marks the start of the Year of the Dog.

Those discussions suggest we should pay attention to three companies:

• Bytedance, the company behind the wildly popular personally tailored news and video feed app Jinri Toutiao;
• Kuaishou, a short-video streaming app backed by Tencent and Sequoia Capital China;
• The viral e-commerce app Pinduoduo.