Web 2.0 Asia

Open Web Asia, the conference that I created together with some good folks, was last held in October 2008. In 2009, we nearly held the Open Web Asia '09, but the plan faltered as the main sponsor backed off at the last minute (and besides I was too busy having my freshman year at Google.)

But the good spirit lives on, and a group of energetic and capable folks in Malaysia rekindled the pulled off the South East Asia version of Open Web Asia -- dubbed "Open Web Asia South East Asia" or "OWA-SEA". It's a very long name, but as I expect the future Open Web Asia conferences to take place in various cities in Asia, I think it makes more sense if we just go with the city-as-the-postfix system, a la TEDx. 

Open Web Asia SEA will be held in KL, Malaysia next week. The conference will host great local speakers (and some foreign ones including myself, and Serkan Toto over at Techcrunch), and the conference has already seen 270+ registrants. (You can register here.) I'm really hoping this to become yet another successful Open Web Asia conference.

The guy who is doing the bulk of heavy-lifting for this conference is Daniel CerVentus. Daniel and I exchanged many emails and I'm really looking forward to meeting him in person finally. He and I have a lot to catch up, as we both know what it takes to pull off a conference of this scale.

Another heads-up for the Open Web Asia conference is that Dr. Gang Lu and his gang (no pun intended ;-) are preparing another Open Web Asia in Taiwan, hopefully to be held this year. Yet another good news is that we have started talks for sponsorship for Open Web Asia Seoul 2011, and it looks very promising so far. (It's too early to share any plans at this point though.)

For any future Open Web Asia's, I will check back and share any progresses; For the upcoming one in Malaysia, I will try to cover any interesting companies that catches my attention. But I'm sure Serkan will do a much better job spotting and introducing interesting services anyway. 

Sorry about the long blogging silence -- ever since I became the main product manager at Google's Blogger, I've been too swamped. I am learning tons of new stuff these days, and those are definitely worth a separate post later on.

I figured a good place to pick up from where I left off with my blogging was recapping on the Geeks on a Plane Seoul, a conference held about a month ago in Seoul. About 20 "geeks" from Silicon Valley and the rest of the world flew all the way to Asia and spent nearly three weeks learning about Asia's IT and Web (while at it, of course, doing lots of social drinking and friendship building.)

I organized the Seoul leg of the conference and it was a blast. Given the short time we had (only one full Sunday), Geeks on a Plane Seoul was squarely focused on startup pitches. Though some companies left room for improvement in their deliveries (Korean startups should hone their elevator pitch skills!), in general the pitches were very good.

Thanks to our brave journalist Serkan Toto, we had a very good coverage on Techcrunch. If you are a startup in Seoul Korea, you don't get to be featured on Techcrunch every day. Especially, John Kim of Paprika Lab had the honor of having his big headshot featured on the Techcrunch post. I met with one of the startup CEOs that pitched in GOAP, and he said his company has seen a new, increased level of interest from investors and other folks after the Techcrunch post. 

There is also a blog with detailed introductions to some of the companies that presented in the GOAP Seoul. The blog is here, and it's running on none other than Google's Blogger platform (what a coincidence! :-)

Hope the next year's GOAP will stop by Korea too - next time, hopefully with more folks (so we can have a bigger party!)