Open Web Asia: Web Innovation in Asia

BY ASEL, ON July 17TH, 2010

For the two days (13-14 July) i was attending splendiferous event in Kuala Lumpur. My friend from FIT grabbed two free tickets for us. To your knowledge the ticket price was 200 RM. Now you can understand how huge and how splendid that event was.

First day. At 7 am in the morning my friend woke me up since in the given schedule we should have been there at 8 am for registration. Struggling with morning preparation we did n`t  know what we should have dressed up. Formal or not?? Take laptop or leave? Many questions.

We reached that place at 9 am due to traffic jam nearby KL. That event took place in Crowne Plaza Mutiara Hotel. I and my friend were impressed how that hotel was huge, rich and luxurious!!! After we signed in, we were given the brochure, it was kinda the big folder where we found schedule for two days, pen and some other things. Then we entered  a huge Hall, it was called Nirwana 1. There the first speech began. I should have mentioned before that during those two days various speakers would give their speeches. The speakers were from Japan, Korea, Singapore, China, Malaysia and etc.

For the first speech “Growing Digital in Asia-Overview of Asia Web Industry” (that speech i like the most). The speakers were Mohan Belani (director, E27), Michael Francis Smith Jr. (Directore Global Initiative, Yahoo) ,Chang W. Kim (Founder, Open Web Asia) and Dr. Serkan Toto (Editor, TechCrunch). You can find it here: http://sea.openwebasia.com/

They were discussing how developed and what happens in Web Industry in countries like Japan, Korea, Singapore.

Japan is the most developed among all other countries and so Korea is. Some parts of their talks sounded so amazing for me and my friend, we actually didnot know so many things about those countries. In Japan, they buy everything online from the smallest things to biggest, they even can buy it from their cell phone. What was the most outstanding to hear that they even can buy a burger with the cell phone by just applying it to a sensor device. ^^

During our lunch and various tea breaks we had a network session as well. It was written in our schedule: “Lunch and network session”. In the beginning we could not get why they wrote network session. Then we got it. It means that during our lunch we should communicate to people. That event was actually aimed to bring many people together and make them exchange the  information..and simply to communicate.

For the second day,  we attended another various speeches. The most interesting was about “Mobile OS- Android vs iPhone” by Aaron Tan  and also “Understanding the power of Geo-Location services” by Richard Coombes.

Then we went to get our long-waited lunch. We found a table and went to grab as many food as we could (joke), especially cheese cake which we both  like so much! After we returned to our table, we found many people sat with us. I looked at a friend of mine and she  looked at me, we thought about the same thing: “OMG! These are so famous and Big people next to us!”

That Big people were very nice to us. And they just simply talked to us as we were the same level with them. They asked us about our country (we are from Kazakhstan), and they said that not many  people are familiar with our country. Then they advised us to advertise with the  means of Web… by blogging and sending them articles about fresh news in our country.. 

After those splendid lunch we went to Nirwana 1 hall. There we met one man, who is an educator, a  technologist and a traveler. I liked his speech very much. It was about his recent travels in Asia. He took pictures of how people there were dealing with Web, how they used it. It was interesting to know that people are so creative in using there cell-phones and Webs to ease their lives. He told about one guy in Africa, who used his phone in fishing.. The idea was that when a fish was in the fishing net, he received sms to his phone!
I made our two day adventure so briefly here, but i wish to say again, those two days were like a revolution, meeting people, talking to them and exchanging the information, all of it is worth to miss my two days in university….