Open Web Asia – The Overview
Arguably one of the biggest ICT industry related event ever held in Malaysia, Open Web Asia was a 2 days event held between 13th and 14th July 2010. With 27 speakers coming in from both internationally and locally, Open Web Asia was deemed a once in a life time experience for majority of the attendees.
Socialwalk was once again lucky enough to be afforded a wonderful opportunity to participate in this remarkable event as the official software partner, providing online ticketing, registration and Business Matching services.
As anticipated, many people arrived early despite the registration was scheduled to start at 8.00am on 13th July 2010. By 8.20am, more than 150 participants were processed by Socialwalk’s registration counter team and by 8.55am, we hit the magic number of more than 300 participants.
At exactly 9.00am, all participants were directed to the Grand Ball room for the welcoming remarks by none other than the founder of OWA, Chang W. Kim himself. This was immediately followed by an opening speech by the CEO of Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), Yang Bahagia Datuk Badlisham Ghazali.
By 10.30am, the event has launched into full swing, starting with Panel Forums. Socialwalk’s Business Matching services were also ran concurrently beginning at 10.30am and streched well into 6.00pm on the first day of the event. With the graces of the event organizer, we were provided with a decent sized, comfortable room named Negara Room as the business matching area. 10 tables were set up and from time to time, the tables were constantly filled with attendees.
Socialwalk also took the effort to bring in some of Open Web Asia’s speakers to participate in the Business Matching service. Some of the featured speakers include James Chen (Neoteny Labs), Stefan Pretz (Launchpad Malaysia) and Brian Wong (Digg.com). As these speakers had a packed schedule, they were only able to spend 2 hours in the Business Matching loungue but that did not deter many attendees from trying to get the chance to meet them.
The first day of Open Web Asia ended in an extremely high note and most attendees left with a high anticipation of what the 2nd day has to offer.
True enough, on the second day, we recorded our first ever attendee arrival at 7.20am. Talk about eagerness. By 8.30am, most of the attendees had arrived and immediately they were ushered to the ballrooms where talks were held. The registration counters were rather inactive as almost all attendees were already registered on the first day. However, the same cannot be said for the Business Matching area. The hustle and bustle in the Negara room started as early as 9.00am. A total of 100 business matching feedback forms were handed out by Socialwalk’s team members and by the end of the day we obtained back 74 forms. We do wonder what happened to the other 26 forms though. Nevertheless the reception for Business Matching services this time around were highly encouraging.
As Open Web Asia comes to close, many attendees were seen mingling around with a smile on their face. Clearly the first ever South East Asia Open Web Asia convention has been a huge success and exceed many expectations. Sure, everyone had worked hard (in a highly stressed situation too), but at the end of the day the results shown by the event absolutely made the tiredness, frustrations and stress went away. We in Socialwalk wishes to congratulate the event organizers for such great job done and for you out there, if you have been an attendee in Open Web Asia, we would like to say “Thank you for your support and see you next year!” (hopefully)