2 Articles for 'Benjamin Joffe'
- 2008/04/24 Progress update on the Asia Web Conference plan (14)
- 2008/03/19 Comparison between Asian social networks (2)
It's been some months since I wrote an open letter on this blog, proposing the first-ever Asia Web Conference (the final name of the conference is TBD).
Since that post, I've been talking to bloggers and web experts in Asia, in an "under the water" fashion. And within some weeks (early this year), we had kickstarted the project - here's a brief update.
We now have the following people as the organizers for the Asia Web Conference:
If you follow blogs about Asian web industry, you should be familiar with these names already. They are some of the best and brightest guys, I'm sure.
As you can see here, we need oranizers from other countries - most notably missing is Japan. If there's anyone reading this blog post from Japan who's interested in making this conference happen, come aboard! Just roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty, it will be fun.
For the last several weeks, we've been exchanging various ideas about the conference via Google Docs (which we're still doing). We recently put together the possible list of speakers and sponsors, and we now have 54 A-list potential speakers on our list. Of course this doesn't mean we'll have all 54 of them on our conference, but I'm sure we'll get some of the best speakers you can find in and out of Asia in our conference.
The central theme of this conference will be "social". We used a couple of criteria when we decided the conference theme: a) the topic should be about an area where Asia has unique strengths, b) the topic should be important/trendy enough to attract participants/speakers/sponsors, and c) it should be where each Asian country has its own market-dominating player, so that some nice cross-country comparisons can be made. We came up with "mobile" and "social" as two best possible topics, and we finally chose "social". Social isn't such a terribly narrow topic either, but the topic shouldn't have to be too restrictive either, we believe.
We still haven't decided on the venue. Well, we didn't even decide which country to hold the conference in, for that matter - I'm still rooting for China but there's the Olympics logistics issue, and the visa requirement doesn't help either. I'm also looking at Korea too, part of the reason being I'm kind of being the main guy pushing this and Korea is my home turf where I can get some help from companies and even the government more easily.
As always, what matters most is the money side. We should find sponsors and come up with the financial plan. To do that, we need big-name speakers, and to do that, we should finalize the venue, dates, and the program, and to do that... well, there's still tons of work to be done.
But in any case, I still firmly believe that the Asia Web Conference is very much in order, as the world's internet industry increasingly sets its eyes on Asia, both for market opportunities (ie. China and India) and for inspirations (e.g. the digital "craziness" of Japan and Korea). Heck, I personally met two big-name Silicon Valley CEOs within three days in Korea!
This was just a brief update, and I'll keep you posted as we go along and get more updates. Of course, if you are interested to be an organizer/speaker/sponsor, don't hesitate to contact me or anyone listed above.
Since that post, I've been talking to bloggers and web experts in Asia, in an "under the water" fashion. And within some weeks (early this year), we had kickstarted the project - here's a brief update.
We now have the following people as the organizers for the Asia Web Conference:
- Angus Lau (852 Signal, Hong Kong)
- Benjamin Joffe (Plus8Star, China)
- Bernard Moon (Silicon Moon, US)
- Lu Gang (Mobinode, China)
- John S. Kim (Paprika Lab, Korea)
- Tangos Chan (China Web 2.0 Review, China)
- Chang Kim (Web 2.0 Asia, Korea)
If you follow blogs about Asian web industry, you should be familiar with these names already. They are some of the best and brightest guys, I'm sure.
As you can see here, we need oranizers from other countries - most notably missing is Japan. If there's anyone reading this blog post from Japan who's interested in making this conference happen, come aboard! Just roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty, it will be fun.
For the last several weeks, we've been exchanging various ideas about the conference via Google Docs (which we're still doing). We recently put together the possible list of speakers and sponsors, and we now have 54 A-list potential speakers on our list. Of course this doesn't mean we'll have all 54 of them on our conference, but I'm sure we'll get some of the best speakers you can find in and out of Asia in our conference.
The central theme of this conference will be "social". We used a couple of criteria when we decided the conference theme: a) the topic should be about an area where Asia has unique strengths, b) the topic should be important/trendy enough to attract participants/speakers/sponsors, and c) it should be where each Asian country has its own market-dominating player, so that some nice cross-country comparisons can be made. We came up with "mobile" and "social" as two best possible topics, and we finally chose "social". Social isn't such a terribly narrow topic either, but the topic shouldn't have to be too restrictive either, we believe.
We still haven't decided on the venue. Well, we didn't even decide which country to hold the conference in, for that matter - I'm still rooting for China but there's the Olympics logistics issue, and the visa requirement doesn't help either. I'm also looking at Korea too, part of the reason being I'm kind of being the main guy pushing this and Korea is my home turf where I can get some help from companies and even the government more easily.
As always, what matters most is the money side. We should find sponsors and come up with the financial plan. To do that, we need big-name speakers, and to do that, we should finalize the venue, dates, and the program, and to do that... well, there's still tons of work to be done.
But in any case, I still firmly believe that the Asia Web Conference is very much in order, as the world's internet industry increasingly sets its eyes on Asia, both for market opportunities (ie. China and India) and for inspirations (e.g. the digital "craziness" of Japan and Korea). Heck, I personally met two big-name Silicon Valley CEOs within three days in Korea!
This was just a brief update, and I'll keep you posted as we go along and get more updates. Of course, if you are interested to be an organizer/speaker/sponsor, don't hesitate to contact me or anyone listed above.
Benjamin Joffe of Plus Eight Star offers a great summary of leading social networks in Asia - namely, QQ, Mixi, Cyworld. Here's also a follow-up post.
