I spent the early morning today at the Asia Web Technology conference at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The main theme of the conference was around Web 2.0 and this is the third local web conference that I’ve been to in HK, first being the Asia Web 2.0 Conference and Web 2.0 Seminar. I missed the first day and only showed up to the second day. The turnout was average, much like the others and I approximate 100 people made it to the morning sessions.

This conference was a bit better than the previous and was glad there was no mention of Del.icio.us, which most local speakers would always use to describe Web 2.0. The topics were great, RSS and Web 2.0 at work, a very good change. The downside of the conference was no network availability, so no blogging, no tweets from me. So these conferences are improving each time, although not with ground breaking information, they are extrememly informative for the people here.

Niall Kennedy of Hat Trick Media talked about RSS and widget on a high level and that is good topic for the local market as I don’t see an adoption here yet. He’ll go into more technical details in Building a successful web 2.0: Packing, Designing workshop on June 6th.

Dr. Akmal B. Chaudry talked about social software for the enterprise at IBM. This was good too as it went over how IBM does it and why they adopt blogs, wiki, social network internally. Although, he admittedly does not use those services much, his insights were valuable and hopefully will have an impact on the audience and I think it will because it’s coming from IBM.

Overall the early sessions were very informative for the crowd which I guess was a mix of students, entrepreneurs and representatives from large companies and education institutions. Unfortunately, I had to leave after only the first session, but my guess is a few more will show up in the afternoon because of the talks on social networks. I wish I had stayed around to see where everyone in the audience are from.