For those who couldn’t make it, you missed some great insights and chances to network with the speakers, entrepreneurs and other attendees. We hope to provide slides on Open Web Asia conference through support partner Slideshare. There are also interviews in English (site in Chinese) from our media sponsor at Netease.

Unfortunately, we did not have a video stream at this event, but it was recorded and will see when we can have this out to you guys. Head over to the conference blog to get those videos.

In the meantime, you can track back on Twitter and Flickr for what went on at the conference and visuals of the speakers and event. Here are some photos I took of the event.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

We are working on getting all the feedback possible and start planning for next year’s event. If you were at the event, we ask you complete this 10 question survey.

We were very excited to have the speaker lineup that we did and like to thank all the speakers for making it to Seoul. The sponsors, supporters and World Knowledge Forum were also very supportive and could not have done it without them. I’d like to thank the local Korean team who made everything go smoothly for both conference goers and the organizers.

Stay tuned to the conference website.

It’s an interesting move for Apple, I mean of all markets, they chose Hong Kong. It’s a matter of time before people in Hong Kong start buying all these iPhones and begin selling them on eBay for the people in the US. This is how Hong Kong people/businesses make money. And despite the almost $800USD price tag for the 16GB and the screwed up economy, I’m sure people there will be willing to pay. I don’t think Apple has implemented anything that would limit the purchases made online. I still think they should limit one iPhone purchase per Hong Kong ID.

I guess it’s not that great being an early adopter for Apple products.

The service has got a lot of the same features, payment gateway integrations, Captcha form and other spam protection, summary reports, SSL, RSS, storage, form templates and others. It’s more or less the same features found in Wufoo.

Unlike the other services mentioned, ecForm doesn’t appear to offer a free service, a big downside to their service. I can see why they would charge them right from the start, if Hong Kong businesses are the target market. I mean people/businesses will exploit it anyway they could to get the most out of a free version, in other words, being cheap. Another downside is the minimum 1-year contract that make you sign. Did I mention the current sign up process requires you to download a form and printing/faxing it back to them.

Addressing those simple issues first would be helpful. I cannot imagine anyone or company who will be willing to put down a year’s payment without first trying it. Online signup, it’s probably not their fault, that’s how businesses operate here in Hong Kong, with fax machines, you get the picture.

Despite all that, Hong Kong needs a service like ecForm. I really hate how companies conduct in-person and phone surveys here. They swarm you on the street and and speak extremely fast on the phone. If and when they put it online, that’s when I’ll start participating.

Frenzoo gave us a peek at their new release, they have since moved on from a
client installed software to a web service (although, there’s still a small install). The new web version is so much better than the client install, even co-founder Simon told me that their old version was junk and I think anyone who have been with Frenzoo would agree.

Frenzoo also raised additional funding on top of their previous round from ASI, this time with SERAP, the local government fund to help local startup businesses.

In addition, the Hong Kong Startup Association also discussed their plans to begin its first talk. As this is a new organization, they are continuously seeking input from the local web entrepreneur, startups and community. If you have any thoughts, feel free to share them at their site. Sign up for the email updates or Facebook updates.

Big thanks for Simon and Frenzoo team for hosting and drinks and HKSUA for sponsoring the food.

Google obviously wants to make inroads in Asia, where they are playing catchup in the big markets, South Korea, China and Japan. Local search giant Naver will eventually fall, (I’ve been told) there’s a cycle that all Korean search engines go through and Google could be a contender to replace Naver in the near future.

It seems like with this acquisition, Google Korea has almost all the ingredients to replicate what other search engine have already accomplished. They now have their own blogging platform in TNC, YouTube for videos, Picasa for images. What’s missing are cafes, shopping site, content on the mainsite (which they probably have access to alread) and other components consumers love. If that’s the case, that won’t be very innovative for Google.

This is some good news for startups in Asia. Google didn’t seem to have much success introducing acquisitions made from US startups, now they are shopping locally. After this deal, I expect Google to make more acquisitions in Asia for the Asian market, especially in Korea and China. As with everything here, the deals in Asia should be on the cheap, and I don’t expect gazillion dollar deals like you see from counterparts in the US startups.

We are expecting the crowd to exceed last year’s turnout (~100) and last year’s event at Yahoo! Hong Kong was a success in itself. I, myself, is shooting for around that number to turnout, of course, the more the merrier. We encourage those interested in Hong Kong to attend and share. There are six sessions available with 3-4 concurrent sessions, so come share your passion with others.

For this year, we are seeing some repeat sponsors in Yahoo! Hong Kong, Zendesk, Outblaze and Drinkazine and Dookaz and some new sponsors like Microsoft Hong Kong and other organizers all became sponsors as well.

If you’re on Facebook, go sign up for the event there or sign up on the Barcamp Wiki.

The theme of the 2008 conference is ‘The Social Web’. Socialization has been a game changing development in the internet industry and the social web is an area where Asia has its own strength and vibrancy. Asian countries have a distinct internet cultures and market players, so informative and educational cross-country comparisons can be made.

The one-day conference will be divided into four sessions focusing on the following key areas:

• Insights and Best Practices
• Innovations in Asia
• Collaboration - An Introduction to Asia’s Social Web; and East Meets West
• The challenges of Internationalization To and From Asia.

Open Web Asia ‘08 is the first conference that truly covers pan-Asia web technology. The conference will include speakers who of the most experienced and knowledgeable in the Asian internet industry, as well as a selection of business leaders and thinkers from outside the region. The conference will offer attendees from Asia and those outside the region insights on the Asian web market, network and create business connections that will benefit both the regional and global internet industry.

As with many social networks, you can also create groups based on interests, hobbies, and friends in Muecs or otherwise known as Crew. They also created a platform for users to create their own marketplace and sell and purchase items from your friends and the community.

Muecs is built using Microsoft technologies and it has its share of ads from Google and search is done via Google. They are still pretty early in development and still need time to grow. We’ll have to wait and see how they will progress down the road.

There was no word on pricing but I’d assume it will be the same, a monthly subscription fee, and although it may be inexpensive, I think these monthly subscription models is something that Chinese companies are not ready to adopt yet. Another obstacle is the common use of free email addresses within SMEs, where you’ll find many business users are using email addresses from sina.com, 163.com and the likes instead of company addresses, which could be an issue.

However, this is some good news in that China has seen a significant growth in online spending and when everyone starts shopping online, supporting those online customers should become a priority, if it’s not already.

Not sure how big lifecasting will get here, I’d like to see someone run around town and record what’s happening, I can just see stares, strange looks and hand covering face tactic. Maybe the Justin.tv crew should come over here and kick start something this lifecasting idea. It would be interesting to see. Justin’s stuff has been great, I enjoy it a lot, but the ones I’ve seen are based in a bedroom or a room of sorts, which is makes it quite boring.