Following the “WebRTC Rockstars Tour”(TM) in Asia last winter, there has been an incredible amount of requests coming from developers, individuals and companies of all sizes to go beyond a meet up and to organise a full-fledged Korean WebRTC conference. 

Feedback about the WebRTC rockstar tour

With roughly 350 registered attendees (and more than 250 actually attending) across all locations, the webrtc rockstars asian tour was a great success, beyond expectations. We had to use different venues than our usual meet-up’s, and until last minutes sponsoring for food and drink might have been challenging in some locations, but the result was overwhelming. Thanks again for Sebastiaan of SingaporeJS, Mr. Son from RSupport in Korea, and Mr. Ganeko from Infocomm in Japan for organising this on the field, and for Tokbox shout out to their audience in the corresponding countries.

WebRTC in Korea

Starting from almost no activity,  while Japan was already organising “webrtc conference in Japan”, and Agora.io was leading the Chinese market with their first RTC Conference Beijing, the Intel / SKT deal (my humble contribution to the corresponding Korean ZDNET article) in 2016 has really acted as an eye-opener and a catalyst for the Korean Market. The first WebRTC meet-up was already co-organised by Mr. Son, and by the original SKT Manager who inked the deal with intel: Jinho Choi (then already with its own start-up: Remote Monster), with myself as an invited speaker, taking advantage of having the IETF meeting in Town, late 2016.

From its humble beginning, the Korean webrtc meet-up grew to more than 400+ members, with a good percentage active members participating to online discussions and meeting, in person.

While a handful of full-time well-funded and well established early adopters (M. Son, remote Monster, but also Lucas lee’s GooRooMee.com) are leading the group, more interestingly, two third of the current members belong to and represent a SME, a start-up, or a corporation. It shows that in the relatively young webrtc Korean market, the interest from the local industry is still great. It’s in sharp contrast, for example, with Japan, where there has not been a WebRTC conference for some time now, by lack of industry interest.

Several Korean VCs are also partaking in the events, and have already funded some WebRTC start-ups, with intend to fund more to de-risk their initial investments and strengthen the ecosystem.

While certainly not expecting to be as big as the RTC conference in BeiJing, which is reaching a thousand attendees, the critical mass has been reached, and the Korean market is big, mature and specific enough to have a great WebRTC event in Korea.

What About the Event then?

There is no webpage up for the event yet. We are still preparing the content, and the Call for Papers and Sponsoring packaged, and we should start circulating the info in February. People interested in having more details right away can reach out to either M. Son if in Korea, or myself if outside Korea.

We plan a very traditional 2 days event, with potentially two parallel tracks (business / technical) and some placeholders for both KeyNotes by industry leaders, and lighting talks for individuals / dev with awesome jaw-dropping hacks or demos. Those have been traditionally very inspiring and refreshingly new at both Korean and Japanese meetings, and we absolutely want to show-case this creativity.

The event shall take place in the May 30 – June 1st time slot, to fit with other events in the calendar.

You have an idea, a question, a request, or you are thinking about speaking / sponsoring the event, feel free to contact me through the cosmo website contact page.

cheers!