A Simple Wrap-up of Twestival Seoul 2010

Twestival is basically a Twitter Festival (Twitter + Festival). But attendees don’t just gather around and drink beer, They fund-raise for charities. Twestival started in London, UK, in 2008. Check out their official web site for further information.

On the 25th of March 2010, hundreds of cities all around the world coordinated to hold a local Twestival 2010 event on the same day.  This time Seoul joined ranks and held its own Twestival for the first time. So, this time I also attended, donated, and enjoyed the event with the rest of my fellow tweeples in Seoul.

The Twestival was held at the Gom TV Studio, at Shinjeong-dong, Seoul.  The place was not in the central area of Seoul, and kind of hard to find. But Gom TV, one of the best and most popular internet streaming video companies in Korea, volunteered to hold the festival at their location as well as film the show and stream it on the internet.  So I guess that’s why they set the event in a remote location.

I got there a little late, around 8:30pm (the event started at 7:30pm), and the show was already going on. However, there were not as many people as I imagined. I think it’s because the place is too far from central area of Seoul, and the promotion started a little bit late, so not many people were aware of the event. Nevertheless, the famous anchor Juha Kim, who’s a huge Twitter user, promoted the event very eagerly on Twitter, so it could be ended pretty successfully. And also the fact famous rock band YB volunteered to perform on the stage motivated more people to come.

One of the most famous Korean tweeple, Yongman Park, who is the chairman of Doosan Infracore, offered to auction off a dinner with himself at the event.  This turned out to be a hot topic, with many news sites reporting on it as an featured article.  When the auction took place, there were 3 people who were obsessed to win.  The winner was Jongok Ko, the CEO of the app development company, Fobikr, for the final bid price of 4,200 thousand Korean won. Mr. Park also matched the winning price as a donation rant. They’re saying they will have Sankyupsal (pork meat) and Soju, Korean whisky.

It was pretty meaningful event because the fact is the Twitter community can actually help people in Korea as a whole as well.  What the event lacked was networking. There were no time or chances to talk with anybody who were there. It was more like watching a concert. I hope they take this into account and improve the event for next year.

Check out the video of the event below:

Ustream (short length)

Gom TV (full length, requires ActiveX on IE)