Web 2.0 Asia

Sony announced it will "invest nearly $1bn in rival Sharp's newest liquid crystal display factory in a bid to meet growing demand for flat-panel televisions and diversify its supply chain".

Now, some Korean folks find this news a bit troubling, thinking this might be a signal that Sony is trying to keep some distance from its rival-cum-partner Samsung.

The thing is, Sony and Samsung had already co-invested billions of dollars in the LCD panel manufacturing joint-venture called S-LCD. Sony has been purchasing LCD panels mainly from S-LCD, and it was naturally expected Sony would make further investment in the joint venture in which the comany had already invested in over a billion dollars. But instead of S-LCD, Sony invested in Sharp - which, to Korea's provincial government, means bilions of dollars of lost FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) opportunity.

To me, Sony's move seems a purely business decision, rather than anything of a nationalistic nature. But some Korean media also expresses concerns that the Japanese electronics giants might be joining forces together (there have been lots of M&A activities in the Japanese electronics industry lately) to seek edge over their Korean rivlas - namely Samsung and LG - amid Samsung's recent difficulties with corruption investigation.

I don't know if Japanese electronics giants are indeed on to gaining turf lost to Korean rivals. I don't know who will eventually come out as a winner in this fierce battle taking place in the global consumer electronics market. But what I do know is that I don't want to be in consumer electronics business. I want to be in iPod business, which not many Korean or Japanese companies seem to be in now.

Newsweek Feb 25 issue has a featured article titled "Not Made in Japan":

"With the right approach [NTT Docomo] could have become a Google," says Gerhard Fasol of the Tokyo consultancy Eurotechnology Japan. "They had the chance—but they blew it."

I think largely the same thing can be said of big Korean companies too. Though it contains some dose of cliche (such as Japanese firms don't welcome stick-out genius as much as US companies do), the article's worth a read - go check it out.

EDaily of Korea (note: link in Korean) announced that Mr. Brian Kim, the ex-CEO of NHN, has started a new company that seems to have its eyes on "the next generation of blog service".

NHN is the company behind Naver, Korea's #1 portal and the world's #5 search service (according to Newsweek). Brian was one of the two CEOs of NHN, and his departure isn't such a small deal for Korean web industry - Think Sergey Brin spinning out of Google for a new venture.

The new company, called IWILab, is apparently based in Mountain View and Bundang, Korea. According to EDaily, Brian thinks that blog service is one of the (rare) weak spots of Google, and therefore thinks he has a chance in the global market if he can build the next-gen blog service. For this, Brian is said to have cashed out some of his NHN stocks, worth about US$ 35 million - I'm not quite sure if a blog service startup would require that much of money, at least initially.

Brian's ShouldDo page says he should "forget about Naver and lead the internet world through Iwilab."

As a person who's already in the blog business, I welcome a new competition. Though it remains to be seen if Brian's new venture will make a huge splash in the blogging service market, I wish Brian the best with his new comany.

CNet Japan announced 10 promising Japanese tech ventures in their recent "Tech Venture 2008". Looking at these 10 companies will hopefully provide some insights into the newest tech trends of Japan.

Here's the link to the original CNet announcement (in Japanese), and here's an English blog about the five of ten award-winners, written by Akihito Fujii. The other five is to be introduced in part 2 of Fujii's blog, which isn't up just yet.

Personally, I like Filimo, a user-created video commercials service. (An English link is here). Also I find it interesting (not surprising however) that six of the ten award-winning companies seem to be mobile-oriented services. Check out Fujii's blog for more information about individual companies.

The National Internet Development Agency of Korea (NIDA) announced the list of most popular mobile websites accessed via WINC.

As background info, WINC is the new and easier way of accessing mobile websites, proposed by NIDA and implemented on over 90% of mobile phones sold in Korea. Instead of typing the long and complex mobile URLs on cellphone keypads, users can just type a simple phone number and press the mobile internet key (you know - those buttons with "i" or "n" on them) to get connected to mobile websites. For instance, type "131", press the n key, and you are on the weather forecasting mobile website.


Obviously, not everyone who uses mobile internet accesses via WINC, so the "most popular WINC sites" list may not exactly represent the most popular mobile sites. Anyhow, the popular WINC sites for 2007 came out to be:

• Bus schedule service, City of Daegu
  
• Bus schedule service, City of Seoul
  
• Naver Mobile (portal)
  
• Daum Mobile (portal)
  
• Hanguk Economy News TV
  
• Chosul Ilbo (newspaper)
  
• Gamevil (mobile game)
• Com2Us (mobile game)
• Samsung Securities (stock trading site)

It's a bit surprising that bus schedule sites topped the list - But maybe it's understandable because young students use the mobile internet most and for them bus schedule might be very important information.

This has absolutely nothing to do with web innovations, but I still find this new thing from Korea quite interesting and worth blogging about. Hyundai Motor Company will introduce in-dash LCD monitor that simultaneously displays two different images/videos based on the viewer angle. This means the driver can see the navigation while at the same time the passenger watches a DVD movie. Hyundai says this will help preventing accidents caused by drivers who watch DVDs or satellite TV on their in-car entertainment system while driving. Quite neat.

This was actually announced a few weeks ago, but the whole issue occurred to me again recently, with the planned Yahoo-Microsoft merger.

Naver, Korea's 800lb gorilla portal, announced in mid-January that they have signed an MOU with Ahn Lab, Korea's leading anti-virus software company, to integrate Ahn Lab's security technologies into Naver's free anti-virus service called PC Green.


Naver PC Green is already being offered as a free service, but it doesn't have Ahn Lab's technologies in it.

Being able to use robust anti-virus software for free is clearly a good thing to users. I'm happily using Naver's PC Green now at my home PC (my work PC is Macbook Pro, not yet supported by PC Green). But the question still remains: How will Ahn Lab, the provider of the technology, be able to make money when nobody pays for the software anymore? Will ads rev share from Naver alone provide sufficient funds to keep the engine rolling at Ahn Lab so the company can continuously innovate?

Now, what does this have to do with the Y-M merger? Obviously one angle to view the whole issue of Microhoo is the rise of free consumer software (as a service) which could have made Microsoft look for fresh source of revenues other than software sales (such as ads).

Office productivity software has already been made free by Google et al. Now, the anti-virus software seems it's no exception from this "software as a free service" trend. It's happening here in Korea now.

Sorry about the recent radio silence - I was nearly off the grid for the entire last week during the holidays. One good thing about Asia is, we get two different new year's days (meaning two different spans of holidays - hooray!). A belated happy new year to everyone, or in Chinese: 恭喜發財! (The photos courtesy of Cherise Fong of CNN).