Web 2.0 Asia

Yesterday, we had the fourth Lunch 2.0 at Microsoft Korea. Korea's "Web 2.0 gangs" were all gathered together. Lunch was great - Nice big fat burger and beef enchilada. Here are Flickr photos, courtesy of Suman Park of Me2day.


Guess which company was appointed to host the next Lunch 2.0... It's ours! We should find a good venue, as our office is *just* a little bit smaller than NHN's. Thanks Microsoft Korea for hosting the event.

Korea Economy Newspaper (link in Korean) reports that, according to a newest research, Koreans aged from 19 to 24 are, on average, found to:

• Have 78 Cyworld buddies ("Il-chon")
  
• Have added 23 new Cyworld buddies over the last year
  
• Have 79 instant messenger buddies
  
• Be a member of 5 online clubs

How can you possibly manage the communication with 78 Cyworld buddies and 79 instant messenger buddies? Add to this 100+ phonebook entries and pouring amount of emails, and boy, is it hard to simply "keep in touch".

It's funny people work so hard, often checking emails at 2AM, to achieve their biggest dream: To become able to throw away their blackberries and get free from emails.

A couple who met through Me2day, Korea's Twitter, are apparently getting married. Feel lonely? Start Me2day-ing.

Now, here's the fun part. Me2day's community is so closely knit that the CEO of the company himself is working on singing for the wedding. Me2day's CEO, Suman Park, is the person playing the piano in the video embedded below. Kewl.



I call the approach Me2day is taking as a "Delicous way" - i.e. Start with small, core audience; Build something great for them; Let them play with it, build a cult-like community; Have the community grow, slowly but surely.

Me2day, just like Twitter, seems to follow the right path. The only concern I have is, compared to Twitter, Me2day's core users could be too small in numbers because the service is only offered in Korean. In fact, that's the same kind of limitation that works against our company as well. Which is why we should have "globalize or die" mentality.

Well, I don't know if couples using our blog service are getting married anytime soon, but I guess I and my team will have to keep practicing on some musical skills on our spare times - you know, just in case. :)

Mr. Jae-Woong Lee, the founder of Korea's #2 portal Daum, announced he will step down from presidency.

Lee, who still owns about 20% of Daum, was the president and CEO of Daum until about a year ago - but he had resigned from CEO position last September, and now he's no longer the president either.

What's interesting is the speculation that Lee's move might somehow be related to the acquisition rumors surrounding Daum. In the Korean stock market, Daum was the subject of various M&A rumors throughout the past two years.

The fact that Lee is no longer part of Daum's management team suggests the Daum M&A rumors might finally be coming true. So who's buying Daum, if someone does buy the company? We don't know yet - but whoever it might be, the acquirer must be a player that's very determined to compete against Naver, the "king of the hill".

As I reported earlier, it was rumored that the former CEO of NHN, Mr. Brian Kim, will enter the foray of blogging business. (NHN is the company behind Korea's #1 giant portal, Naver.) Mr. Kim's new company, Iwilab, is already up and running in the Bay Area.

But it turned out that Iwilab's new service isn't so much about blogging as it's about website asset clipping/sharing. (Confirmed by Mr Jun Hur of Iwilab.) So I guess it was a classic example of a traditional newspaper reporter hearing one thing and writing another, completely different thing - when will they "get it"?

The new service from Iwilab is called Buru.com. I don't know where that name comes from - perhaps "bookmark" + "guru"? Or the Korean way of pronouncing "Blue"? (just kidding - but couldn't help the speculation as the site is generally hued in blue).


Buru.com is actually a very simple concept. It's a giant archive for anything you see on the web - web pages, photos, video files, etc. You can directly add items to your buru, or browse some else's saved items and copy those onto your buru. Social bookmark meets RSS reader meets Box.net, perhaps?


The concept reminds me of a popular Korean service called "Nate Tong". Tong means "container" in Korean, and the service is provided by SK - the same company running the ever-famous Cyworld. Tong is quite popular in Korea, but the less desired side-effect is rampant copying of content among the users.


Buru.com is currently in open beta, meaning you can register and take the service for a spin. Frankly, I'm a bit underwhelmed by the service. When you try something out, there are services that "bite", and there are those that don't - I think buru.com falls into the latter category, at least for the time being. (I still like you guys, don't take me wrong.)

But the amazing thing about web services is, of course, you can always improve things as you go on. Buru.com will get only better from this point on - and you should never underestimate someone who used to sit behind the wheel of the world's #5 search company.

Benjamin Joffe of Plus Eight Star offers a great summary of leading social networks in Asia - namely, QQ, Mixi, Cyworld. Here's also a follow-up post.

Joyce Kim is the CEO of Soompi.com, but she's perhaps more famous for her other gig, namely the co-host of the GigaOm Show. Yesterday Joyce visited our office and we had some fun conversations.

We talked about many things: open web standards, blogging in Asia vs. the US, good strategies for international companies to knock on the doors of the US market, etc. We also showed our product to Joyce, and she liked it very much and she suggested we should set up a presence in the Bay Area.

(By the way, when the new blog service we're developing now will be out this summer, it will first be available in Korean - but we do will launch international version soon after that. So stay tuned. :-)

Despite being someone with such impeccable resume (sorry Joyce, I did some Googling), Joyce Kim was very down to earth and carried conversations in a pleasantly bubbly way. Also much to my delight, she reads my blog (she talked about my blog theme before I mentioned it to her, so that's for real). I would be more delighted if I could be invited as the next guest at GigaOm Show. I'd be able to share some unique views from the East, then. I'm all yours, Om and Joyce!

CNet Japan reported that Microsoft made investment in OKWave, Japan's #1 online Q&A service. With the investment, Microsoft now owns 10.52% of OKwave.

According to CNet, this marked the first time Microsoft acquired shares of a Japanese company. But apparently, this is not the first time Microsoft and OKWave announced partnership.

Microsoft and OKWave will work together to integrate OKWave's Q&A content with Microsoft's Live search. This, I think, is a smart move (if done right): Anyone who's kept an eye on the success trajectory of Korea's Naver would testify that "search + Q&A + contextual ads = killer combination and lots of revenue".

Here's my previous post about Asia's online Q&A services.

CityIn, the new social network from China that aims to find your "taste buddies" in an intelligent way, officially launched. I covered the service briefly in a previous post.

According to the information sent by Simon Chan, the co-founder of the company (who, I learned later, actually happens to be a fellow Michigan Wolverine), CityIn has three key distinguishing features:

1. QQ IM Contact Import
2. The first SNS adopting Japan QR Code Technology!
3. CityIN learns your taste

QQ IM contact import would definitely be a great feature, as QQ is well known to be the single most successful service in China and everyone is using it.

But here comes my favorite part form Simon's PR:

We know clearly what the Chinese users need. I'm sure that CityIN is going to be the market leader, because we, the team of average age 24, have the ability to provide fresh experiences to Asian users through innovative breakthroughs.

That's the spirit, Simon! Also, what sets CityIn apart from the pack is that it's not one of those "C2C" ("Copy to China") services.

So the guys behind CityIn are young, ambitious, and are committed to building something uniquely suited for the local Chinese market - I think many ingredients for success are there. Visit the site here.

Over the past couple of weeks, online Q&A services in Asia made some announcements, suggesting Q&A services are pretty active in Asia.

Tangos writes that Qihoo.com of China is set to focus more on the Q&A service (China already has a prominent Q&A service in Baidu Zhidao); Japan's top Q&A service, OKWave, announced they will start contextual ads ("content-matching ads") alongside their Q&A content.



It's to be seen if Qihoo and OKWave will generate huge ad revenue, as seems to be the case with Naver Q&A service ("Knowledge iN") and Baidu Zhidao.