Web 2.0 Asia

Jaxtr, a leading internet phone company, announced they are expanding to a host of countries including Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia.

To bypass expensive international phone charges, callers can now get a free local number in their country from jaxtr to dial directly – on any mobile or landline phone – without the hassle of extra numbers or access codes. This is a permanent number that callers can save in their address book and use to dial directly each time they want to call their friend abroad.

Here's how Jaxtr works: Visit www.jaxtr.com and link your phone to the Web. You’ll receive a personalized link, called a jaxtr link, which allows your friends to call you – for free – using any mobile or landline phone. Your friends simply click on the jaxtr link and enter their number. Jaxtr then generates a local number in their country that your international friends can save and use whenever they want to call you, without being tethered to their computer or getting the shock of a huge bill.


It seems that Skype and other internet phone companies are making hard efforts to launch into the Asian market, in order to expand their geographic territories. Recently, Skype installed campus-wide free phone service at Hankook University of Foreign Studies, a foreign studies-dedicated university in Korea. Students at the university, who make frequent international calls (given the nature of their institute), can make free (or very cheap) calls anywhere on campus - Skype says. When Skype installs a cheap phone service at a Korean university, you know the internet phone service (VoIP) market is becoming mainstream.

Gang Lu of Mobinode stepped up and built the Open Web Asia workgroup, arguably Asia's Web 2.0 Workgroup. And Gang also kindly included my humble blog there. Thanks Gang!

We're tired of hearing "There's no good English blog about Asian web industry." Now you have Openweb.Asia, so please stop whining. :)

Gang says he should perhaps add more blogs before he lets the world know about the site. If you know good English blogs/sites about Asian web industry, ping the information to Gang at gang dot lu at mobinode dot com.

Hong Kong-based Angus Lau is the author of 852 Signal blog, and is with the online spreadsheet company EditGrid. He's also part of the working group behind the upcoming Asia Web Conference.

Angus was born in HK, educated in the US, worked in Shanghai where he met his Korean wife (the couple communicate in Mandarin), and is now back at HK after working in Japan and the US for quite some time. Man, talk about metropolitan life.

I had the pleasure of meeting and having a pleasant chat with Angus last week. Angus said Hong Kong is perhaps too small a market for web startups to gain sizeable market traction. And of course the VC environment for web startups isn't exactly that of the Valley. Which is why companies in HK, just like Korean companies, should either globalize or die, I think.
 

Thanks again Angus for taking out your time. By the way, the Chelsea jersey in the above picture is from the years when I worked at Samsung Mobile's marketing division, when we started sponsoring the football club. Back in 2005, there were a lot of doubts if Samsung's humongous sponsorship will pay off. Now it turns out the Chelsea sponsor deal was one of the best marketing decisions Samsung Mobile ever made, many say.

Daum, Korea's #2 portal, had 27M monthly search queries in April (link in Korean), a 75% increase over two months.

For portals, search is the name of the game, and Daum's position in Korea is no better than Yahoo's in the US. Naver, the top dog, has over 70% market share. Daum didn't hide its intention to play a catch-up game in search market, and their weapon of choice was to introduce better search over its "cafe" (web bulletin board) content.

Daum believed web BBSes are some great archives of useful knowledge, and the strategy seems to pay off, judging from Daum's search market share gains. A few posts before, I called BBS a rather older system - now, BBS combined with very robust search might be an entirely different story.

Do you know what's #1 electronics brand in India? It's not Sony, Samsung, or even Tata (Not sure Tata is in electronics business, but they seem to make everything). It's LG.

Knowledge@Wharton has a podcast with Y.V. Verma, who has been director of human resources and management support for LG's India division since 1997. Verma has even authored a book on LG India called "Passion: The Untold Story of LG Electronics India."

Verma says the key success factor of LG India was empowerment - handling the decision power to the local staff as a way to hire and retain good talent. Sounds easy, but it's definitely not the typical way Korean conglomerates are run, I can say.

I posted this because some of the readers might be working at a local branch of a multinational company. Mr Verma is a living evidence that you can succeed big time at multinationals, or if you are determined enough, you might even pull a book endorsement. What's cooler than writing a book? (except for blogging, that is ;-) )

Cyworld Japan announced a site renewal plan where it will essentially turn into a place for pro-Korean community in Japan.


This might make sense as what little number of Cyworld users in Japan are mostly K-wave followers or Korean expats anyway.

But on the other hand, this is something like, let's say, Xing France announcing it will focus on offering German job information to French people. Bad analogy, I know, but my point is Cyworld JP is essentially turning itself into a service that's quite limited to serving small, niche demographics. Which is their own statement that Cyworld JP is irrelevent to the mainstream Japanese web users.

Just another evidence that in Asian web industry, it seems so difficult (nearly impossible) to produce a "cross-cultural" hit service, whose success isn't limited only to its own country. Which is a topic that's well worth discussing in our upcoming Asia Web conference.

My heart goes out to the people of China who lost their loved ones in the yesterday's earthquakes...

The other day, I read a piece on the China Vortex, shared on Google reader by Tangos. (Thanks Tangos - I'm getting lots of insights into the Chinese web industry through your shared blog articles. Of course I enjoy your own too.)

In short, the article said:

• Much of Chinese internet = BBS
• Often the Chinese "group thoughts/activities", such as the recent (rather unfortunate) "Angry Chinese" incidents, get organized on these BBSes
• Chinese' love of BBS might have come from distrust of traditional media
• Outsiders have not figured this out

But the very last part of the article kind of made me scratch my head:

So, BBSes are the real social media marketing tool, and as usual, the Chinese are ahead of everyone else, but just haven’t figured out that part themselves. While the west talks about social media and Web 2.0, China has had a version of it for the past ten years. It may not be pretty, but it works.

Does the fact that BBS is so popular in China today mean a) BBS is the right platform for social media and b) BBS will remain as popular in China for the coming years? I'm not very sure about that, at least using the Korean market as a "canary in coal mine" example.

a) Is BBS the right platform for social media?

If we define "social media" as the collection of unque, diversified individual voices, I don't think BBS is the optimal platform for social media activities - on the contrary, BBSes can often lead to group thoughts and monoculture, where the agenda is largely driven by big voices.

b) Will BBS remain popular in China for the coming years?

In Korea, we have a popular BBS/forum service in "Daum Cafe". Three or four years ago, Daum cafe was arguably THE most popular service for Korean netizens. Today, Daum Cafes are still doing pretty okay I guess, but are definitely not the most popular daily web destination as they once used to be. Over the last several years, Daum Cafe has given much way first to minihompies, and later to blogs.

The problem of Daum Cafe as a BBS-type service was that it wasn't as much focusing on individuals. On BBSes and forums, usually it's difficult to keep track of the messages users left on different spaces and the subsequent comments left by other users. It's also difficult to put one's personal identity to the page that collects all his postings ("My page"), just like a contributor's personal page on Wikipedia is rarely visited (many people don't even know such pages exist). People like group activities too, but basically people are individualistic. Users want to have "their own site" where they have all their content under a specific URL which they can use as personal brands.

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I know this is a very crude analogy, but I think the evolution from homepage to BBS to blogs and other forms of social media can be said:

Generation 1 = Homepages = individual "homes" without much communication channels. People sometimes visit other "homes" but communication between homes are generally not very active. Besides, it's generally difficult to build and manage one's own home.

Generation 2 = BBS = town hall meetings or cocktail parties where people gather together and talk about various topics, but not much of "individual space".

Generation 3 = blogs = individual homes with built-in communication system and numerous, instant townhall meetings (i.e. the content aggregation via XML/RSS).

If we look back on the Korean web service market, the game-changing services have walked through the above generations. First the homepages were all the rage (circa 1998), then there were Daum Cafe and other BBS/forum services like Freechal (circa 2000). Then, of course, Cyworld minihompies came along and took the market by storm (2002 or so). And now the name of the game is, arguably, blogs - I'm not saying this because I'm a blog company CEO :)

Of course this is only what happend in the Korean market, and just because something happened in the Korean market doesn't mean it will happen everywhere else. But having said that, I am eager to see if the Chinese' love of BBS will continue or even get stronger, or the Chinese netizens will further embrace blogs or other forms of more "personal" media platform. What do you think?  

Shanghai-based italki is "applying Web 2.0 concepts, such as social networking, user-generated content, and crowdsourcing, to language learning." Founded by American and Chinese entrepreneurs, italki has 210,000+ users from 100+ countries speaking 90+ languages. They have recently launched a new version, where users can "now collaborate on creating free language learning textbooks", according to Kevin Chen of italki.

On italki, speakers of different languages can exchange questions/answers regarding the languages they are learning. For example, as shown on the screenshot below, those who are learning Korean language can post questions, for which Korean speakers (like myself) might provide some help.


Or, one can also find a "language partner" for peer study. Naturally, I searched for the 18-25 year old females - go ahead and sue me :) By the way, the search still gave me some 17 year olds - a small glitch, perhaps? (Just hope there isn't such thing as "underage peer language learning").


Users can do more, such as posting language-learning resources and files, and forming study groups. The site is cleanly designed and very web 2.0-ish (with the Truebuchet font and all). The fact that they already have user base in the order of couple hundred thousands is also a plus, I guess.

I don't know if italki has indeed finally brought the concept of "education 2.0" into existence, but it's true that many people (including an avid reader of this blog who now became a friend of mine) firmly believe that education and web 2.0 are natural fit and the so-called "education 2.0" is very, very promising.

My thought is that, perhaps the true Litmus test for italki will be to see if italki can replace, or at least provide a more efficient way to learn foreign language than the existing language-learning methods.

Spotplex, a Silicon Valley-based blog analytics service that was founded by Koreans and once touted by Techcrunch as "a better Digg", apparently closed its door:

Dear Spotplex users,

We regret to inform you that Spotplex is going offline. This was a very hard decision for us and we are sure you will miss the service as much as we do.

Thanks for your support. For any question, please send us an email at support@spotplex.com.

The Spotplex Team

Spotplex was "a real-time ranking for blog articles based on actual impression counts, not the number of votes or recommendation. In short, people can find what people read most today and thus most interesting news of the day."

Spotplex was run by Doyon Kim, co-founder of Dialpad (sold to Yahoo) and Opinity. As someone who personally knows Doyon (we even went to the same school, albeit during different years), I am sorry to see Doyon's service shutting down. But I'm sure Doyon is learning tons and will bring us other exciting services in no time.

Other Valley-based services founded by Koreans include Mysimon.com; And some Korean web services like Cyworld have their US operations.