Web 2.0 Asia

For the coming days, I'll blog about these:

Open social conference Korea 2008: This conference is held on June 12, hosted by ID Tail (No English page unfortunately), a spin-off from Ahnlab (Korea's prominent security software company) that is dedicated for rolling out apps based on open social and other open web technologies. The reason why you shouldn't shrug off this conference as just one of the numerous other open social conference is that ID Tail is being regarded by many as the best commercial implementation of open social technologies.

Update on the Open Web Asia '08: Though I've been quiet about this conference so far, a number of people have been working hard on making this conference happen, and there are many exciting updates. We have the dates and venue (October 14th, Seoul Korea, Sheraton Walker Hill) and have partnered with one of the Asia's most prestigious conferences. Programs and potential speaker lineup is being worked up by some leading bloggers and industry experts in and around the Asian web industry. Oh, I almost forgot to say the conference will be called the Open Web Asia '08. Stay tuned.

OECD Ministerial meeting: I was honored to contribute an article to Korea Times special edition, the only official media material to be distributed during the OECD Ministerial meeting held in Seoul next week. The theme of this meeting is "The Future of the Internet Economy", and my contribution, titled "Walled Garden: a Double-edged Sword", will talk about Naver and more. After the embargo, I'll put the whole article on this blog.

Business Blog Summit '08: I'll be participating and speaking at the Business Blog Summit '08, a conference looking at how blogs are changing the business in general. Lots of web and PR folks are coming. My talk will focus on the new blogging service we've been working on the past several months, Textcube.com (yeah, between blogging and conference organizing, I do have a day job :-) ). I'll try and post the insights learned from the conference.

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.

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 ;-) )

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

In Korea, you can check out the gas price on the web in advance before you fill up your car. The government-operated site, Opinet, offers a near real-time price comparison service for the nation's gas stations.
 


For those who are always on the move, this feature will soon become available on mobile and in-car navigation. So the age-old "future scenario", where we drive our cars around and find shopping and price information around us in real time, doesn't seem too distant to finally become reality.

It's been some months since I wrote an open letter on this blog, proposing the first-ever Asia Web Conference (the final name of the conference is TBD).

Since that post, I've been talking to bloggers and web experts in Asia, in an "under the water" fashion. And within some weeks (early this year), we had kickstarted the project - here's a brief update.

We now have the following people as the organizers for the Asia Web Conference:

• Angus Lau (852 Signal, Hong Kong)
  
• Benjamin Joffe (Plus8Star, China)
• Bernard Moon (Silicon Moon, US)
• Lu Gang (Mobinode, China)
• John S. Kim (Paprika Lab, Korea)
• Tangos Chan (China Web 2.0 Review, China)
  
• Chang Kim (Web 2.0 Asia, Korea)
  

If you follow blogs about Asian web industry, you should be familiar with these names already. They are some of the best and brightest guys, I'm sure.

As you can see here, we need oranizers from other countries - most notably missing is Japan. If there's anyone reading this blog post from Japan who's interested in making this conference happen, come aboard! Just roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty, it will be fun.

For the last several weeks, we've been exchanging various ideas about the conference via Google Docs (which we're still doing). We recently put together the possible list of speakers and sponsors, and we now have 54 A-list potential speakers on our list. Of course this doesn't mean we'll have all 54 of them on our conference, but I'm sure we'll get some of the best speakers you can find in and out of Asia in our conference.

The central theme of this conference will be "social". We used a couple of criteria when we decided the conference theme: a) the topic should be about an area where Asia has unique strengths, b) the topic should be important/trendy enough to attract participants/speakers/sponsors, and c) it should be where each Asian country has its own market-dominating player, so that some nice cross-country comparisons can be made. We came up with "mobile" and "social" as two best possible topics, and we finally chose "social". Social isn't such a terribly narrow topic either, but the topic shouldn't have to be too restrictive either, we believe.

We still haven't decided on the venue. Well, we didn't even decide which country to hold the conference in, for that matter - I'm still rooting for China but there's the Olympics logistics issue, and the visa requirement doesn't help either. I'm also looking at Korea too, part of the reason being I'm kind of being the main guy pushing this and Korea is my home turf where I can get some help from companies and even the government more easily.

As always, what matters most is the money side. We should find sponsors and come up with the financial plan. To do that, we need big-name speakers, and to do that, we should finalize the venue, dates, and the program, and to do that... well, there's still tons of work to be done.

But in any case, I still firmly believe that the Asia Web Conference is very much in order, as the world's internet industry increasingly sets its eyes on Asia, both for market opportunities (ie. China and India) and for inspirations (e.g. the digital "craziness" of Japan and Korea). Heck, I personally met two big-name Silicon Valley CEOs within three days in Korea!

This was just a brief update, and I'll keep you posted as we go along and get more updates. Of course, if you are interested to be an organizer/speaker/sponsor, don't hesitate to contact me or anyone listed above.

(Tipped by Joyce Kim) Rain, a Korean popstar, is yet again getting the most votes for this year's Time magazine 100 Most Influential People list.


Joyce calls Rain "...the biggest guy in Asia, like Michael Jackson and JT rolled up into one. Mega mega star in Asia..." (Who's JT by the way? Oh, a quick googling tells me it must be Justin Timerlake - he comes out on top). 

Rain received the most votes last year - Notice (the venerable) Steve Jobs was at a mere #11.


Is Rain really the most influential person of the world? Is he really making this world a better place to live? I don't know about that. (For his fans, I'm sure he is.) But the vote clearly shows that, when it comes to online voting, no one really beats the internet-savvy Koreans. Although most Korean fans of Rain might not understand English, they won't have problem recognizing how to push Rain to the top on the online voting. They'd do the same even if the sites are in Russian.

Joyce's service, Soompi.com, encourages its users to go vote for Rain - If you happen to be a Rain fan (which I highly doubt given the audience of this blog), here's the link for you to show some love for Rain.

Auction, Ebay's Korean operation, announced that the personal data of over 60% of its total users had been hacked by a foreign hacker.

This means that the personal information, such as IDs, password, social security number, and even (for some users) credit card information, of over 10 million people have been hacked and leaked to someone who might do what God only knows with those personal data. As an auction user, I'm quite concerned myself as well.

Taewoo Danny Kim, a blogger/book author who also happens to be my friend, will speak at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco. Between blogging and speaking engagements, Taewoo is also helping a Korean web company Openmaru as a part-time consultant. His talk at Web 2.0 Expo will probably center around Openmaru software. The planned title of his talk: "Web 2.0 Killed the Moleskine Star". Let's see what he has to say.

Though not that widely known in Asia, Max Levchin is actually a Silicon Valley celebrity entrepreneur. Originally from Ukraines, Max was the co-founder and CTO of Paypal. He's now running his own shop, Slide.com. Slide is essentially a hosted photo slideshow service, but perhaps a more meaningful fact is that it's grown to become one of the largest widget service providers in the world now. Slide recently received funding ($50m) at a rumored valuation of over $500m. Max was also recently featured on the New York Times.

The meeting was set up by Jung J. Hwang, a VC at Blue Run Ventures (Blue Run Ventures invested in Slide.) Max is currently visiting Korea to learn the Korean/Asian market. It's an exploratory trip, I guess.

I showed our product to Max and he liked it - though he didn't sugarcoat on anything (I like that) and said plainly that in the US, there's a very good blog product in Wordpress, and therefore our product, despite kicking some ass in the Korean market, might have difficulty breaking into the US market. I totally agree - that's why we're building a new, killer blog serivce now. I've been spearheading this project myself for the past several months and I can tell you that this one will just rock.

Fitting his technical background, we engaged in some serious techical discussions during the meeting. We talked about open social, about which Max wasn't too excited. He believed the whole open social thing, despite being a noble concept, is probably too early and might potentially slow down innovation for those who try to embrace it in the early stage. Hey, it's a problem that even Google has some difficulty solving anyway, says Max.

Overall, it was great to meet Max in person and had a chance to talk about technology with him. Funny that on the same day, I encountered this great article by another Ukrainian, Alex Iskold: The American Dream. Well, they must put something in the water there in Ukraines.