116 Articles for 'Other'
- 2010/07/07 Open Web Asia is Here Again
- 2010/03/05 Are You Kidding Me? A Bizarre Story About Online Gaming
- 2010/01/28 MBC finally gives in and embraces P2P sharing (3)
- 2009/12/29 My TEDx Seoul Talk Is Now Up (7)
- 2009/12/15 Let's go Korea
- 2009/11/17 Help Needed: My TEDx Seoul Talk on November 28 (19)
- 2009/09/08 LIFT Asia 2009: You Should Definitely Check This Out. (3)
- 2009/07/28 Seoul: Best city for mobile LBS? (7)
- 2009/07/08 Tmax Soft unveils a new OS, but success still in doubt
- 2009/07/02 Picture of the day - a Korean rural house with 85 dishes
Open Web Asia, the conference that I created together with some good folks, was last held in October 2008. In 2009, we nearly held the Open Web Asia '09, but the plan faltered as the main sponsor backed off at the last minute (and besides I was too busy having my freshman year at Google.)
But the good spirit lives on, and a group of energetic and capable folks in Malaysia rekindled the pulled off the South East Asia version of Open Web Asia -- dubbed "Open Web Asia South East Asia" or "OWA-SEA". It's a very long name, but as I expect the future Open Web Asia conferences to take place in various cities in Asia, I think it makes more sense if we just go with the city-as-the-postfix system, a la TEDx.
Open Web Asia SEA will be held in KL, Malaysia next week. The conference will host great local speakers (and some foreign ones including myself, and Serkan Toto over at Techcrunch), and the conference has already seen 270+ registrants. (You can register here.) I'm really hoping this to become yet another successful Open Web Asia conference.
The guy who is doing the bulk of heavy-lifting for this conference is Daniel CerVentus. Daniel and I exchanged many emails and I'm really looking forward to meeting him in person finally. He and I have a lot to catch up, as we both know what it takes to pull off a conference of this scale.
Another heads-up for the Open Web Asia conference is that Dr. Gang Lu and his gang (no pun intended ;-) are preparing another Open Web Asia in Taiwan, hopefully to be held this year. Yet another good news is that we have started talks for sponsorship for Open Web Asia Seoul 2011, and it looks very promising so far. (It's too early to share any plans at this point though.)
For any future Open Web Asia's, I will check back and share any progresses; For the upcoming one in Malaysia, I will try to cover any interesting companies that catches my attention. But I'm sure Serkan will do a much better job spotting and introducing interesting services anyway.
A bizarre, sad story related to online games. A married couple in Suwon, Korea has been arrested by the police for negligence of their parental duties. The couple left their three month old baby starve to death, because they were "too obsessed with online gaming." Ironically enough, it turned out that the online game they were playing to their baby's death was themed around, well guess what, raising a virtual avatar.
So in short, the couple were too busy taking care of their "virtual baby" that they kept their "real baby" completely unattended and starved to death.
The game is called "Prius Online" and the players can adopt an avatar and grow it. Game players can also buy the avatars virtual items such as clothes, or even write a blog about their avatars, much resembling a parenting diary.
The parents in charge are said to have been under great parenting stress, presumably due to their financial difficulties, and as their parenting stresses mounted, they became more and more obsessed with the game -- their "escape" from the real world.
This is really unheard of, but I'm afraid the world might see more incidents like this as games become more real and blur the lines between the real world and the virtual world. Unlike packaged games, online games and MMORPGs often do not have a clear ending, forcing users to put in endless amount of time and energy into the game. Some players become seriously obsessed with the game and play it for days straight without a wink of sleep. After days of immersive gaming, they might get to confuse the real world and the virtual world, like the way the characters in the movie Avatar gradually became more familiar with the virtual world.
MBC, a major Korean broadcasting company, announced (link in Korean) it will make nearly all of its content available to anyone for sharing. This means any individual or company can freely grab MBC's original content and put it up on their server without any restrictions.
MBC says they are doing this as they are confident they will be able to monetize successfully. End customers who want to download MBC content should pay around KRW 500 per episode (= about half a buck). MBC will collect the revenues from P2P service providers, and has signed agreement with 40 P2P companies. As a way to make sure there is no loophole, MBC will use the technologies that can detect free-riders -- content downloaders who do not pay for the content. There are startup companies, such as Enswer, that can filter out illegally downloaded content.
MBC's new policy can be summed up as: Encourage more sharing/uploading, and monetize at the point of downloading. To me this seems to be a better strategy than what MBC (and all other content owners) have been trying so hard to do in the past, only in vain: Putting heavy penalties to content uploaders, in a hope such measure will scare people away. But the problem is, many of the content uploaders turn out to be 16-year highschool students, who may not be aware of all the laws and regulations, nor are easily scared in general.
MBC says they are giving the new system a try until March this year.
It looks like TEDx Seoul videos are now up. Mine is here. Show some link/share love!
Since the video is offered in Windows Media plug-in, not in Flash media (a la YouTube), I can't take the share codes and embed them in this post. Also the audio quality is obviously less than desirable, with quite a few portions of the talk sounding broken and incomprehensible -- thanks to the wireless mic that came on and off all the time, leading to the frustrations of some speakers including myself. For a conference speaker, nothing is worse than a malfuctioning mic. About 2 paragraphs of planned talk got wiped out from my brain on stage, and those were the funniest 2 paragraphs! Sigh.
As a Korean, I definitely feel more comfortable talking in Korean, but given the subject and the global nature of the conference, I did my talk in English. Subtitles don't seem to be offered yet -- but as soon as they are up, please come back and see some TED Talks by our Korean speakers. They are as much entertaining and engaging as any other TED speakers from around the world.
Chang Kim's TEDx Seoul talk: http://tedxseoul.com/xe/5491
Disclaimer: Not tech-related
(Via Lovesera) It's holiday season! For anyone interested in visiting Korea anytime soon for whatever reason, here's a good (and free) Korea guidebook. Korea Tourism Organization published an English tour guide for Korea. You can download the pdf file from the link below. It could be a good in-flight read.
It looks KTO put the slides up on Scribd themselves, which is pretty amazing. Is Korean government finally embracing web 2.0 technologies? By the way, the organization recently had a new CEO, Lee Cham, a German-converted-to-Korean, and are moving aggressively to invite more visitors to Korea. They even hired Bae Yong Joon as an ambassador.
TEDx is an extension of TED conference that are independently organized and hosted by local groups around the world. Various cities have held TEDx's, and now it's finally Seoul's turn. The inaugural TEDx Seoul will be held on Saturday, November 28, in Sinchon, Seoul (near Yonsei University). For more info, visit TEDx Seoul website.
I've been invited as a speaker (many thanks to those recommended me! Thou shall receive karma). The topic that I chose was, well, what else could it be? The Korean web. Given that TEDx Seoul is not a super geeky conference, I will keep my talk to be pretty high-level.
Here are some of the underlying thoughts for my talk, as can be found on the website:
"Ten years ago, Korea was an innovation powerhouse in the web industry -- The country was filled with entrepreneurship and was churning out some of the most interesting web services before any other countries did. But these days Korea-born innovations are hard to come by. On the contrary, some worry that Korea might be becoming "internet Galapagos", inflicted by walled gardens and lack of entrepreneurial spirits. What happened, and what should Korea do? Are there any signs of hope we can find?"
Based on this, I have put together some slides that may form the foundation of my talk (definitely far from being a final version, as you can see). Final slides will likely feature bunch of pics and images, true to TED tradition.
TEDx early draft
View more presentations from chang1.
Now, I'd like to ask your collective intelligence to help me build my cases. My talk will be roughly organized into three parts: a) good old days of the Korean web industry, b) challenges we are facing, and c) signs of hope that we can see despite all those challenges. I will especially focus my talk on the c), namely the "signs of hope" part, because that's what matters most anyway. This is the area that I'm having most difficulty finding compelling cases too.
So anyone out there reading this post, please help me out: Let me know any interesting people, companies, ideas, or trends that you believe will help re-igniting the Korean web. I know it's a big and awfully vaguely defined question, but I'm intentionally leaving it open-ended for now so that you can give me, well, anything. Let's keep good ideas coming. Thanks in advance!
I'm finally breaking out of my social media silence. Coming back from business trip and holidays, I was faced with ridiculous amount of work.
LIFT's main conference is held in Europe in Spring, and the Fall event is happening in Asia. The venue for the Asian event is (just like the last year) Korea's Jeju Island - the southern-most part of the country that's arguably as tranquil/tropical/exotic as any other getaway trip destinations in South East Asia.
Jeju Island - photo from Flickr
Of course the key difference between spending your early Fall in other nice places and Jeju is that, with LIFT Asia, you can recharge your intellectual mojo while also bathing in the sun. Speakers are definitely top-notch and are bringing with themselves lots of exciting experiences and expertise. If not for LIFT, where can you possibly meet the folks who are building next-generation robots, buildings, and games in one place?
Well, simply saying "meet" would not be sufficient, because the networking session will make everyone into friends. Jeju's secluded environment keeps all attendees and speakers away from big-city distractions and almost force them to spend the evenings together. You want some real networking? LIFT Asia is the right conference for you to attend. You can register at LIFT's official homepage.
Yet another interesting, "only possible in Korea" story. For those who didn't know, Seoul is pretty famous for its healthy (or almost unhealthy?) dose of night life. Recently, a civil organization called Citizen's Movement for No Prostitution published "escort businesses map" of Gangnam Gu, southern part of Seoul.
As expected, the whole Gangnam area is found to be jam-packed with various kinds of nightlife places where people can drink and, if they want, buy sex. Does this spell a business opportunity for nightlife-focused mobile LBS (location-based service)? You figure it out.
Apparently, Google is not the only company that announced plan for launching a new OS. Just a day before the "nuclear bomb" news about the Chrome OS, Tmax, a Korean software company, unveiled (link Korean) a demo version of their new OS called none other than "Tmax Window".
Tmax Window is squarely aiming to become Korea's Microsoft Windows fighter. The promise: Works just like Microsoft Windows, but the price is half. During the product demo, Tmax ran Starcraft game and Microsoft Office on its Tmax Window. The applications somehow ran, but there were still many rough edges and glitches, participants witnessed. Tmax Window will go on sale in November this year.
Tmax is one of the leading software companies in Korea, most famous for its middleware server solution. They take huge pride in being the only Korean company (or one of only few local players anywhere in the world) competing head-on against global software giants such as Microsoft and Oracle. Pride is good, but it may not necessarily mean success: Especially with the Tmax Window, one can't help but question if Tmax is fighting a worthy fight. When even Microsoft itself is much struggling to launch a OS that just works, will Tmax ever get a chance?
It remains to be seen if TMax Window will be a contender at least in the Korean market, but one thing is dead clear: The company couldn't have picked up a worse time. With Google's Chrome OS announcement, chances are not many people will care Tmax Window anyway.
This is not the post aboout the latest, cutting edge IT development of Korea. New York Times reports a man nicknamed the "antenna man", who has set up 85 satellite dishes in his rural house.
You might wonder if this person is either an eccentric type trying to receive some signals from aliens in the outer space, or a TV maniac who just can't be satisfied with hundreds of Korean satellite TV channels -- but the story actually goes deeper than that. What started out as a man's hobby is now one of the best ways to serve the local community, which has many foreign wives suffering from homesickness.
In South Korea, which had once prided itself on being a homogeneous society, 4 out of 10 women who married in rural communities last year were foreign born. In Yeongju alone, the number of foreign wives increased by 28 percent in the past year and a half, to 250, half of them from Vietnam.“These women have a hard time fitting in. The local governments, and the husbands, often focus only on making them ‘Korean,’ teaching them the Korean language and computer skills,” said Mr. Lee, 39, who has never married. “They don’t quite understand how isolated these women feel.”
When Mr. Lee, who lives with his 80-year-old mother and 97-year-old grandfather, is not toying with his satellite equipment, he tends his pepper and sesame fields or makes the rounds of nearby villages to see if the foreign brides are having any problems with their television reception.
