(Last update on November 2007) Hi, my name is Chang. (Just for the record, my full name in Korean is Chang-Won Kim.) I've been writing this blog since early 2006, mostly as a personal project. The primary goal of this blog is to let people outside of Korea know what's happening around the Korean IT/web industry, and other interesting web-related things happening in Korea. I was also in Japan for quite a while, on a long onsite project (hence the name of this blog, Web 2.0 Asia, instead of Web 2.0 Korea), but honestly I'm mostly based in Korea for now and therefore most of my stories pertain to the Korean market. As a full time startup executive, I'm usually pretty busy - so when I blog, I usually just quickly "write away" and don't look back, so my blogs might contain some typos or grammatical errors or some unclear things (English is not my first language anyway). But I'll try my best though - just don't expect this blog to be perfect ;)
My full-time job is to run Korea's leading blog software company, TNC (Sorry the link is in Korean), sharing the CEO post with the original founder and my partner/pal Chester Roh. TNC provides professional blogging software and services to 400K+ users, including 65 of Korea's top 100 bloggers (as of 1H 2007). TNC is the first company to have received funding from Softbank Ventures' Ranger Fund, a venture fund dedicated for Asia's most innovative web startups. TNC is also a 2007 Red Herring 100 Asian Company. My primary role as the co-CEO is to take the company to the global market and to develop new services. During the day, I'm busy working on either the next version of blogging service, or a pretty wacky new business idea. For more information including my more resume-ish profile, check out my first post below. If you'd like to contact me in person, please send an email at chang1.kim at gmail dot com.
(Please, no term debate here -- the word Web 2.0 throughout this blog roughly means an innovative, next generation web. That's it.)
What motivated me to begin this blog was the dinner we had after the Next Generation Web conference of Korea in March 2006. (Oliver Starr's article about the conference here.) The program committee (of which I was a member) got together to review the conference in general; Soon the discussion centered around the question, why can't Asia lead the Web 2.0 innovation, or at least get on par with the Web 2.0 ventures in the Valley?
After all, Korea, for one, boasts the highest household penetration of broadband internet in the world; Successful web companies abound; Mobile internet infrastructure in Asia has always been phenomenal.
An interesting observation: a blog of a young Asian girl -- not a pop singer or a movie star, but seemingly just an everyday girl -- ranks higher than Robert Scoble's Scoblizer on the Technorati Top 100 blog list.
So why don't we see so many Asian Web 2.0 companies being TechCrunched ?
I think one of the reasons has been the lack of efforts to bring the Asian Web 2.0 innovations to the attention of the rest of the world. Less effort to get these companies known, less attention to Asian Web 2.0 industry, less venture money flowing in, less number of startups, and so on.
So I thought maybe more people based here in Asia should step up and start talking about the Web innovations across Asia -- hence this blog.
Just a little bit about myself: I am a Web/mobile professional who has contributed 100+ IT articles to various media, most notably Sky Venture. I also have a gig at a company that tends more to deliberate not obliterate.
I'll be first looking at Korean Web 2.0 companies, with many of whom I have professional and/or personal ties. I will always welcome contributions from outside. Whenever you are interested, send me an email at chang1.kim at gmail dot com.
To view a more resume-ish profile of me, click below.
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