Web 2.0 Asia

Joop Dorresteijn over at the Next Web wrote a piece on Korean web, for which I contributed via email interviews:

Today, South Korea is the most connected country on earth, but the funny thing is that we hardly hear anything about Korea’s web scene. This made us curious about what websites are popular over there, and if Korea has a web 2.0 scene. To find that out, we reviewed the three visited websites in Korea and we interviewed Chang W. Kim, Korean web 2.0 enthusiast and initiator of the Open Web Asia ‘08 conference.

... Chang has written before about why so little South Korean companies get ‘Techcrunched‘. He thinks that it’s related to 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.”

Which is why we are making such initiatives as the Open Web Asia workgroup (initiated by Gang Lu at Mobinode) and the Open Web Asia '08 conference (for which an update post is long overdue - check back here next week.)

The whole Korean society is literally in frenzy now. Just look at this picture. We have protests like these every single day in Seoul.


So what happened? Here's my one paragraph summary for you: The new Korean president Mr Lee hastily signed the US beef import agreement, without paying close attention to banning the kind of beef that might potentially cause mad cow disease. Fitting his nickname "bulldozer", Lee tried to push through his plan despite serious concerns. Amid this, the traditional media tried to play a cover-up game, accusing the public health concerns as unfounded rumors and the protesters as left-wing manipulators.

But the majority of protesters were not political minds - they were average Koreans who were deeply upset by the government and the old media. Given that many Koreans are web-savvy, always-connected, blogging-like-crazy folks, what we had was essentially millions of angry bloggers.

Ouch. You don't really want to imagine what happens when you have millions of angry bloggers.

Behind the massive physical protests, there are even more massive web activities: Protests are organized by mobile messages and broadcast on the internet live at the scene. But the government and traditional media embarrass themselves on a daily basis by not "getting it". The government once mistook Daum's Agora, the massively popular internet discussion forum, as some kind of secret political party. (Duh?)

It used to be so easy - the government could just set up a plan, push through it, let the media do its part. But the web 2.0 turned nearly every single Korean into a media figure. Now everyone ventilates his or her ideas on the internet, to which all others are responding back and forth - the amount of communication taking place grows exponentially. It ain't simple and easy anymore. If you want to lead people, you should do it in a 2.0 way, or you're doomed.

This is what Korean politicians and old media folks are slowly realizing (if they ever are, that is), in a very painful and costly way. Politicians around the world can learn some important lessons from what's happening in Korea - Are you there, Barack Obama?

PS. There's a deeper analysis on this matter on Taewoo's Technokimchi.

Here's the video of my interview with Myspace co-founder and CEO, Chris DeWolf, and also with Travis Katz and Sung Lee, both VPs at Myspace. (Sung is heading up the Asian operation of Myspace.)

Do you know what keeps Myspace CEO up at night? The fact that there are local competitors in every country, and that he has to keep track of about 30 of them.



As a tech blogger, this was really a golden opportunity for me - Well, it's not like you get to interview Myspace CEO every day, right?

The interview went very smoothly. I'm not necessarily saying this was a good thing though. In retrospect, I think the interview could have carried more "sting", with perhaps more jokes and curve balls (ie. hard questions) thrown. To defend myself a bit, somehow the settings were not entirely conversational - I suspect this was because at the end of every sentence we all had to wait for the translator to translate the entire paragraph.

By the way, it's worth noting that more and more Silicon Valley CEOs are visiting Korea. Interview with Chris marked the second time I met a big-name Silicon Valley CEO during the span of three days (the first such meeting was with Max Levchin of Slide.com.)

So who should I interview the next time in Korea, Google founders maybe? :)

(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.

Silicon Alley Insider reports that Kai-Fu Lee, Google China's president, said Google aspires to become China's search market leader within five years. Lee's comments back up Eric Schmidt's audacious statement.

"Certainly, we would like to aspire to be a market leader in five years," Mr. Lee said Monday on the sidelines of the Boao Forum for Asia.

Google accounted for 26% of China's Internet-search revenue in the fourth quarter, up from 17% a year earlier, according to Beijing research firm Analysys International. Market leader Baidu.com's share of the market rose to 60% from 58%.

Many Internet users in China are more familiar with Baidu, which started earlier in the country and which attracts users in significant part by facilitating easy access to free music.

If Google China does succeed in becoming the top dog in China, it will certainly be a sweet revenge against Baidu, which practically mocked Google with its infamous "I know you don't know" commercial (ironical this is hosted on Google's own Youtube):



Going back to the quote again, Google China's market share jumped from 17% to 26% in over a year. That's pretty remarkable growth, isn't it? Especially so, contrasting those figures against Google Korea's current market share, which is 2.16% as of March 2008 (according to Korean Click, a Korean web analytics company.)

Why is Google struggling to break into the Korean market? It might be because Korea is a unique market where "monoculture" dominates, or it might be because Korean local incumbents, most notably Naver, are so good. Or it might be the combination of both.

Myspace Korea launched officially today. Chris DeWolfe, Myspace CEO who is visiting Korea, delivered a keynote at Yonsei University today. Myspace is also throwing a chic, "clubby" launching party tonight in Seoul too.


Their Korea strategy? The same strategy that they used in the US when they started out, namely to focus initially on Indie bands and musicians and build self-service content outlets for them. Myspace will also try to work with local web companies to develop Myspace apps tailored for Korean market. Chris DeWolf said Myspace is fully aware that each local market has different usage pattern and taste, especially when it comes to web services, and therefore Myspace Korea will be "quite differentiated" from Myspace US. For example, as I had introduced in earlier post, Myspace Korea offers some Korea-only features such as "Minilog", a Twitter-like mini blog. The UI is also much tailored for Korean users' tastes, says Myspace.

As a side note, I was supposed to do a one-on-one interview with Chris DeWolve at tomorrow's  Myspace Developer Conference Seoul (think Guy Kawasaki-Steve Ballmer talk), but Chris had a last minute schedule change and I'll be talking to Travis Katz and Sung Lee, both Myspace VPs. It would have been very cool if I could interview Myspace CEO for an hour, but still I'm sure Sung and Travis are terrific people and I'll have a heck of time talking with them. If video becomes available, I'll post the interview video on this blog later on.

Cyworld is launching a blog service (link in Korean) - well, technically, they're not launching a new service, but changing the name of their existing Home2 service. With their "Cyworld Blog" initiative, Cyworld might add more features down the road, but at least for the time being, the change seems pretty cosmetic.

What is Home 2? As the suffix "2" tells, Cyworld has made a longtime effort to bring forth an upgraded version of their popular yet aging (i.e. slow growth) minihompy service. As popular as minihompy service was, Cyworld knew that nothing can be popular forever and they had to come up with the new engine of growth.

So they put together a team of brilliant strategists (including Marc Canter of the US, it's widely known) and spent numerous hours on brainstorming sessions. The service that came out of that effort was Cyworld Home 2 (out in spring 2007) - which was essentially a blog service with some robust frontpage editing features (widgets, page addition, etc) and 1-chon (Cyworld's friend system).


However, Home 2 service never really clicked with the Cyworld minihompy users. Minihompy users didn't perceive the more blog-like Home 2 service as the natural next step to their minihompies and therefore didn't rush to Home 2. The fact that Home 2 was packed with all the bells and whistles also meant the service didn't have a very clear focus. When introduced to Home 2, minihompy users were like, "ok, so why am I supposed to use this?"

So Home 2 was by and large a flop, but to make matters worse, the situation isn't all that rosy for the minihompy service either - it's under a double threat of a) decreasing traffic in its domestic Korean market and b) struggle in virtually all foreign markets it entered into.

Which is why the re-naming of Home 2 to Cyworld Blog seems to have come from desperation rather than from a well-devised strategy.

Cyworld is perhaps undergoing a textbook case of innovator's dilemma: Once great, now slowly aging. Massive self-reinvention effort in the name of Home 2 didn't exactly succeed. Again, if you were Cyworld CEO, what would you do? Certainly a nice brain-teaser.

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.

Call Korea "e-learning paradise" - According to Naver News, on a recent survey, 39.1% of Koreans were found to turn to the internet (e-learning) when they study. The percentage of people who study on the web has been on a sharp increase - It was 13.6% in 2005 and 27.8% in 2006. The figures for people from 6 to 19 years old were a whopping 67.0%.

I don't know if Koreans are the hardest-studying people in the world (well, Korean students certainly are - though they still mostly cram stuff in their heads for their college entrance exam rather than developing creativity). But it's certain that when they do study, Koreans are much more likely to use the web as the medium than the rest of the world. Which translates into some tough competition for Korean e-learning service providers: There are 756 e-learning service providers, an increase of 21.7% over the last year, the survey also found.