After Oprah's blessing, Twitter has become officially mainstream, and many celebrities are joining the micro-blogging service. Yuna Kim, a Korean figure skater who is one of the most popular sports figures in Korea, also started her own Twitter recently. Kim's Twitter has instantly got .
Whenever I talk to folks from the Valley, many of them ask me why no one had started a Twitter clone in Korea. It turns out that we do have a cool Twitter-like service in Me2day, which is now part of NHN (the company behind Naver.) Also there is another service called PlayTalk, which became famous after a famous Korean book author published a best seller book, based on his "Twits" on PlayTalk.
Speaking of a famous figure using the service, Me2day also saw increase of use after having Epic High, famous singer, on board. Key takeaway here: Whether it's Oprah, a figure skater, or a best selling book author, having a celebrity on your service can make it much more visible to the mainstream users.
Korean internet portals join the mourning as the former president dies
Other | 2009/05/26 09:39 | Web 2.0 Asia
Last weekend, the news that caught all Koreans in shock was the former president Roh's death. The nation is in mourning, and many of the major Korean internet sites were quick to participate in the mourning by employing monotone hues on their front page. Portals also have opened public forums where users can leave messages of condolescence. As societies become more connected, internet portals are becoming more and more the default window that reflects the society's current sentiments and the zeitgeist.
Playstreet is a new service that sort of combines the best of Google's street views and Yelp.com. In a nutshell, Playstreet, a Seoul-based startup service, is a local review service on select hot spots. Hotspots in cities are usually represented by streets -- think Paris' Champs-Elysees, New York's 5th Avenue, Los Angeles's Rodeo Drive, or Tokyo's Harajuku Dakeshita Dori. Playstreet displays local review content on those popular streets in a unique way, where street view images are overlayed onto graphical maps, so that it can give users a feeling as if they were actually walking on the particular spot.
Playstreet only focuses on "hot spots", and for Seoul, currently there are 29 hotspots. I think that's plenty.
Select a hotspot, and the default view presented is a graphical map. But notice the map doesn't try to cover everywhere, but specifically focuses on most interesting streets. When mouse is over a blue line on the map (i.e. certain street of interest), it gets highlighted.
Click on the highlighted blue line, and you get a more detailed view for the street. Now you see a mashup of street view (top pane) and the matching graphical map (bottom pane). The two panes are synchronized, so whichever pane you are scrolling in, the other pane gets scrolled at the same time.
Notable places on the street view are tagged; Click on a place tag, and a popup window shows basic information and review content about the place. (There isn't so much of content for the time being, it appears).
It's interesting they are not using Google's street maps (which doesn't support Korea right now anyway), or anything equivalent, but are producing their own version of street images. They say they have a partnership program with colleges, and through that program they can hire college students for a low-cost photo taking. Playstreet says the key reason they have to produce their own images is the needs for more frequent update - in Korea, shops do change all the time. But I'm still wondering if producing the street images in-house is the best approach for them in the long term.
It also remains to be seen if Playstreet will be able to amass enough content, either through crawling or through user generation. At the end of the day, local information sites would be all about content. Having said that, I think this is a quite interesting concept and a brilliantly unique user interface.
TAG playstreet
Image from Google
At this point, it is not 100% clear how far the company will go in terms of integrating Open Social in Cyworld. Most basic implementation can be something like making Cyworld an Open Social container so that Korea's third party developers can introduce and sell interesting small applications to the minihompy users. That's almost given, I would say, but it will be more cool to see Cyworld's social graph become available to third party developers so we can see some interesting apps that leverage Cyworld's "1-chon" social graph, or better yet, Dotori (acorns) virtual payment system. If app developers can piggyback on Dotori system, it will allow micro payment and help monetizing apps -- which will lead to more active participation of app developers.
Largely, Cyworld Minihompies have been called a closed ecosystem. Now Cyworld wants to become "as open as Facebook", according to the article quoted above. Hope Open Social will rejuvenate the recently stagnating Cyworld, the "mother of all social networks", by bringing in lots of interesting apps to the game.
Enswer.me seems to have found the holy grail of monetizing online videos
Web 2.0 | 2009/05/13 12:43 | Web 2.0 Asia
In this Youtube era, people upload TV content on the web literally the minute after programs are aired. Content owners are almost frantic to chase after those non-copyright uploaders and delete their uploaded content. But it often ends up being a mere hide and seek game, as for every deleted piece, there is always another piece of the same content getting uploaded. Also, content deletion leads to a bad user experience, as people often see the image of a video, click on it, and end up seeing "This content has been deleted due to the request of the original owner" sign.
Back to the Boys Over Flowers. The content owners of Boys Over Flowers knew that their program would be put up on the internet in no time, and their effort to hunt down the illegal uploads would be simply not enought. So intead they worked with Enwer.me, a video startup (which I covered in my previous post), to search the user-uploaded Boys Over Flowers content on Daum and Cyworld, and put relevant ads.
Content owners, instead of relentlessly chasing after user uploaded content and deleting them, could generate fresh ads revenue -- the more users upload content, the more money content owners make. Enswer's video search technology enabled such targeted video ads, and anyone would agree that this would be a far better way to monetize video content than banning user uploads and restricting the viewing experience to those channels that the content owners have direct control over. Job well done.
Wetoku is a new web service out of Korea that doesn't try to do too many things, but does one thing very well -- interviewing someone on the internet. Doing an interview can be a rather cumbersome process: think all those travels and equipment-carrying. But Wetoku makes doing an interview as easy as filling out some basic info, creating an interview session, and sending the created interview session's URL to the target interviewee.
Once the recording is done, the interviewer can embed the copy of the URL to easily embed the interview content on blog or other sites. Here is an example of an interview done ovder Wetoku and embedded on a website.
Wetoku is a product of Zenitum, a Seoul, Korea based professional service agency cum small-scale venture incubator. As for the name, Wetoku is the Japanese way of pronouncing "We Talk", according to Wetoku. This is just a fun and hip way of coming up with a new brand, never meant to be making fun of Japanese accents at all, Wetoku says - in fact, they say the name came from one of the Japanese speakers at the firm. Well, with the likes of Wetoku and Big in Japan (which has nothing to do with Japan anyway), maybe Japan is becoming the newest source of inspiration for Web 2.0 names? We'll see.
The guys behind Wetoku are agile application developers, who also produced Edufava, a web service whose tagline is "Find and learn from the world's best educators." Both Wetoku and Edufava were built in Korea, but they are obviously targeted for global audience, both being available in English. Also both sites have very clean, uncluttered design. Hope they become the long-awaited Korea-born, globally-hit web services.
TAG Edufava, Wetoku, Zenitum
Just a quick house-keeping announcement. I built a new personal homepage: Planet Chang. I used Weebly for drag and drop site building, and used feeds and widgets from various sites to populate sections of the site. Web 2.0 Asia's feeds will also be syndicated out to my personal website. It's got links to my Facebook and Twitter accounts as well.
PlanetChang.com
