Web 2.0 Asia

My contribution for CNN, titled "A day in the (digital) life of a South Korean boy", was featured on a special section called "Eye on South Korea". Some exceprt:

Insoo Kim, 14, is a typical junior high school student in Seoul. Like all his classmates, Insoo's main means of communication with his buddies is text messaging.

Insoo doesn't even have to take the phone out of his pocket to send an SMS. He knows how to slide it open, which buttons to push how many times to reach the "Send SMS" menu option, compose the entire text message, and hit the send button -- all without even looking at the phone. This is especially handy when he needs to send an SMS during class.

Yes, some Korean kids do can send an SMS without looking. You can check out the rest of the article here.

(Via Hatena) Cleantech is white-hot around the world. As an environmentally conscious person working in the IT sector, I sometimes wonder if there can be a "bridging" solution that brings innovation to both the internet world and the cleantech world. An example for such a bridging solution can be a technology that can lower the power consumption by servers.

SIlicon Valley companies like Google and Yahoo seem to embrace the cleantech very actively these days. back in May, and (The founders of Google are investors in Tesla Motors, which will produce an electric car that goes 0-60 in 4 seconds).

But when it comes to caring for the environment, not many people are so much ahead of the Japanese. Having lived in Japan for half an year, I can attest that many Japanese people care about mother nature (maybe except for the obviously excessive use of plastic packagings everywhere). After all, it's the Japanese who brought hybrid cars to the world!

Goo, a Japanese search and content portal site, is undertaking a campaign called "Goo Search, Green Label". Goo will donate 15% of the ads profit made from searches done on the Green Label search site to an environment NGO, Foe Japan.

The site also displays the number of searches made on the Green Label site, with trees - a tree means 100 searches. Now there are 5,347 trees.

The Green Label search site will be up until November 21, so it's not a permanent initiative. But I think Goo's Green Label search is a lot more realistic an approach than , thereby saving electricity.

Qbox is a service that lets users find music embedded on web pages. In Korea, many blog and Cyworld users have background music embedded on their sites. Qbox indexes the metadata regarding which pages contain which embedded songs. So when someone trying to find music types in the song's title on Qbox music search, Qbox directs the user to the pages that have set the song as background music.  

Now Qbox extends their search target to non-Korean sites as well - namely Youtube, Google, Myspace, and Wikipedia. User can enter a song title and see which Myspace or Youtube pages have that song as background music or contain outbound links to that song.

Using Qbox, services like Myspace effectively double up as a free online jukebox. In the mood for the late Luciano Pavaroti? Type in Pavaroti on Qbox, see the list of Myspace sites that have selected Pavaroti as background music, and click to enjoy away license-free music. 

Qbox also offers a set of browser extension, with which users can mark up a specific part of their web pages and embed links to music files. Qbox has many other features too - perhaps it would be best to visit their "quick tour" page here.

Qbox is a brilliant service, a very unique concept that's been beautifully executed. I think they should have been on the recent Techcrunch 40. But the only concern I have is the license issue - will the music license holders be comfortable with a meta search engine that fiinds music so effectively that it also finds illegally hosted music as well? But then, the bulk of legal responsibility should lie in the person(s) who put up the file illegally in the first place, not the search service provider. Overall, I think Qbox is a clear winner.

Techcrunch reported that, SK Telecom announced it will invest another $270m in Helio, which is expected to lose $340-$360m this year on a revenue of $140-170m.

With other MVNOs like ESPN mobile and Amp'd mobile busted, SK Telecom's move looks a bit dicey. But SK Telecom's mission seems to go beyond the boundary of the smallish Korean market. SKT also invested $1 bn for 6.6% stake in China Unicom (#2 Chinese mobile service provider) last June.

By the way, I found something interesting on the Wikipedia entry on SK Telecom, that the company kicks out people over 45:

At 45 years old the employee must leave the company and accept SKT's retirement package OR join SKT's "Manpower Surplus team" and continue to receive a salary but usually the shame of just sitting at a desk and doing nothing and the loss of retirement benefits is enough to make most employees leave.

This sounds pretty much true, but it was put pretty bluntly - especially given it's on the Wiki.

Olaworks is a company that started with face recognition technology, which the company claimed was better than Riya's. Olaworks launched a photo album service with face recognition feature a few months ago, but the service didn't get so much of traction. Undeterred, the company has just launched a brand new service called Oladay.

Oladay is, in essence, a Flash-based lifelog service. User creates an "episode" by first selecting a theme out of a list of pre-defined themes, and then adding content using texts, photos, videos. Media files can be added directly or from a remote source.

After taking the service for a spin, what springs to my mind immediately are services like Scrapblog, Flip, and Vuvox. But Oladay tries to differ itself by making the service more social - other users can add comments directly on the pictures; Comment thread can be displayed in a way that resembles Twitter dialog. Obviously, Oladay wants to foster conversations around someone's lifeblog.

This was pointed to me by Geoff Long:

HUGE news: the ITU's Telecom Asia event, held every two years, is coming to Bangkok. Actually Thailand has been trying to land this event for quite some time, having made a bid to be the 2004 host, which went to South Korea, and also the last event in 2006, which was eventually held in Hong Kong.

Thanks Geoff for the tip. By the way, this reminded me of the event that I participated in late 2004 in Phuket, Thailand. One year later, the hotel that I stayed in got afflicted by Tsunami. It reminded me of how fragile our lives can be - therefore we should live every day as if it was our last.

The Korea Times reports that the internet traffic in Korea is surging, thanks to the "Web 2.0" services, spanning online video and blogs.

But I doubt if this is the case - I think the real culprit for the surge of internet traffic is P2P. There's even a report that P2P is responsible for as much as 90% of all internet traffic.

So the Techcrunch 40 is now over, with Mint going home with the $50,000 first prize.

Most notable to me as a Korean is the presence of two Korean companies - Storyblender and MusicShake.


Musicshake - I didn't know this company very well, but they rocked the stage on Day 1. About 95% of people thought they were the clear winner at the end of the first day. I'll probably look into this company more.

Storyblender is run by Mr Yongjun Hyung, the original Cyworld founder. I've known him for quite a while and we spent some time together in Japan last May. I'll always envy him for the "original Cyworld founder" tag that will perhaps be attached to him throughout the rest of his life.

This is what I call M. Night Shamalan advantage - if your first film becomes a smash hit, the fact that your second, third, and fourth films actually failed doesn't really matter that much. People always remember you for the huge hit. Reputation certainly goes a long way, and that's why you should have your own Sixth Sense, i.e. the first truly huge success. For Mr Hyung, Cyworld was one. Hope all will go well for him and Storyblender.

Can you imagine Vodafone developing a Twitter clone, in-house? Probably not. But that's what SK Telecom, the number one wireless service provider in Korea (sort of Vodafone of Korea) seems to be doing, with its new Tossi service.

Tossi is essentially a microblogging service with a bit of social networking, which can be accessed from both web and mobile. So it's not so different from Twitter and Jaiku.

In Korea, there's a well-known microblogging service called Me2Day. (I covered the service here). And it's commonly known that SK Telecom has been discussing business partnership with Me2Day. But for some reason SK Telecom decided to go its way and develop the service away. Someone at SKT must have said "Hey, a microblogging service? No sweat - we can build something like that in 2 weeks." That's just my speculation, but that's typicaly the way smart people at big companies think.

But the general opinion around the industry is SK Telecom should have just worked the partnership out with Me2Day instead of building its own service. That way, small companies can have an exit strategy and big companies can save time. That's why there are a lot of acquisitions happening in the Valley. Those guys in the Valley aren't exactly buying other smaller companies because they are generous, are they?

We know SK Telecom, like other big telcos, spent billions of dollars on securing the 3G bandwidth and they will do anything that will help them recuperate the investment. Well, if they want to recuperate billions of dollars, they should come up with a billion dollar plan - a plan that's a lot more fundamental and sophisticated than copying a several person company.

(Via Junycap) Kia Motors launched an official blog called "Kia Buzz", apparently in partnership with the famous PR firm Edelman.

Here's a quote from the blog:

Kia BUZZ is Kia’s official blog for sharing information on Kia vehicles, news, information and opinions.  Kia BUZZ is written by a wide range of Kia experts and management from across the organization to help bring Kia closer to its customers, industry opinion leaders and car enthusiasts.

For those who aren't familiar with the car brand, Kia is a sister company of Hyundai, Korea's largest and world's top 10 car company.

Kia tries to distinguish itself from its older sibling by putting on a more younger and sportier image. That could be a reason why Kia is launching this blog marketing initiative before Hyundai did. But frankly, most of the times, it's pretty darn difficult to separate Kias from Hyundais, because they share many parts.

The blog is actually surprisingly good. For starters, the CEO himself wrote a post. Assuming from the lack of ponytail, Mr Chung isn't exactly Jonathan Schwartz, and I'm thinking it was probably his secretary rather than Mr Chung himself who wrote this post. But the fact that there's a post from the Big Man himself adds a lot of credibility to this blog and sends out the message that Kia is pretty serious with its blog.  

It looks that various Kia insiders from around the world will pick up the slack and chime in with a post or two. And the real-life stories from Kia men could perhaps be the most powerful and resourceful marketing messages. For example, the post written by Michael Choo, International PR manager, made me actually want to buy the Pro_Ceed.

The site however tries to preload video clips, which can make the site look frozen while the videos get loaded. But that's the problem from the video hosting company not Kia's.