Web 2.0 Asia

Today I stumbled upon a blog titled "Japan's Cellphone Edge". The blog says about itself:

Japan's wireless industry is where America & Europe can be in a couple of years. This blog invites you to have a look at the wireless future by discovering what is hot in Japan right now. Learn about the best practices for mobile business from one source.

Among many interesting articles, what especially caught my attention was the article about Mincle, a Japanese location-based mobile SNS.

Apparently, Mincle is a service where the GPS-phone users can post content (blogs/photos etc) about specific locations and share stories about their favorite spots with others. I should perhaps check out the service myself. By the way, the name "Mincle" comes from "mingle", according to the blog.

Including this particular post about Mincle, Japan's Cell Phone Edge blog offers a lot of good content.

Sources like Comscore suggest Orkut isn't as bad as some might think. Even Michael Arrington, usually cynical, concedes that "Perhaps, somehow, [Orkut] is actually a social networking heavyweight."

Some people derided that Orkut is used by many drug dealers in South America. But then, if a community service sees a lot of uses by drug dealers, doesn't it mean the service is actually quite a secure and effective platform of communication? I mean, drug dealers wouldn't want to trade some sensitive information such as the next trading schedule on a crash-prone, insecure space.

As a (quoted below), it's also quite surprising that Google hasn't done much about Orkut despite the service's ridiculously huge popularity in Brazil. If what he says below is true, then one can't help but conclude Brazil clearly isn't Google's top priority.

As a Brazilian living in Silicon Valley, it is very hard for me to understand why the venture community ignored Orkut’s phenomenon for such a long time. In Brazil (and probably in India too) Orkut is more than a social network: It is a Craigslist, Facebook, MySpace, and Classmates.com ALL COMBINED in one single social network. And I’m talking about demographics and behavior, not software features.

Furthermore, Orkut as a brand is hugely popular: Just go right now (3pm PST) to g1.com.br, the largest news site in Brazil and you will see the “Orkut” word in the front page news. Even those without Internet access know Orkut — there is even a country song called “I Will Delete You From My Orkut” (!!)

And I am not even mentioning the ecosystem that was created around Orkut by third-party developers — without a official API!!

In conclusion, traffic is actually not the most surprising thing about Orkut. More importantly is the fact (ignored so far) that Orkut presents a *huge* untapped opportunity for capitalization beyond simply page views.

 

Considering the fact that such great media sites as TechCrunch and VentureBeat generate at least some revenues from their job boards, I figured it's time Web 2.0 Asia had its own job board.

Obviously I'm kidding about the job board thing here :) but the following executive search is for real. I got referred to a headhunting firm YES Partners by my friend Benjamin Joffe and YES Partners told me I could put this information on my blog.

So here it goes. If you find the position attractive and think you are a good candidate, then apply away! (Use Rose Mortilla's contact information given below)

++

Manager, Worldwide Strategy & Planning (Seoul, Korea)

Company Description:

Our client is a company operating a video sharing website that hosts user-generated content. Founded in October 2004, it is the fist video sharing website in the world to attach advertising to user-submitted video clips and to provide unlimited storage space for users to upload. As of March 2007, the site was visited by 15 million monthly unique visitors and 1.5 billion video streams watched per month. It has over 1 million video inventory and 2 billion monthly pageviews.

Job Description:

Reporting directly to the CEO, the Strategy & Planning Manager will assume responsibility for the company's long-range strategic planning efforts. He/She will lead the implementation of a new companywide strategic planning process and will be responsible for select business development activities. He/She will also be responsible for leading the company's product strategy and development efforts including partnerships and alliances as well as the development of future technology roadmaps, capabilities and customer offerings.

Responsibilities:

1.      Providing direct support to Senior Management

2.      Coordinating the activities, schedules, and agendas for strategic planning

3.      Working directly on the Strategic Plan to include drafting, monitoring and reporting on goals, scheduling and facilitating annual and monthly planning meetings

4.      Working directly with Senior Management to coordinate special projects related to current and future strategy

5.      Driving new business and service development

6.      Identifying opportunities for market expansion

Skills and Experience

1.      Strong strategic planning skills

2.      minimum 3 years experience developing and implementing strategic planning methodology

3.      Strong business acumen, management / organizational skills and professional style/presence

4.      Experience in global consulting with a focus on MEDIA is required. Ideally having worked for one of the top consulting companies.

5.      Excellent / professional communication (oral and written), interpersonal, and organizational skills

6.      Conversational Korean is required

7.      In-depth knowledge and understanding of every phase within Strategic Planning life cycle.

Contact:

Rose Mortilla
YES Partners
global executive search solutions
tel    x703

www.yespartners.com

TNC (disclaimer: I'm co-chairing this company) launched Tatter and Media (available in Korean only for the time being), a blog media network.


In short, it's the Federated Media of Korea. Some 40+ well-known blogs are participating in this blog media network to increase their reach and benefit from the increased ads-buying power.

A similar service in Japan can be found in the Agile Media Network.

How can Tatter and Media enable the participating bloggers to gain higher ad revenues? It's the scale of economy - the combined monthly page views across the whole blog networks are obviously much higher than those of each single blog site. As such, the "blog network" can find banner advertisers more easily and cut a better deal with those advertisers than a single blog site can.

What's up with the slightly off name "Tatter and Media"? Our company's blog software (which happens to be the most widely used server-hosted blog software in Korea with a dominating market share) has been called "Tattertools". Although we're changing the software's name to (more catchy and slightly more globally acceptable) Textcube, Tattertools is still the household name among the Korean bloggers - hence the name "Tatter and Media".

Obviously the Tatter and Media blog network does not only accept Tattertools blog software users - we're against walled gardens. But it just happens that the majority of the initially participating bloggers are Tattertools bloggers.

Again, hat tips to our crew who launched this blogger network in Korea. I'll contemplate about bringing this to Japan, but currently I'm too tied up with finishing this client project I've been doing in Tokyo for the last 5 months. We're almost finishing up the project and I'm about to start searching for the next opportunities lying ahead of us.

Via Anil Dash:

I hope one day my children will do that for me.