2008/09/12 15:01

Breaking News: Google buys TNC (and Tattertools/Textcube)

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Two Google stories in a row on TechnoKimchi. This one is just as big as the Chrome news to me. And to Korean bloggers.

Google Korea announced just hours ago that it acquired TNC(short for "Tatter and Company"). TNC is the company behind the blogging platform Textcube, formerly known as Tattertools. Basically Textcube is the Korean version of Wordpress. The most popular blogging platform. It also recently launched a hosting service named Textcube Dot Com, which combines the best of blogging and SNS.

Google's acquisition of TNC has lots of implications. This one not only marks the very first acquisition of any company by Google Korea but also implies its strong will for playing with Naver and Daum in the Korean market despite Google Korea's official title "R&D Center."

But here's the reason why this is so important: Korean Web 2.0 startup market has been dead for a while. There's simply no "exit". Startup Web companies can't generate revenues, can't go IPO, can't be sold. No exit. Period. Thus, no innovation.

TNC has been one of the most famous Web 2.0 startups in Korea. And it was finally sold to none other than Google!!! Bloggers are going quite nuts, obviously.

Chang Kim mentioned once on his blog the lack of innovation in Korea. Saddened by the current state of (lack of) innovation in the Korean Web industry, he's been working hard on Open Web Asia and other things, hoping Korea would be a better place for Web innovations.

And guess what? He's the star today! Chang is actually one of the co-CEOs of TNC and soon, he'll be working as a Google employee, probably in charge of Textcube. Congratulations, chang!!!

Starting from tomorrow, we're going to the biggest holiday season of the year: Chuseok. And this is perfect (and good) news to know as we go into holidays. Of course, there's much to be discussed about the deal and I'm not sure how active Google has been in terms of acquiring local startups in different parts of Asia. But for now, I'm just happy that a great startup company has found a great acquirer.

What do you guys think of the acquisition?

More: Chang Kim himself wrote a post on the deal. Go check it out. You can tell how excited he is :)

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Posted by Danny Kim twdanny
TAGChang Kim, Google, Korea, open web asia, Tatter Tools, textcube, TNC, Web, Web 2.0, web 2.0 asia
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2008/08/26 23:17

Open Web Asia '08 Is Here!!!

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Hey, guys. I'm back again! This time with some good news. :)

In the beginning Chang W. Kim created the idea. The idea was "hey, there's something big happening with the Web in Asia. Let's gather together and talk about it."

So those with interests started talking about it and planning for an event. The idea grew bigger and bigger even to be associated with one of the largest business conferences in Asia: World Knowledge Forum. It's Open Web Asia '08!

Open Web Asia '08 will be a very unique opporunity for you. There's no other "Asian Web" conference. But, you know, as I've been saying time after time on TechnoKimchi, we really gotta notice special things happening out here. And let's talk about it!

We got a great lineup of speakers and some fun/social events prepared as well. You can see more details about the conference on Web 2.0 Asia and on the homepage. For media purpose, you can also download the press release (PDF version) here. Just for your information, I'm scraping the basic info about the conference below. ("scraping" means copying and pasting in Korean :) )

I'm thoroughly convinced that you're gonna love this conference. Don't forget to visit the registration page if you're interested!

disclaimer: I'm one of the organizers for the event :)

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= = = =


Gain insight into the current state and future potential of the Asian web.

October 14, 2008 | Sheraton Grande Walkerhill, Seoul, Korea
in association with the 9th World Knowledge Forum

Conference theme: The Social Web

Social has been a game changing development of the internet industry and the social web is an area where Asia has its own strength and vibrancy. Asian countries have a distinct internet cultures and market players, so informative and educational cross-country comparisons can be made.

What is Open Web Asia?

The first truly pan-Asia web technology event. A one day conference with carefully crafted speeches and panels featuring thought leaders and doers of Asia 2.0.

Why attend?

The gathering of thinkers and doers from Asia and beyond is a unique opportunity to learn about Asia's most astonishing web successes and best practices from online communities, e-commerce, mobile web ecosystems and more! This will also provide unique intelligence on approaching the booming Asian markets.

Not only that, plenty of networking opportunities offer the potential for valuable connections with both Asian and Western web industry movers and shakers.

Who should attend?

Technology executives, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists and anyone looking looking to learn from or with a stake in the development of the web industry in Asia.

Confirmed speakers

Confirmed speakers include some of the most experienced and knowledgeable people from the Asian internet industry and a selection of business leaders and thinkers from outside the region.

James Kim
Andreas Weigend
Loic LeMuer
Kent Lindstrom
James W Kim
CEO of Yahoo!'s Korea Region
Andreas Weigend
Consultant and Lecturer
Loic Le Meur
Founder and CEO, Seesmic
Kent Lindstrom
Senior Vice President, Corporate Development, Friendster

Jimmy Kim
Bill Wang
Kevin Day
Arthur Chang
Jimmy Kim
Executive Vice President, Nexon Corp.
Bill Wang
VP of Overseas Business, Perfect World
Kevin Day
CEO, Comsenz
Arthur Chang
VP of Global Sales, Alibaba

All speakers »












Posted by Danny Kim twdanny
TAGKorea, Media, open web asia, Social, social web, Web, Web 2.0, World Knowledge Forum
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2007/11/15 03:37

TechnoKimchi at Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo!

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Yes, you heard it right. I'm in Tokyo to attend Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo. This will be my fourth conference this year: Web 2.0 Expo in SF in April, Supernova in SF in June, State of Play V in Singapore in August, and this one; but this is my first trip to Japan.

I'm in Tokyo with the openmaru team. Here goes my discloser: I've been working with openmaru, a Korean Web 2.0 service provider, for its English blog marketing. Indeed, its English blog has been run by me! (but I'm not an employee, just working on a partnership-based project)

I'm not sure if you guys have come across the blog or any of its services, but not because I'm the marketer, but even from a pure user point of view, you should most definitely try out the openmaru applications, such as Springnote. It simply rocks!

I'll be reporting from the Expo as well as interviewing famous dudes and companies in the Web 2.0-sphere. One thing interesting is that reporting will be done through 4 major channels: openmaru Korean blog, openmaru English blog, Taewoo's log (my Korean blog), and TechnoKimchi. Chances are I'll be posting a lot more stuff in Korean than in English.

But if you ever had questions regarding openmaru or me, or the Web and digital landscape in Korea, feel free to come around the openmaru booth to find me. I'm not there, other openmaru members will be more than kind enough to find me for you :)

I'm very excited to attend the conference for many reasons. But for TechnoKimchi, I think this will definitely mark an important milestone as this is the first time I'm officially exploring the Web in Asia, outside Korea. As I've been writing in my Korean blog, there are so many things that are just completely different about the Web and the digital culture in Japan from Korea that I'm almost lost. Too many thoughts in my head.

But for now, I'm resting for tomorrow. Hopefully, I'll be able to run into some of you guys!

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Posted by Danny Kim twdanny
TAGAsia, broadband, Culture, digital generation, Japan, Korea, Media, openmaru, Springnote, technokimchi, Tokyo, Web, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Expo
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2007/08/27 14:18

Kind of taking a break

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Hey, guys, it's been a while since I last wrote up a post here. I'm back in Korea from a wonderful trip to Singapore and still have a great deal of stuff to write about the State of Play Conference. In short, it was so amazing!

Unfortunately, it seems I might have to take a week off or so from this blog :( because I'm trying to finish up a book that's going to be published pretty soon. It's called "MECONOMY (like Me-Economy)". It's about a new economic system that's been emerging from the falling communication and coordination costs thanks to the Internet, an economy in which individuals, not institutions or firms, can now function as the center. It's about an economy where I AM the center, thus MEconomy. By the way, it's being written in Korean.

So, I'll be back soon, but please, keep loving this blog :)

If you want to reach me for anything, my email address is  
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See ya-


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Posted by Danny Kim twdanny
TAGBook, economy, Korea, meconomy, Publishing, Singapore, state of play, Web, Web 2.0
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2007/08/21 01:40

State of Play V: Regulating Virtual Worlds, and Changes in Education, Connecting East and West

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I wasn't able to write too much after the first session. So, rather I'm going to try to put down the summaries of the last 3 sessions I had today.

Regulating Virtual Worlds
Legal experts explore how controversies related to intellectual property, real-money transfer, gaming as political speech, time-limit addiction laws and the policing of Internet cafes play out throughout the region. They will also draw our attention to culturally variable assumptions that underpin analytical approaches to these issues.
Much of the panel discussion revolved around whether it's better to have communities self-regulate or have external forces to step in. At large, there are three forces at play: 1) community of players regulating themselves, 2) game and virtual world makers deciding what needs to happen within through creating systems certain way, 3) actual regulating bodies like the government. Many factors come into play here. Obviously, it'll be the best if all the players and communities act reasonable enough to reach certain social agreements and norms to control themselves; however, not quite so in reality. That's what makes things complicated. Besides, creating laws and regulations for a world that doesn't really exist is a very difficult task itself. For example, let's say there is a crime in Second Life. What country's law should be applied to that member? Is it for Linden Lab to decide? Or should the U.S. government intervene? What if the player was Korean?

Education, Kids, and Teens in Virtual Worlds
There has been an explosion of interest in the use of virtual worlds in education. This panel will examine what works and what doesn’t work, and will present some ideas for the effective use of online spaces for student learning.  It will also ask examine how children and teens interact within virtual worlds, and what this teaches us about building kid-and-teen-friendly environments for learning and playing.
This session was very interesting because I've always known there's so much learning, in a non-traditional sense, that could be done through an environment like virtual worlds. People indeed train themselves and learn a great deal in this kind of environment. They set goals for themselves, leadership becomes visible, and they collaborate with each other to solve certain problems. Some of the examples in the session were astonishing--like teaching classes in StarWars Galaxy. Now how much of this could be applied to the real world education?

Currently the real world education system is designed for a world back in 1950's. Kids are growing up enormously influenced by the digital technology. They are a lot more participatory also. The social and economic scenes are changing faster than ever due to the Internet. Unfortunately, none of this is reflected in the current one-way-teaching and text-based education system. For us to be able to adopt the opportunities given by virtual worlds and other technologies, we need a completely new mindset.

However, not everything can be learned in virtual worlds, obviously. It's our job to figure what virtual worlds can offer in this space. It seems at the moment that virtual worlds are good providing an environment in which people can come together to collaborate to solve certain problems, rather than learning specific skill sets.

Connecting East and West
Experts explore variations in playing styles, the influence of game mechanics on cross-cultural cooperation, the challenge of intercultural communication, and outcomes of forced localization. This panel will also explore issues of society, governance and virtual worlds as a vehicle for people-to-people diplomacy.
Well, as you know, that's the goal of this blog. I want to let known to the world what's here in Korea and Asia and see if we can make any connections between East and West. I was actually one of the panelists during this session. But, I wasn't invited as an "official" panelist, but rather as a translator to Judge Unggi Yoon, who is a very well-respected member here. He'd explain what the MMORPGs are like in Korea and I'll translate that into English for the audience. But, hey, I was still up on the stage. What an honor! ;)

The session covered various topics ranging from the two different purposes of playing games in Lineage and Second Life, gold-farming, index for measuring the east/west-ness and etc. I really enjoyed the session while listening on the side most of the time. We definitely need to take a more analytical approach to crossing the gap. While there are fundamental differences between the two which will never get any closer than they are right now, there are also a growing number of commonalities among the two that something could be done for further development. The most important point of the session, I guess, was acknkowledging the value of the differences and how the differences indeed enrich our virtual world experiences.

- - -

Just like every time I attend a conference, I really enjoyed meeting new people and having conversations with them. It's simply because you get to learn so much by doing so. For me, this is a completely new experience: the first time being in Singapore and first time being immersed in the virtual worlds talk.

I'm very excited for tomorrow and hopefully I'll be able to bring even more interesting stuff to you all.

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Posted by Danny Kim twdanny
TAGAsia, Culture, digital generation, education, Korea, laws, learning, Media, metaverse, MMORPG, regulations, Singapore, state of play, technokimchi, Web, Web 2.0, World of Warcraft
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2007/08/21 01:30

State of Play V: Building Businesses in Virtual Worlds

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Virtual world builders now encourage third parties to develop content inside their worlds, and so we’ve seen the rise of businesses built inside virtual worlds.  This panel will explore the nature of these businesses, and look at how businesses get built within virtual worlds.  It will ask whether the trend has played out, and examine the future of businesses inside the virtual worlds.
The first session was on "Building business in virtual worlds." I liked how the conference started off with the business aspect because you typically get the information that's very "real" when talking about businesses.

Discussion was started with a question about the different branding strategies for real world and virtual worlds. Can the same branding strategy be applied to virtual worlds, too? Obviously, the answer was No". Like in Web 2.0, it's a lot more about having conversations and engagement. There's so much social going on here that virtual world branding strategies must incorporate the social nature of the medium. It's better to start your first chatper and hand the pen over to fans and users. This way you can totally up your innovation speed, too.

The question of "open vs. closed" came up here as well. Again, like in Web 2.0, not everything needs to be open all the time; however, people in this field are increasingly discovering the value of open in virtual worlds.

So I decided to act brave and went up and asked a question:
"It seems like given the strong media nature of virtual worlds, much of their business aspect has to do the marketing/advertising after all. Within the context of convincing the clients, what are some of the metrics and methologies to measure the efficiency of marketing and advertising in virtual worlds?"

I really wanted to know the answer because with my background in Web 2.0/Media, I needed to know how things are different in virtual worlds. Answers were basically that virtual worlds are a lot more about interactions themselves than information flow like on the Web. Also scales are far smaller in virtual worlds than the Web. Thus, we get smaller scale, but much higher engagement in virtual worlds. One of the most frequently used metrics are the amount of time spent by players around a certain advertising object. It could easily go up to hours and hours every day.

The session closed with a question, which I thought was very appropriate for closing, which was "what are some opportunities for enterpreneurs in virtual worlds?" Answers really varied. And when you get diverse responses like that, what that really means is "it's up to your imagination" :) Some of the answers were:
  • Creating consultancies within virtual worlds
  • Real companies/organizations can use virtual worlds as collaborative spaces
  • More opportunities in developing countries because they can move in with so much less barrier-to-entry. Product designer/developers will have huge opportunities
  • Turn the World Wide Web into the World Wide World
  • Short term: Infrastructure - code developement, design skills, creative (story lines)
  • Long term: any job you see in real world will be seen in virtual worlds
  • Collaboration applications
I'm ending this post with one memorable comment made by one of the panelists: "SecondLife is like the Mosaic browser in 1993. It's only the beginning. It comes down to communications, collaboration, communities."

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Posted by Danny Kim twdanny
TAGAdvertising, Business, Marketing, Media, metaverse, MMORPG, state of play, Virtual, Web 2.0
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2007/08/20 10:01

I'm at State of Play V

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I'm sitting in the Ballroom of Marina Mandarin Hotel in Singapore. The State of Play V is about to begin!

I'll be reporting from the conference time to time (not quite sure about live blogging every session, but I'll do my best!)

Please let me know if there's anyone you want me to interview. I'm here as press so I might be able to :) Here's the list of speakers. Also, having a look at what metaverse means will obviously help you a great deal, here's a link to the wikipedia article.

Ok. See you soon!

A couple of snapshots:



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Posted by Danny Kim twdanny
TAGMarina Madrian Hotel, metaverse, Singapore, state of play
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2007/08/17 12:22

Heading off to Singapore for State of Play V

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These virtual worlds are crucial building blocks of global civil society. As such, they harbor the promise for relationship-building and cooperation across national borders. Solutions to the cross-cultural growing pains of this new medium require a sincere commitment to transnational dialogue.
I'm flying to Singapore on Sunday to attend the State of Play Conference.

As I briefly mentioned before, in order to appropriately cover the digital generation in Asia, the gaming culture and industry, now expanded to virtual worlds altogether, must be extensively studied. Unfortunately, my expertise has been more on Web 2.0 and Enterprise IT industry in general, not so much games and virtual worlds.

But they're all coming together. I get to interact with lots of kids of age 5-15 or so at church and they live in a different world than the one I grew up in. (I'm only 28 by the way). They don't seem to draw the line between the "real" world and the "virtual" world. The two worlds are so interchangable in their lives. What's imaginary and what's physical? They don't care and they don't know, but it's all in their minds. I get to talk to people working at NCSoft and Nexon, two largest game companies in Korea, and Cyworld. AND I HEAR SOME CRAZY STORIES FROM THEM.

IBM is training their employees in Second Life. When I attended Supernova in June, there was this great session on virtual worlds and I remember Raph Koster, one of the gurus in the field, saying "many of the Web 2.0 principles and phenomenon have come from games." I totally agree with him, especially as far as how social interactions are concerned.

I go to PC bangs and see middle/high school guys in their school uniforms spend 4 hours straight playing Starcraft, Lineage, WoW, FIFA, etc. after school. What's scary is how this is such a big part of their lives. I mean their real lives.

What would happen when you combine everything together? I mean combining different virtual worlds with blogs, mobile, social networks, and messengers. Maybe some efforts towards standardization would help? What if you can play WoW on the bus for an hour using Wibro on the way to school? What if your Cyworld buddy can be found on Club Penguin? Possibilities are endless, I think.

Of course, we'll be seeing various social and legal issues come up in this fast-developing medium as well. I know much about what's up with social networks and blogs. Can the same principles be applied to virtual worlds? What's the same? What's different?

We'll find out at the conference. I'm not sure if I'll be able to live-blog the conference, given I don't know much about the wireless connections at the site. But I'll be constantly feeding you guys with what I learn there. And trust me, what I'll be learning there will be extremely important to anyone who has anything to do with anything digital--Web 2.0/portal services, H/W & gadget makers, game makers, social networks makers, book publishers, network providers, teachers, legislators, parents, kids, or even HR people.

Should I go, "stay tuned and excited" again? ;) Well, I am!


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Posted by Danny Kim twdanny
TAGAsia, broadband, Culture, Cyworld, digital generation, games, Korea, Media, MMORPG, Mobile, Singapore, state of play, technokimchi, Virtual, Web, Web 2.0, WIBRO, World of Warcraft
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