Yup, I'll be at your service. While I've been digesting lots and lots of information on what's going on and my brain is right now explode with so many thoughts. And I know these are GOOD ones.
One problem I'm struggling with right now is I don't know where to begin. So can YOU GUYS maybe come and pop the soda can?
Some candidates are: ("here" here means "in Korea")
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!
I realized that I've been getting a huge traffic to this blog since the CNN broadcast. I've also been learning that this blog is not in its most user-friendly format: if you're a first-timer to this blog, chances are you'll probably get lost, not knowing where to begin.
So, I've decided to become my own editor for the day. I picked out some articles which I thought might be most interseting to you.
Luckily, I haven't written too many posts on this blog yet, making it not too difficult to pick out the articles.
So, here is the list. You probably want to read them in the order listed below. Have fun!
And, oh yeah. If you want to contact me, please don't hesitate to email me at
CNN is featuring a whole series called "Eye on South Korea". You'll purely love it! It's basically everything I've been trying to say at TechnoKimchi: what's it's like to have a digital generation like in Korea.
You can watch the video clip of my interview HERE.
At first, I thought it was really incredible that a little boy like me could be featured on such prestigious media like CNN. And it was possible because of this blog: THEY FOUND ME THROUGH TECHNOKIMCHI!
It's just so weird. Tons of people have been contacting me since the broadcast. Lots of people actually searched for the term "technokimchi" to land at this blog. What a day!
Below are some pictures taken from the set. I'll go over more on CNN: Eye on South Korea in the coming days! Until then, hurrah!
Hello, everyone. It's been a long long time since I basically "stopped" posting here. Which is pretty sad :( It's just been crazy last couple of weeks, but with so many things coming up in the next weeks, I just had to switch my mode to the "blogging" mode again. And here I am :)
After reading my first article, many have contacted and asked me to give even more snapshots of what the digital generation looks like here.
Well, well, well. None other than our dear Chang-Won Kim, a close friend of mine, the blogger behind Web 2.0 Asia, a CEO of the largest blogging tool provider in Korea (the article was written before he became of the CEO of the company), and also an old Samsung buddy of mine, wrote up a really really nice article on the exactly same topic, only better than my own version :)
So, here are some notable lines from his article. Don't just try to chew on it. Swallow it and digest it. Take a deep breath and imagine what a life like this could do for education, business, culture, and even technology. What he describes in the article is very very typical of a Korean boy in my opinion.
So here we go!
...But these days, Insoo and his friends don't simply
use their phones to send an SMS, or to take pictures or listen to MP3
music. Whenever funny things happen during the day, Insoo and friends
shoot video with their phones and send the clip to portal sites, hoping
their clips will be featured on the portals' homepages.
...The first thing Insoo does after Hakwon is, of course, turn on the
PC. Insoo has a difficult math problem as homework. He posts it up on
Naver Knowledge iN, a popular online Q&A service with some 70
million entries.
Within about 10 minutes of posting, someone chimes in with a good
answer, and Insoo awards him with some "Knowledge Power" points --
knowledge-based economy in action among 14-year-olds.
...Gone are the days when kids bought CDs by their favorite singers.
For the young generation, music is deemed something that must be
consumed over the 'Net -- CDs are for their parents. To date, Cyworld's
minihompy streaming music sales amount to more than 200 million songs,
or $100 million in revenue.
Business 2.0 lists up top 12 wired cities that are suited best for business. Obviously, Seoul is one of them. What caught my attention, though, is that 6 out of the 12 cities are Asian cities: Bangalore, Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo. This is what I exactly spotted while over in Singapore. Some serious things are happening over in this half of the world! I'm not sure if all the U.S. cities were dropped out on purpose or the Business 2.0 folks really couldn't find a single U.S. city fit for this.
Wondering what your cell phone will be like in three years? Head to
Seoul, home of electronics giants Samsung and LG and the world's
proving grounds for cutting-edge wireless technologies.
Well, I've been writing so much in Korean that I thought maybe taking a 20-min break to write something in English might refresh my hands and thoughts. Ok, back to work!
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.
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!
I watched Joost on my notebook on the bus in Seoul and on highway today!
You think I'm kidding, right? No, I'm not. On the way back home from Seoul, I actually watched some Reuters and MTV episodes on Joost.
That's how good Wibro connection seems to be. Good enough for digesting the Joost stream, meaning good enough for most of the applications I know of.
Want a proof? Here it is:
I recorded this with my cellphone and the quality makes me sick. But, come on, this is probably one of the coolest things you could ever do.
More experiments to come. Let's see what happens when ubiquitous meets Web 2.0 :)
p.s. I put a link to this post on the Joost forum and am waiting to see what guys over there have to say. Hopefully this would bring some excitement to them as well.
Despite all the excitement, it rained all day today and I couldn't really take my laptop out to the park. Darn!
Instead I stayed home and tried several things with Wibro. While Wibro connections are relatively weak indoor, I was still able to get through the Web pretty well, including some high-traffic-demanding sites like Cyworld. But connections are quite unstable as I get frequent disconnections despite the status bar being almost all the way up. (This post is being written and uploaded using Wibro.)
But tomorrow is the day I WILL try real things because I'm giving a talk at the Blog and Social Networking Services Conference (Korean) tomorrow on microblogging, so I'll have an outing to Seoul. I live in Bundang, fyi.
So, please, stay tuned.. and..argh.. excited! (man, I really hope this is the last time I say this :-)
Luckily, it didn't take me too long to recover from the OTL moment. An hour after the incident, my Wibro modem finally arrived!
I opened the box and took some pictures as I carefully examined what I was getting. I'm done installing it and it works quite fine even at home. (Wibro is known to work better outside than inside).
Sitting at my desk, the connection speed is not that great compared to my home LAN line. However, still totally fine with me and I'm looking forward to tomorrow when I'll be taking my notebook around and test various applications out in the park!
KT Wibro modem is arriving tomorrow after some account problem I had to clear. I'm preparing some projects to display what it's like to have "ubiquitous" access :)
Today, I introduced TechnoKimchi to my Korean blog readers. Just to flex my muscle again, my Korean blog Taewoo's log has about 5,000 RSS subscribers and 4,000 daily visitors. You might ask "why are you so full of yourself?" I'd go "Aren't we living in the age of attention economy, anyways?" :)
But seriously, Asian people are "supposedly" humble. So until proved otherwise, I'll remain humble. Another ":)"
Anyhow, I'm thinking I'll probably get over 1,000 visitors today for the first time since TechnoKimchi was launched. Much traffic will be from my Korean blog. So I got even more full of myself and decided to do some more vanity search and I google for "technokimchi".
Some of the interesting facts from the site (all in quotes):
South Korea has a population of 49 million. 14.3 million out of the country's 15.9 million households nationwide are linked to broadband Internet connections as of May 2007. In particular, Seoul and the surrounding Gyeonggi Province posted 106.8 percent and 100.7 percent in the broadband penetration rate, respectively.
The average person visited the internet 13.8 days a month, and spent 20.2 hours viewing 2,172 pages--below the global averages of 17.1 days, 25.2 hours, and 2,519 pages. However, South Koreans topped the world averages--with scores of 17.4 days, 31.2 hours and 4,546 pages.
According to the new research report by ROA Group the number of mobile users in South Korea will reach 41.95 million by 2010, which is 85% of the total population.
In South Korea, a single service (Cyworld) already has 18 million accounts—enough for 30 % of the entire country's population. The survey was done in 30 days. Within that 30 days, more than half of all Internet users in South Korea have accessed a social networking site.
Between 2001 and 2006, the Korean online advertising market's volume grew at annualized 48 per cent compared to entire advertising market's 4.6 per cent yearly growth during the same period.
In the event where any law suits arose from the online activities, portal operators can disclose this private information to the court. The disadvantage that this law brings about is the disruption to freedom of speech. People will feel that they are being restricted into giving their comments.
There were many cases where teenagers had spent more than a day continuously playing computer games. Some of them eventually collapsed from exhaustion and passed away.
There are currently three major 3.5G services offered in Korea. HSDPA by SK Telecom, iPlug by KTF, and Wibro by Korea Telecom. (KTF is a mobile carrier company of KT and stands for Korea Telecom Freetel). With 3.5G services, you can basically have broadband connections anywhere in Seoul and some other cities, whether you're out in the street, riding bus or subway, even playing out at a park. Are we talking "ubiquitous" here? I say "Heck, yeah!"
Today I just ordered a KT Wibro modem. I could've chosen other services, but for my personal use, the KT service seemed to be most fit. I'm jumping into a promotion package where I get to try out the service for free for 3 months and pay just $20 for unlimited traffic thereafter. The modem's getting delivered in about 2 days and I'll be on, baby.
I'm waiting with much anticipation and excitement. When I get it, I'll be able to blog on subway, chat in the Seoul City Hall Square, or even watch YouTube's most viewed video of the day while taking No.2 at a public restroom. Ok, that, I went too far ;) I've read some reviews on KT WiBro and it seems to be awesome.
For more information on KT Wibro in Seoul, check out this article.
In April, about the time Sydney newspapers were lambasting Australia's household broadband speeds, Oh Se-hoon, the mayor of Seoul, was sitting on a moving bus and using a laptop. Se-hoon could have been downloading TV shows, playing online games or chatting with friends, because he was enjoying speeds of three megabits a second using WiBro, a new wireless broadband service from South Korean telco Korea Telecom.
On the same day, KT announced that WiBro - which delivers high speeds even to those travelling at 120kmh - would be rolled out throughout Seoul.
The story illustrates Seoul's top spot among the world's digital cities. Stephen Quinn, associate professor in communication studies at Deakin University, visited Seoul in April. "You still see people walking about reading print newspapers, using origami to fold broadsheets to the size of a paperback novel. But you also see people surfing the internet on tiny laptops while on the subway, which travels about half a kilometre underground."
So, wait for my own review of the service. It'll probably be EXCLUSIVE!! ;)
People have asked me, "why do you feel compelled to start another blog when there are already 80 million out there and you're running 7 blogs?"
The need was born quite naturally. I'm from Korea and I'm subscribed to something like 150 feeds, mostly English content. While most of the "Web 2.0" stories have been coming from the Western part of the world, I've been increasingly convinced that there's so much happening over here in Korea that just simply must not go unnoticed. Moreover, I've been seeing, time after time, that things that happen in Korea end up taking place in U.S years later.
It's probably because
we have better broadband connections and mobile infrastructures,
we have a better "gadget culture" where teens are not hesitant to easily spend $500 on mobile phones or PMPs, all coming at the expense of their parents,
we have a culture which values the virtue of "flocking together" much higher than that of "staying as individuals", empowering the growth of mass collaborative efforts across the Net, and
we have a mental world where the virtual stuff is often blurred with the physical reality.
Of course, there are many other reasons why this is happening, but this is the short list I could come up with. All of these factors together have enabled the younger generation in Korea to experience the "digital society" much earlier than those in other parts of the world.
While I could much talk about the cold and dry biz/tech aspect of the whole picture, I feel that's already being sufficiently done by some of those 80 million other blogs. I'd rather like to focus on the social dynamics, cultures, and economics behind the scene. Definitely, there's a reason why the fancy and pretty Cyworld works in Korea and the coarse and logical MySpace works in U.S. Cultures matter and we're not gonna change the cultures in Asia and Americas and Europe over night just because we're now all connected to each other through HTTP. Accordingly, many of the things I talk about in this blog might be simply irrelevant to many people that are looking for business opportunities using the principles derived from Asia and applying them to the U.S. or European market.
But, here's what's important. The gap between the young generation in East and West is closing. The reason is because better broadband and mobile infrastructures are now set place in the West while the East is learning to be somewhat more "logical" and "open" on the Web like the West has been. However, more than anything, the digital generation from both East and West is developing a culture that is commonly observed across all different countries, philosophies, races, ethnicities, languages, and continents. Seriously, an average 6th grader from Japan has a much higher chance to be like an average 6th grader from Canada than ever before. They play games, send numerous SMS messages to friends, listen to mp3s through iPod. What does that say about business opportunities? Plenty, I think.
