Recently in Korea Category

APA Magazine has a great in-depth, two-part interview with John Cho who is one of the only high-profile Asian-American actors working in the industry today. I hope Cho has a long and exciting career ahead of him as it is great to see an actor like him on the stage of today.

The Game-Changer: An Interview with John Cho

The Game-Changer: An Interview with John Cho (part 2)

via Angry Asian Man

This is a few months late but JP Morgan's Imran Khan has a lengthy 2009 Internet Investment Guide (or here) out that is worth reading for it's coverage of China, Korea and Russia.

I really enjoyed Benjamin's newest presentation on Asian Internet businesses in comparison to Western ones.

Presentation at eComm in San Francisco in March 2009 about Asian mobile ecosystem, especially Japan, and comparisons with Apple's iPhone and Facebook. Some extra like mobile SNS, mobile novels and various other considerations of interest.

Changwon Kim has news on his blog that Cyworld is quitting the US market: Cyworld pulling plugs from US.

Cause of failure? Well, for starters (the obvious ones): Cyworld didn't seem to have sharp strategies as to how to position their service (Was it Myspace or Habbo hotel?); They didn't localize the service very well; SK Telecom, the parent company, didn't "get it" yet still tried to put a grip on the business.

Chang suggests that this recession is a good time for Korean entrepreneurs to build the post-Cyworld service that would ideally be more popular outside of Korea. I'd be happy for this to happen, but that barrier to success is quite high.

Why?

It's clear from the existing marketplace that Asia is qualitatively different for consumer web services. I've been blogging about this for years and the best example comes from a post by Mitani-san at Asiajin quoting George Godula of Web2Asia; In fact, I'll use the subtitle instead of the title as the subtitle is more relevant: Why it is difficult for European and U.S. companies to advance into Asia.

Godula's presentation at Open Web Asia looked at China, Japan and Korea and compared the leading ecommerce, video hosting, sns, bbs and blog service vs. what is popular outside of Asia. It's a crystal clear chart that shows that sites and services that are popular in North/South America or Europe are just nowhere to be found in Asia. Godula has a good list (be sure to click over to see it) of why companies are unsuccessful in Asia:

1. No formal internationalization/Asia entry strategy
2. Entered Asia too late/ too slow
3. Local HQ has no full decision power
4. Incomplete localization（Translation, Content, Pricing, Branding(name, colours, etc.), Features, Business model)
5. No Local technical development team (Slower time to market, More expensive)
6. Domestic players sometimes simply have the superior technology/business model
7. Global corporate guidelines
8. Local legislation

This is tough stuff. And as I commented on Chang's blog, I'm not sure there are good examples of Asian-founded successful consumer web services that have been successful outside of their home areas. One might say Naver is doing ok in Japan with their web-based games but to me Flash-games are not consumer web services.

That Friendster's success in SE Asia (specifically the Philippines) was largely accidental is telling. They've been smart to focus on their successful markets but being successful in markets by accident is a scary way to grow a business.

Tonight Jason Calcanis joins Tokyo 2.0.  I won't be able to make it as I have a previous committment but if you go, ask Jason what he thinks it takes for a non-Asian consumer web service to be succesful in Asia.  Outside of core search (which is a consumer service but one that requires the deepest of pockets) it's instructive to consider how little Asia has in common with N. America or the EU in this segment.

The FT has a good overview of some markets where Google is not leading search including China, Korea, Japan, Russia, Czech Rep. In addition to these, you can add Taiwan too. If there are other markets where Google isn't leading, please leave a comment.

Yandex, which handles 46 per cent of search queries in Russia, has been preparing since the spring for a listing on the US stock market. Seznam, which controls 63 per cent of Czech searches, has been the subject of a number of buy-out approaches, according to two internet industry insiders.

Along with just three others, these represent the only local companies that have prevented the global search business from turning into "Planet Google."

Baidu in China and Naver in South Korea each handle about 60 per cent of internet searches in their respective countries, while Yahoo Japan claims slightly more than half of its local search market.

Google still struggling to conquer outposts

I have a longer discussion about whether the iPhone will do well in Japan planned for when I have more than a moment to blog, but I wanted to point folks to an article on alternative interfaces to computers which Jeff Yang recently wrote in SFGate: ASIAN POP / Off key
My quote is:

"To a certain extent, Asia is a slave to the alpha keyboard,"

I'm pretty sure I said qwerty keyboard, but I'll let Jeff slide ;)

"Many input methods for languages like Chinese and Japanese require knowledge of the Roman alphabet to use, which is crazy when you think of it. Imagine if the PC was developed in China and everyone in the rest of the world needed to know Chinese before inputting their own alphabet. Well, that's the case for a lot of PC users in China and Japan."

My blog's comments are still broken and I haven't had time to fix them, so I'll close comments. Once I have time to fix the comments, I'll re-open comments and inform you here. Apologies!

It's great to see a non-Western web service (in this case, the Korean wiki service SpringNote) getting a thorough review at ReadWrite Web.

It's disappointing that SpringNote, who is trying to appeal to users outside of Korea, did not invest throughly in localizing their interface in English.

Unfortunately, the English version of the site also suffers from some real usability problems. I don't mean to be overly provincial, but the company ought to hire someone more conversant in the English language if they are going to offer an English interface and market to native English speakers. I want to see projects birthed far from Silicon Valley thrive, but a small investment in a copy editor who speaks your chosen interface language as their native language could make a big difference in product usability.

SpringNote Launching Impressive Wiki Platform from Korea

Some of you may remember a popular post I had earlier this year called "the cost of monoculture" which looked at the de-facto monopoly that Microsoft Internet Explorer has in South Korea for a number of historical and technical reasons. There has been some movement on this topic recently and I wanted to share this information.

I've posted the updated information over at my Mozilla in Asia blog: update on the cost of monoculture in Korea.

I don't have time to parse this article. Hoping Fukumimi will do it for me :)

In Asia, Private Equity Is Still Bullish - New York Times

Can this really happen via the US-Korea Free Trade Act?

US makes Korea eliminate fair use