Recently in Korea Category

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

UPDATE: Scott of TechJapan.com corrects me that these are not Flash.

Changwon Kim of Web 2.0 Asia points us to the fact that Google Korea's homepage now has 7 Flash-driven CSS image rollover "buttons" linking to popular Google services. I can see this being popular in Japan as well.

I don't like the fact that they are Flash animated, but it is interesting to see Google change their UI in Korea, where they are trailing Naver.

This news is interesting.

Google Korea plans to introduce an age-verification system to its search engine later this year that will restrict adult-themed searches to those 19 years of age and older, it said Thursday.

Users will be asked to verify their age when searching for any of about 700 words in Korean judged to be adult and supplied to the portal by the Korean government, said Lois Kim [cq], a spokeswoman for the company in Seoul.

Users will have to enter their name and national resident registration number, which will be checked against a database to verify the user-- or at least the person whose data has been entered-- is old enough.

The article does go on to say that all the other Korean portals already do this kind of age verification. I wonder if this age verification is based on language or location (i.e. if you search in Korea, you'll be prompted to verify your age, or if you are outside of Korea, you can search on adult terms without a prompt.)

Can you imagine Google trying this in the US?

Google Korea Restricts Search - Yahoo! News

UPDATE: Searchengineland had 5 questions about this new age-verification system answered by Google. Most interestingly, it only affects Google.co.kr. If a person in Korea accesses Google.com, they won't be prompted for the age verification? Seems like quite a nonsensical filter.

Searching For An Adult Topic? You'll Have To Prove Your Age To Google Korea

Looks like male Korean users, aged 25-29 have moved over from Naver to Google. Also Google's recent opening of Gmail to all users in Korea has also helped them.

KoreanClick, the domestic online consultancy, Thursday said the number of unique visitors to Google's Korean-language search site (www.google.co.kr) was 3.8 million in January, up 14.9 percent from a year before.
...
Around 26.6 million people used Naver's search engine in January while Daum drew a total of 21.2 million clients to its flagship e-mail offerings in the cited period.

However, Naver's year-on-year growth rate was just 3 percent and Daum even saw the number of visitors shrink 5.8 percent from 22.5 million in January 2006.

"We learned male Internet users aged between 25 and 29 moved from Naver to Google last year for some reason," a KoreanClick researcher said.
...
"Although Google has struggled to make its presence felt in the local market, we have always kept a tab on the firm because it has a financial and technical edge," Mirae Asset analyst Kim Kyung-mo said.

Google has "a financial and technical edge"? Those asset analysts, so insightful!

AsiaMedia :: KOREA: Google secretly strikes back in Korea

Fascinating look at the CEO of Yahoo! Korea who's stepping down after 2 plus years.

A chemical engineering major in Yonsei University, Sung worked for three years at the trading department of Samsung Corp. and earned an MBA degree from the University of California, Berkeley. After returning to Korea in 1996, he was a consultant at McKinsey & Company and Accenture, and was hired by Yahoo Korea in December 2004. He served as chief operation officer for the company before getting promoted to CEO in October 2005.

Sung has allegedly had views that conflicted with Yahoo headquarters, as he wanted to acquire several tech firms in South Korea while the U.S. headquarters stuck to a tight budget.

What is more interesting is to consider who Yahoo! Inc. will hire to take that role. It's got to be a really tough role- trying to get out from underneath Naver, Daum and Nate.

The Korea Times : Yahoo Korea CEO to Resign