Web 2.0 Asia

I met with Thierry Bezier, the famous French video blogger, and the chief executives at France-based Webzine Maker, today at Shibuya. I took them to the Sushi place for lunch - you know, the place where small dishes of sushi are put on the conveyor belt (It's called Kaiten Sushi  in Japanese but I don't know if there's an English term for it.)

As I've mentioned in my previous post, I believe one of the biggest online business opportunities will come from the change of the media industry. Eventually, a significant portion of the print media and the advertisement industry associated with it will get online, and the notoriously conversative Japanese print media industry will not be an exception. This print-to-online transition was also one of the topics for the latest Knowlede at Wharton, which I find very insightful (I loved the Ray Ozzie piece as well.)

In this regard, I like the Webzine Maker solution. It allows people to build webzines in 5 clicks. I couldn't check out all the features of the Webzine Maker since it's all in French, but I did see the demo of the solution. Speaking of demo, they said they will be on the DEMO Fall '07 in Mountain View. Wish all the good lucks, guys. :)