I missed the "Launchpad" session in the morning as I got up a bit late and had to work on my emails etc. The afternoon started with 2 sessions from my fellow countrymen from Korea.
The future of the web, from the founder of Cyworld: This session was held by Mr Yong Jun Hyoung, the original founder of Cyworld. His current interest obviously lies in online video and social networking. He first gave a presentation around a new video service he’s preparing to launch in July, dubbed "Vikipedia". Mr Hyoung is envisioning a video service where a) the “smart mobs” can jointly produce a video clip; b) products that appear in the video clip can be purchased by clicking on the in-video link; c) various digital items that can go with the video clip (emoticons, background music, special effects, etc.) can be sold on a digital item shop and overlaid on top of the original video file. He later gave a demo on how pictures, video clips, and special effects can be layered on top of original video file.
For the digital item shop part, Mr Hyoung showed some figures from Cyworld, which was amazing to me. Cyworld’s background music sales to date is some 200 million songs ($100M revenue), making the minihompy service the #2 music service behind iTunes (although iTunes is a download service and minihompy music is a streaming service, so a direct comparison is not suitable). That’s pretty remarkable given that iTunes is a worldwide service and Cyworld is mostly a Korean service.
Mr Hyoung also shared his thoughts on the emergence of “PRP”, or "Personal Resource Planning”. As ERP is an essential part of an enterprise now, PRP will become a central part of a person’s life, he asserted. Mr Hyoung believes the concept of “personal resource” now mostly means digital content such as photo and video, but in the future will increasingly include more things such as call and SMS history, product purchase list and wishlist, and even the TV program watchlist and the food consumed (which is given by RFID tags). And as such, keeping up with and sharing those personal resources will become increasingly important and perhaps where the future of the web lies in.
Korea's User Generated Content Service, Case Studies: Henry Kim, CEO of Omnitel, outlined the concept of NPlugs, a service that they claim enables “Social networking 2.0”. Omnitel is a public company with about 100 employees, whose main business is mobile broadcasting and DMB solutions, and mobile content service.
NPlugs enables seamless file sharing among multiple devices, agnostic to device type (notebook computer, mobile phone, etc.) This way, if people around you (family, colleagues, etc) had permitted access to their devices, then you can view all those accessible devices in an integrated view on NPlugs and find/exchange information seamlessly. This platform-independent file sharing seems to be the key differentiation factor of NPlugs.
The next speaker was Michael Hong, CFO and head of global business development of Pandora TV. Pandora TV (Pandora.tv) is the leading video service provider of Korea, in terms of unique visitors and average session duration. They had a phenomenal growth - the growth rate between June 05 to December 06 was a whopping 7,000%.
Pandora was one of the first movers in the online video space; They opened 5 months before Youtube did. But because they were based in Korea, they didn’t have as much impact on the global market as Youtube. To address this, Pandora is opening an international service, primarily targeting the Asian audience, in September this year. Thereby, Pandora wants to become the “Youtube of Asia.” Pandora will introduce user-generated subtitle system so that users themselves will translate the videos available in other languages into their own language.
Pandora’s business model is pre/postroll ads and providing viral video files. Currently, the Korean advertising market is $8 billion in size and the online ads take up about 12%. Mr Hong said the equivalent figures would be 7-8% in Japan and 4% in China, suggesting the online ads have room for growth in those countries. If Pandora finds the
The future of web apps - Tariq Karim of Netvibes. Tariq started by showing the demo of Netvibes, and went on to talk about the widgetization of the web. When Mr Masashi, the moderator of the session, asked people to raise their hands if they know about Netvibes, about 90% of people raised their hands - so Netvibes is pretty well represented in Japan, I guess.
Netvibes is now among global top 5 in terms of RSS (which they define as "Really Sexy Syndication") feed delivery, and is looking to compete with Google (iGoogle) and the market leader My Yahoo soon. They also provide Netvibes Universe, a service that "widgetizes" the media. About 160 media companies are already providing their media content through Netvibes Universe; Agile Media Network of Japan is the first Japanese company on Netvibes Universe. The Netvibes Universal Widget API (=UWA) is an open source API that allows you to create widget once, and use it everywhere, including Macs, Google, and mobile devices.
What was perhaps most amazing about Netvibes was their fascinating relationship with the open source developer community around the world. Netvibes decided to go global from day 1, and as they were based in France, they figured that working with communities from around the world was the key to their globalization. Tariq said, if you come up with a good vision and throw that to the community, the community will certainly roll up their sleeves and help you build a great service. About 15,000 users joined Netvibes on the first day of launch, and Tariq didn't know where all these people came from - that's the power of the community, he said.
About the startpage companies, I've always had a question whether they are offering a feature of a service, and I asked that question to Tariq - to which he answered that they're building a platform where they allow people to personalize the web, which would definitely be a service, not a mere feature (or so I interpreted.) But it looks like they are on their way to make money, which would help proving them as a good "service" as well as a good "feature". First way of making money is to monetize the widgets; For example, if Netvibes provides a widget for a travel agency, they make commissions whenever online booking is made. Also the partnership with media companies would help their revenue generation, too.
The future of the web, from the founder of Cyworld: This session was held by Mr Yong Jun Hyoung, the original founder of Cyworld. His current interest obviously lies in online video and social networking. He first gave a presentation around a new video service he’s preparing to launch in July, dubbed "Vikipedia". Mr Hyoung is envisioning a video service where a) the “smart mobs” can jointly produce a video clip; b) products that appear in the video clip can be purchased by clicking on the in-video link; c) various digital items that can go with the video clip (emoticons, background music, special effects, etc.) can be sold on a digital item shop and overlaid on top of the original video file. He later gave a demo on how pictures, video clips, and special effects can be layered on top of original video file.
For the digital item shop part, Mr Hyoung showed some figures from Cyworld, which was amazing to me. Cyworld’s background music sales to date is some 200 million songs ($100M revenue), making the minihompy service the #2 music service behind iTunes (although iTunes is a download service and minihompy music is a streaming service, so a direct comparison is not suitable). That’s pretty remarkable given that iTunes is a worldwide service and Cyworld is mostly a Korean service.
Mr Hyoung also shared his thoughts on the emergence of “PRP”, or "Personal Resource Planning”. As ERP is an essential part of an enterprise now, PRP will become a central part of a person’s life, he asserted. Mr Hyoung believes the concept of “personal resource” now mostly means digital content such as photo and video, but in the future will increasingly include more things such as call and SMS history, product purchase list and wishlist, and even the TV program watchlist and the food consumed (which is given by RFID tags). And as such, keeping up with and sharing those personal resources will become increasingly important and perhaps where the future of the web lies in.
Korea's User Generated Content Service, Case Studies: Henry Kim, CEO of Omnitel, outlined the concept of NPlugs, a service that they claim enables “Social networking 2.0”. Omnitel is a public company with about 100 employees, whose main business is mobile broadcasting and DMB solutions, and mobile content service.
NPlugs enables seamless file sharing among multiple devices, agnostic to device type (notebook computer, mobile phone, etc.) This way, if people around you (family, colleagues, etc) had permitted access to their devices, then you can view all those accessible devices in an integrated view on NPlugs and find/exchange information seamlessly. This platform-independent file sharing seems to be the key differentiation factor of NPlugs.
The next speaker was Michael Hong, CFO and head of global business development of Pandora TV. Pandora TV (Pandora.tv) is the leading video service provider of Korea, in terms of unique visitors and average session duration. They had a phenomenal growth - the growth rate between June 05 to December 06 was a whopping 7,000%.
Pandora was one of the first movers in the online video space; They opened 5 months before Youtube did. But because they were based in Korea, they didn’t have as much impact on the global market as Youtube. To address this, Pandora is opening an international service, primarily targeting the Asian audience, in September this year. Thereby, Pandora wants to become the “Youtube of Asia.” Pandora will introduce user-generated subtitle system so that users themselves will translate the videos available in other languages into their own language.
Pandora’s business model is pre/postroll ads and providing viral video files. Currently, the Korean advertising market is $8 billion in size and the online ads take up about 12%. Mr Hong said the equivalent figures would be 7-8% in Japan and 4% in China, suggesting the online ads have room for growth in those countries. If Pandora finds the
The future of web apps - Tariq Karim of Netvibes. Tariq started by showing the demo of Netvibes, and went on to talk about the widgetization of the web. When Mr Masashi, the moderator of the session, asked people to raise their hands if they know about Netvibes, about 90% of people raised their hands - so Netvibes is pretty well represented in Japan, I guess.
Netvibes is now among global top 5 in terms of RSS (which they define as "Really Sexy Syndication") feed delivery, and is looking to compete with Google (iGoogle) and the market leader My Yahoo soon. They also provide Netvibes Universe, a service that "widgetizes" the media. About 160 media companies are already providing their media content through Netvibes Universe; Agile Media Network of Japan is the first Japanese company on Netvibes Universe. The Netvibes Universal Widget API (=UWA) is an open source API that allows you to create widget once, and use it everywhere, including Macs, Google, and mobile devices.
What was perhaps most amazing about Netvibes was their fascinating relationship with the open source developer community around the world. Netvibes decided to go global from day 1, and as they were based in France, they figured that working with communities from around the world was the key to their globalization. Tariq said, if you come up with a good vision and throw that to the community, the community will certainly roll up their sleeves and help you build a great service. About 15,000 users joined Netvibes on the first day of launch, and Tariq didn't know where all these people came from - that's the power of the community, he said.
About the startpage companies, I've always had a question whether they are offering a feature of a service, and I asked that question to Tariq - to which he answered that they're building a platform where they allow people to personalize the web, which would definitely be a service, not a mere feature (or so I interpreted.) But it looks like they are on their way to make money, which would help proving them as a good "service" as well as a good "feature". First way of making money is to monetize the widgets; For example, if Netvibes provides a widget for a travel agency, they make commissions whenever online booking is made. Also the partnership with media companies would help their revenue generation, too.
