Web 2.0 Asia

Yesterday, we had the fourth Lunch 2.0 at Microsoft Korea. Korea's "Web 2.0 gangs" were all gathered together. Lunch was great - Nice big fat burger and beef enchilada. Here are Flickr photos, courtesy of Suman Park of Me2day.


Guess which company was appointed to host the next Lunch 2.0... It's ours! We should find a good venue, as our office is *just* a little bit smaller than NHN's. Thanks Microsoft Korea for hosting the event.

Korea Economy Newspaper (link in Korean) reports that, according to a newest research, Koreans aged from 19 to 24 are, on average, found to:

• Have 78 Cyworld buddies ("Il-chon")
  
• Have added 23 new Cyworld buddies over the last year
  
• Have 79 instant messenger buddies
  
• Be a member of 5 online clubs

How can you possibly manage the communication with 78 Cyworld buddies and 79 instant messenger buddies? Add to this 100+ phonebook entries and pouring amount of emails, and boy, is it hard to simply "keep in touch".

It's funny people work so hard, often checking emails at 2AM, to achieve their biggest dream: To become able to throw away their blackberries and get free from emails.

A couple who met through Me2day, Korea's Twitter, are apparently getting married. Feel lonely? Start Me2day-ing.

Now, here's the fun part. Me2day's community is so closely knit that the CEO of the company himself is working on singing for the wedding. Me2day's CEO, Suman Park, is the person playing the piano in the video embedded below. Kewl.



I call the approach Me2day is taking as a "Delicous way" - i.e. Start with small, core audience; Build something great for them; Let them play with it, build a cult-like community; Have the community grow, slowly but surely.

Me2day, just like Twitter, seems to follow the right path. The only concern I have is, compared to Twitter, Me2day's core users could be too small in numbers because the service is only offered in Korean. In fact, that's the same kind of limitation that works against our company as well. Which is why we should have "globalize or die" mentality.

Well, I don't know if couples using our blog service are getting married anytime soon, but I guess I and my team will have to keep practicing on some musical skills on our spare times - you know, just in case. :)

Mr. Jae-Woong Lee, the founder of Korea's #2 portal Daum, announced he will step down from presidency.

Lee, who still owns about 20% of Daum, was the president and CEO of Daum until about a year ago - but he had resigned from CEO position last September, and now he's no longer the president either.

What's interesting is the speculation that Lee's move might somehow be related to the acquisition rumors surrounding Daum. In the Korean stock market, Daum was the subject of various M&A rumors throughout the past two years.

The fact that Lee is no longer part of Daum's management team suggests the Daum M&A rumors might finally be coming true. So who's buying Daum, if someone does buy the company? We don't know yet - but whoever it might be, the acquirer must be a player that's very determined to compete against Naver, the "king of the hill".

As I reported earlier, it was rumored that the former CEO of NHN, Mr. Brian Kim, will enter the foray of blogging business. (NHN is the company behind Korea's #1 giant portal, Naver.) Mr. Kim's new company, Iwilab, is already up and running in the Bay Area.

But it turned out that Iwilab's new service isn't so much about blogging as it's about website asset clipping/sharing. (Confirmed by Mr Jun Hur of Iwilab.) So I guess it was a classic example of a traditional newspaper reporter hearing one thing and writing another, completely different thing - when will they "get it"?

The new service from Iwilab is called Buru.com. I don't know where that name comes from - perhaps "bookmark" + "guru"? Or the Korean way of pronouncing "Blue"? (just kidding - but couldn't help the speculation as the site is generally hued in blue).


Buru.com is actually a very simple concept. It's a giant archive for anything you see on the web - web pages, photos, video files, etc. You can directly add items to your buru, or browse some else's saved items and copy those onto your buru. Social bookmark meets RSS reader meets Box.net, perhaps?


The concept reminds me of a popular Korean service called "Nate Tong". Tong means "container" in Korean, and the service is provided by SK - the same company running the ever-famous Cyworld. Tong is quite popular in Korea, but the less desired side-effect is rampant copying of content among the users.


Buru.com is currently in open beta, meaning you can register and take the service for a spin. Frankly, I'm a bit underwhelmed by the service. When you try something out, there are services that "bite", and there are those that don't - I think buru.com falls into the latter category, at least for the time being. (I still like you guys, don't take me wrong.)

But the amazing thing about web services is, of course, you can always improve things as you go on. Buru.com will get only better from this point on - and you should never underestimate someone who used to sit behind the wheel of the world's #5 search company.

Benjamin Joffe of Plus Eight Star offers a great summary of leading social networks in Asia - namely, QQ, Mixi, Cyworld. Here's also a follow-up post.

Joyce Kim is the CEO of Soompi.com, but she's perhaps more famous for her other gig, namely the co-host of the GigaOm Show. Yesterday Joyce visited our office and we had some fun conversations.

We talked about many things: open web standards, blogging in Asia vs. the US, good strategies for international companies to knock on the doors of the US market, etc. We also showed our product to Joyce, and she liked it very much and she suggested we should set up a presence in the Bay Area.

(By the way, when the new blog service we're developing now will be out this summer, it will first be available in Korean - but we do will launch international version soon after that. So stay tuned. :-)

Despite being someone with such impeccable resume (sorry Joyce, I did some Googling), Joyce Kim was very down to earth and carried conversations in a pleasantly bubbly way. Also much to my delight, she reads my blog (she talked about my blog theme before I mentioned it to her, so that's for real). I would be more delighted if I could be invited as the next guest at GigaOm Show. I'd be able to share some unique views from the East, then. I'm all yours, Om and Joyce!