Web 2.0 Asia

KT (Korea Telecom) announced it will start offering a $3-per-month unlimited wireless internet access plan for the users of its "NESPOT" WLAN hotspot service.

This means that the iPod touch users who have Skype account can practically use their iPod touch as a phone (via Skype), at only three bucks a month. (Plus your Skype fees, of course, but those won't be huge).

Well, given the ubiquity of NESPOT coverage, at least in Korea, who needs an iPhone when they can use iPod touch + Skype + $3/month NESPOT?

New York Times reported that Japan's NTT DoCoMo saw its market share in its domestic Japanese market fall below 50%, the first time in almost 10 years.

The winner in this fully saturated Japanese mobile service market (read: a zero-sum game) seems to be Softbank Mobile. (My previous piece about DoCoMo vs. Softbank Mobile is here).

Meanwhile, NTT DoCoMo will test mobile fragrance service: Like ringtones, "scents" can be downloaded and played back (ie. generated) by a phone-embedded aroma generator. Well, mobile fragrance service is surely cool and futuristic and all that, but I guess they should first do something about their "stinking" market performance.

Tangos of China Web 2.0 Review introduces the winners of Mobile Monday Beijing peer awards, including Tokiva:

Tokiva is a mobile virtual network operator which provide convenient and low-cost communication service to global traveler. Tokiva addresses key communications necessities for global travelers: inexpensively phone calls around the world, accessing email and sharing with peers.

After installing its mobile client and log in, you can call any number. Tokiva calls the user back and immediately connects the user to the called party. It also integrated with IM, so you can add its IM bot to use the service without downloading its client.

The service was privately launched in September 2007, and entered public beta with over 700k registered users on January 2008.

You can check out the rest of the winners here.

Mobile Monday Beijing is being spearheaded by our friend Benjamin Joffe, whose consulting work has recently been introduced on Read/Write Web.

Samsung Electronics introduced mobile Second Life and several other innovations at CTIA '08. Coverage here, and here.

With the Second Life client available on Samsung's mobile handsets, users can enjoy many services from the Second Life virtual world whenever and wherever. Unique features of the Second Life client on Samsung's mobile handsets include a mixed blogging platform that allows users to post their blog simultaneously in the real world and the virtual world of Second Life, and the Samsung Mixed Contact feature which allows users to have mixed world contact by communicating with avatar friends via voice or SMS. The Second Life client on Samsung's mobile handsets is compatible with Windows Mobile devices.

I like the concept of using mobile phone as a link between one's online (virtual) life and offline life - Imagine your real-world activities such as phone conversations or short messages being portrayed onto your virtual world.


What's also very interesting is Samsung Life Diary, Samsung's answer to Nokia Lifeblog. I had been involved with this project when I was at Samsung - honestly I didn't know it was going to take this long for Samsung to launch Life Diary.

LifeDiary, developed by Samsung, allows users to compose a personal diary, which manages the user's photos and videos taken that day, the calls made, SMS messages sent, contacts and any specific appointments throughout the day.

I'm sure Samsung Life Diary changed a lot since last time I was involved in the project (Fall '06), but some features we were planning at the time included visualizing social graph based on frequency of mobile phone communications, quick mobile blogging with rich content generated on mobile phone, etc. I'll try to get some more information on Life Diary and write a follow up post.

W3C Mobile Wednesday Workshop was held last week in Seoul - the first major W3C meeting held in Seoul, I heard later.

I gave a brief talk about "Blogging and Knowledge-based Social Network". Though it was mostly about blogging on the "online web", I tried to touch the issue of blogging on the "mobile web" as well, recollecting some of my (often frustrating) memories from my Samsung years. Some major points I made across in my talk:

• 2007 was the year of blogging in Korea - Our company's blog service (called Tistory - now the property of Daum as we sold the service to them) was the only new addition to the top 10 Korean web destinations in the last three years
• The dividing line between blog and traditional media is quickly blurring - Bloggers are now essentially "media company CEOs"
• But the problem with blogging, though, is that it doesn't foster much community actions: No set profiles, lack of inherent social features other than comments and trackbacks, etc.
  
• The next generation blogging tool will be expected to address those issues, eventually leading to the creation of knowledge based social network among bloggers
  
• For mobile blogging to take off, manufacturers and carriers should step up. Let the browser access the phone's generic file system. Lower the network cost so people can comfortably send pics and videos to their blogs from their phones.
  

I also sat in one of panel discussions. To me the most interesting question from the audience was: When it comes to mobile social network, how can we ensure privacy issues?

For this, Opera's Charles McCathieNevile (second from left in the picture) answered something that sounded like the concept being developed in the web industry these days: "Social whitelisting" that's tied to data portability, like XFN blogroll whitelist.


I'll also speak at Web 2.0 Korea 2008 tomorrow with similar topics, but the conference will be an all-Korean one and therefore I won't be able to share much about the conference on this blog. Which is one reason I can't wait to make the English-language pan-Asian conference happen. Lately I've been up to this, and I'll update on it in a separate post.

Maeil Business News (link in Korean) reports that Samsung Electronics has been selected as the mobile Wimax equipment provider for UQ Communications, a Japanese mobile broadband service company that's related to Japan's #2 wireless carrier KDDI.

Samsung is also providing mobile Wimax equipment and technologies to Sprint Nextel of the US. Samsung, along with Intel, has been extensively involved with mobile Wimax technologies.

It's expected that mobile Wimax service will be deployed in Japan in 2009, but the service will likely face a tough competition with other high-speed mobile internet standards like "Super 3G" from Docomo, the top dog.

In Korea, mobile Wimax (called "Wibro" here) is struggling to have a market presence. Wibro users are far outnumbered by HSDPA users in Korea. With the recent rise of LTE (Long-term Evolution) as the possible de facto standard for All-IP 4G, mobile Wimax (or Wibro) might find itself in a difficult position, stuck between HSDPA and LTE.

The National Internet Development Agency of Korea (NIDA) announced the list of most popular mobile websites accessed via WINC.

As background info, WINC is the new and easier way of accessing mobile websites, proposed by NIDA and implemented on over 90% of mobile phones sold in Korea. Instead of typing the long and complex mobile URLs on cellphone keypads, users can just type a simple phone number and press the mobile internet key (you know - those buttons with "i" or "n" on them) to get connected to mobile websites. For instance, type "131", press the n key, and you are on the weather forecasting mobile website.


Obviously, not everyone who uses mobile internet accesses via WINC, so the "most popular WINC sites" list may not exactly represent the most popular mobile sites. Anyhow, the popular WINC sites for 2007 came out to be:

• Bus schedule service, City of Daegu
  
• Bus schedule service, City of Seoul
  
• Naver Mobile (portal)
  
• Daum Mobile (portal)
  
• Hanguk Economy News TV
  
• Chosul Ilbo (newspaper)
  
• Gamevil (mobile game)
• Com2Us (mobile game)
• Samsung Securities (stock trading site)

It's a bit surprising that bus schedule sites topped the list - But maybe it's understandable because young students use the mobile internet most and for them bus schedule might be very important information.

Cmotech, a Korea-based manufacturer of USB wireless modems and other network equipment, announced (note: link in Korean) they raised US$ 8 million from Intel Capital. As well as the investement, Cmotech also announced a partnership agreement with Intel on 3G/Wimax data communication device. Cmotech is the world's leading manufacturer of USB-based wireless modems (some shown below), and posted FY '07 profit of roughly US$ 24 million on a revenue of about US$100 million.

Chosun Ilbo reports that in Korean market, mobile coupon is seeing increased use among young users. This is an encouraging sign, with the mobile internet service business in general being stagnant.


Users present mobile coupon (which normally includes a barcode, as shown above - many shops in Korea has m-coupon barcode readers) to get discounts, or they can also forward their coupons to friends as a gift. While SMS ads are being recognized as "spams", mobile coupons are being even "welcomed" by many consumers, the article says.

SK Telecom's mobile coupon service, dubbed "Gifti-con", saw an year-over-year growth of 700% from 2006 to 2007.

Key East, an entertainment company managing a famous Korean actor Bae Yong Joon, said the company will launch "Bae Yong Joon phone" in Japan, in partnership with Softbank Mobile. The phone will feature some embedded photos of the actor, Key East said through Korean Chosun Ilbo.

I think what they should have embedded in the phone is not Bae's photos, which can easily be obtained elsewhere on the web, but a factory-configured auto-dial to Bae's private number.