Web 2.0 Asia

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.

CNet Japan reported that Microsoft made investment in OKWave, Japan's #1 online Q&A service. With the investment, Microsoft now owns 10.52% of OKwave.

According to CNet, this marked the first time Microsoft acquired shares of a Japanese company. But apparently, this is not the first time Microsoft and OKWave announced partnership.

Microsoft and OKWave will work together to integrate OKWave's Q&A content with Microsoft's Live search. This, I think, is a smart move (if done right): Anyone who's kept an eye on the success trajectory of Korea's Naver would testify that "search + Q&A + contextual ads = killer combination and lots of revenue".

Here's my previous post about Asia's online Q&A services.

Over the past couple of weeks, online Q&A services in Asia made some announcements, suggesting Q&A services are pretty active in Asia.

Tangos writes that Qihoo.com of China is set to focus more on the Q&A service (China already has a prominent Q&A service in Baidu Zhidao); Japan's top Q&A service, OKWave, announced they will start contextual ads ("content-matching ads") alongside their Q&A content.



It's to be seen if Qihoo and OKWave will generate huge ad revenue, as seems to be the case with Naver Q&A service ("Knowledge iN") and Baidu Zhidao.

EDaily of Korea (note: link in Korean) announced that Mr. Brian Kim, the ex-CEO of NHN, has started a new company that seems to have its eyes on "the next generation of blog service".

NHN is the company behind Naver, Korea's #1 portal and the world's #5 search service (according to Newsweek). Brian was one of the two CEOs of NHN, and his departure isn't such a small deal for Korean web industry - Think Sergey Brin spinning out of Google for a new venture.

The new company, called IWILab, is apparently based in Mountain View and Bundang, Korea. According to EDaily, Brian thinks that blog service is one of the (rare) weak spots of Google, and therefore thinks he has a chance in the global market if he can build the next-gen blog service. For this, Brian is said to have cashed out some of his NHN stocks, worth about US$ 35 million - I'm not quite sure if a blog service startup would require that much of money, at least initially.

Brian's ShouldDo page says he should "forget about Naver and lead the internet world through Iwilab."

As a person who's already in the blog business, I welcome a new competition. Though it remains to be seen if Brian's new venture will make a huge splash in the blogging service market, I wish Brian the best with his new comany.

This was actually announced a few weeks ago, but the whole issue occurred to me again recently, with the planned Yahoo-Microsoft merger.

Naver, Korea's 800lb gorilla portal, announced in mid-January that they have signed an MOU with Ahn Lab, Korea's leading anti-virus software company, to integrate Ahn Lab's security technologies into Naver's free anti-virus service called PC Green.


Naver PC Green is already being offered as a free service, but it doesn't have Ahn Lab's technologies in it.

Being able to use robust anti-virus software for free is clearly a good thing to users. I'm happily using Naver's PC Green now at my home PC (my work PC is Macbook Pro, not yet supported by PC Green). But the question still remains: How will Ahn Lab, the provider of the technology, be able to make money when nobody pays for the software anymore? Will ads rev share from Naver alone provide sufficient funds to keep the engine rolling at Ahn Lab so the company can continuously innovate?

Now, what does this have to do with the Y-M merger? Obviously one angle to view the whole issue of Microhoo is the rise of free consumer software (as a service) which could have made Microsoft look for fresh source of revenues other than software sales (such as ads).

Office productivity software has already been made free by Google et al. Now, the anti-virus software seems it's no exception from this "software as a free service" trend. It's happening here in Korea now.

Naver, Korea's #1 portal, unveiled Naver Labs, a la Google Labs. Naver Labs is a collection of "petri dish" projects being undertaken at Naver. Some of the projects include: News Clustering, which automatically finds similar articles when a news article is looked up; Review search, which automatically rates products or people through symantic analysis of the text descriptions on the particular product or person; Face search, a Riya-like face recognition and search. Interesting.

China's Baidu is poised to launch officially in Japan on Jan 23.


Will 2008 see Asian search giants - Baidu, Naver, Yahoo Japan - battle it out, with the first battlefield being the Japanese market? (Here's a previous short take on Naver's new Japan office.)

But what exactly is Baidu's strategy and competitive edge over incumbents in Japan, most notably Yahoo Japan? What's their unfair advantage? Can anyone shed some light on this?

The reason why Windows is called Windows is because Microsoft wanted the OS to be the window to all your computing life.

Now, Naver apparently wants its search box to be the window to all your online life.

Pictured below is the new web-cam called "Navercam" from Naver. The Navercam can be used for video calls on Naver's VoIP service "Naverphone". 

Naver says the company will work with other hardware vendors too - we might soon see a Naver TV as well. (If there's such a thing, it will have a green frame, of course.)

Here are some recent news on NHN, the 800-lb giant Korean company behind the Naver portal.

A new Japan office

(Via NmindPlus blog) NHN Japan recently moved into a new office - obviously a super hip/cool place. Here are some pics. (Note the Tatami conference room - something you won't see in the Googleplex).


There's been many talks that NHN currently regards Japan as the "next holy grail" and the company will launch its ever-famous Knowledge iN Q&A service in Japan soon. (It's no secret that Naver's Q&A service was copied by Yahoo Answer and Google Answer in Russia). Of course, the whole purpose of the Q&A service is to get users produce highly relevant content for search queries, by introducing the concept of question and answer. Which means it's likely that the Japanese market will soon see an improved Naver search service, tied closely with the Q&A service. Watch out, Yahoo Japan.

... Meanwhile, domination in the Korean market continues...

(Via Read&Lead blog) While Daum and other players seem to have gained some turf in terms of search page traffic (i.e. the # of visitors to each portal's search page):

(Sorry the graph is in Korean, but the top, green one is Naver)


... But in terms of search page views and visit duration (staying time), Naver still dominates other portals.


So this roughly means that when people use Naver search, they tend to stay longer and visit more pages than when they were on other portal's search sites. This might suggest that Naver is providing better search results on a given query.

... But not everyone is welcome

The phrase "Not in another hundred years" apparently isn't only being used by girls who dump guys - Naver recently banned someone who posted commercial content 20 times in a row on Naver's Q&A service from using the service for 100 years.

A user, who sells health supplements online, uploaded content of commercial nature that is guised as an "answer" for the Naver Knowledge iN Q&A service. Noticing this for 13 times, Naver prohibited this user from logging in Naver for a week. After a week's probation, the user started posting commercial content again - hence the ban for 100 years.

It's quite important for Naver to make sure all commercial content gets published only through their advertising program. Naver's search result page, meanwhile, is being increasingly criticized for having too many ads.

Mr TJ Kim, the CEO of NC Soft, said yesterday that the market domination and walled-garden business model of Korean portals are stifling innovations in the Korean internet industry. In other words, Naver is so dominating across so many different areas, and at the same time keeping its "all data in, no data out" strategy, and therefore small startups are left with little business opportunities.

NC Soft is, as I described in my previous post, an online game powerhouse famous for its Lineage games and is recently pushing out "open web" based new services through its Openmaru subsidiary.

It looks like the internet services market is getting increasingly consolidated, in other countries like Japan and China as well as in Korea, as the whole industry gets more and more commoditized. The startup people I know in Japan always say the same things as Korean internet entrepreneurs do - such as "The entire market is in the hands of Yahoo and Rakuten, and there's nothing left" or "There should be more internet startup entrepreneurs in Japan, but the window of opportunity for internet startups is not very wide, with the market uptake of new internet services being low." China seems to be a bit of different story and startup actions there seem more bustling, but the overall market share of big players like QQ seem to be increasing in China too.

So perhaps we can't just blame the increasing market domination of big portal players, as the market consolidation around the "Big 3" might be the natural path of evolution for the internet industry, as it was for other industries such as car manufacturing, personal computers, or arguably all other industries.

Yes, the domination itself might be both "natural" and even worth some credit, but what about the openness?

That indeed is clearly an issue. Time and again, it's been proven many times that, in the internet industry, open is a much better model than closed - in both ethical and practical terms. Umair Haque probably said "open beats closed" about 34,879 times, and although I don't agree him all the time, I'm with him on that premise 100%. Who holds the biggest market share in the server software market, between open source and a single company with a walled garden model?

So, to conclude, Naver is evil - But it's not the company's bigness that makes it evil (bigness and market domination is part of the industry evolution so it's neither harmful nor unnatural), it's only the closeness that makes it evil. Someone will have to do something about it.