Web 2.0 Asia

ShowStreet, dubbed "Virtual Street Walk", displays actual photos of streets on top of Google Maps, making user feel as if he was virtually walking along the street. The service is now live in New Zealand, and will soon be launched in Australia too. 

Users initially see the customized version of Google Maps where streets of interest are highlighted (blue lines in the picture above). Click on one of the streets, and the actual photos of the selected street will be displayed on the top half of the screen, so that user can see the building facades and shop fronts. User can scroll the photos left and right, and the location marker on the Google Maps move correspondingly. 

Local shops and businesses are tagged with clickable links; Click on the link, and the popup layer displays shop information such as phone number, business hours, and reviews. ShowStreet also allows business owners to add their business information to ShowStreet directly (See video). 

ShowStreet is a product of collaboration between Korea's PlayStreet, which I had covered in this blog earlier, and a New Zealand company called Web Concepts. This creates a great case of a Korean web service getting launched in other countries through partnership. 

Often, internationalization means launching an English version, which many people somehow automatically accept to be the same thing as launching in the US market. But of course the two may not be the same, and launching an English version in a non-US market first may also be a good way to test the waters, potentially with lower costs. With the experiences gained from New Zealand and Australian market under the belt, the PlayStreet/ShowStreet team would hopefully be better prepared to launch a more rock-solid US/global service. 

Blogger Channy Yun, on his Korean blog, recently posted that Daum Map's traffic has slided back to its original level after a shark-jump peak in late January, when Daum launched Street View service. 

All in all, Daum has a great map service, better than Naver's in ways (take the Street View, currently not provided by Naver, for one). However, Naver seems to be such a strongly entrenched top-of-the-mind choice for most Koreans, and the "escape velocity" for any second player to take off and surpass Naver can be just too high. Got a great feature? People may give it a try or two, but chances are they will just go back to Naver. The Economist has a recent article on Naver's success, which I'll cover on the next post. 

Meanwhile, on a separate note, Korean map service players may be suffering from too many government regulations. No Cut News reported (article in Korean) that Daum had to remove the Blue House, Korea's Oval Office, from its map service due to government request. (Left in the picture is what shows on Google Maps, while on the right you can see the whole area has been greened out). Google itself had enormous difficulty launching the map service in Korea due to many regulations. That's probably what you get when your country, while having bleeding-edge technologies, is still bordering with a military enemy who is very open about its missile launching programs.