Web 2.0 Asia

I met with Ian Kwon (link in Korean) of Qbox yesterday. He's the person heading all Qbox operations in the US now. Qbox has been focusing on product development so far, and they are ready to go full-fledged with beta service.

Qbox, again, is a game-changing online music discovery service. Most people today consume their music in digital format, which means music files sit in servers as much as they do on local hard drives.

Qbox lets you look up all songs publicly available on internet servers, e.g. what users publicly put on their Myspace and Youtube pages. The result is a free internet jukebox with almost endless volume of music library. Qbox also has other features, such as "music markup" tool that allows user to tag music file more specifically so that it can be indexed by search engines better. For details, see my previous post.

If you reside in the US, you can access qbox.com (it will redirect you to us.qbox.com) and take the service for a spin - other regions will have to wait a bit more, Ian says.

They are ready to go public beta. Their key to success, in my opinion, will be "Myspace marketing", or how to increase service awareness among Myspace users. The door to funding is still wide open, Ian says.

I don't have any affiliations to this company/service but I see Qbox clearly has potential to become a hit, arguably more so than MusicShake - a Techcrunch 40 wunderkid and another great service.

SK Telecom is Korea's top wireless carrier. Unlike some of other carriers which resemble ostriches with their heads buried in the sand, SKT had foresight and made acquisitions to place its bets across various multimedia businesses.

SKT companies now include:

• SK Communications, which runs the ever-popular Cyworld
  
• TU media, a DMB (DIgital multimedia broadcasting) service provider
  
• Seoul Records (a record label) and Melon.com, Korea's top music download service - So SK telecom is a powerhouse of music industry, both online and off
  
• IHQ, a talent agency and management company which has many K-wave stars under its roof
• Ntreev, an online gaming company
• Aircross, a mobile solution company
• YTN Media, a cable channel running Comedy TV and YTN Star
• Chungeorahm film, a major movie studio
• Morning 365, an internet bookstore
• Paxnet, Korea's top finance portal
  

And now, the company is planning to add Hanaro Telecom, the nation's #2 broadband service provider which also provides fixed telephone and IPTV services, to its army of affiliated companies.

Hanaro acquisition, when goes through, will be of magnitude that's no comparison to other acquisitions SKT has made so far. It will be big - about $1.2 bn big, to be exact. But monetary figures aside, the value Hanaro will be adding to SKT and the overall synergies to be created are what scare the SKT competitors.

So, SKT was smart and prescient enough to realize one day the wireless carriers will turn into "dumb bit pipes". SKT wanted to avoid this fate by diversifying into multimedia businesses, mostly through acquisitions. And they have made some great acquisitions - I mean, who among other wireless carriers have such diversified portfolio, spanning DMB, game, music, movies, entertainment, and even finance - and now poised to take over the broadband and IPTV services as well?

But does it mean SKT has successfully transformed itself from a wireless carrier into something totally different? Is SKT's innovation scale ranked right up there with Googles and Apples? That's a bit hard to say. SKT is still a wireless carrier by DNA, and many times, it shows. SKT doesn't seem to understand the ins and outs of new media business as thoroughly as, let's say, Apple does. Well, if we expect SKT to be as innovative as Apple, it might be a bit of stretch anyway.

All in all, there's no wonder SKT is among very few carriers in the world that know how to think ahead and make the right moves. In that sense, the future of wireless carriers is here, and it's called SK Telecom.

Only that the future of wireless carriers itself, at least for now, doesn't look terribly bright... Rumors like this doesn't help so much either.

As everyone knows by now, Nokia acquired Loudeye (which is essentially OD2), which I think is a pretty smart move.

It's an open secret around the industry that some carriers (especially more powerful ones) basically ask the phone manufacturers to be good boys and make the phones just as told by the carriers - not so much of gimmicks allowed.

But the manufacturers need to innovate despite all this - if they only try to stick to the manufacturers' guidelines and specs, they will soon find themselves lacking in unique differentiation factors and therefore competing solely on price.

And "competing solely on price" is equal to "getting one day destoryed by the Chinese cheap labor". In China, things are so cheap that they sell computers by weight.

I think Nokia's acquisition of Loudeye will greatly help the company to provide an end-to-end mobile music experience. Hence a smart move - In fact I think Nokia as a company is pretty smart.  

Personally, I have some friends over at Nokia. At one time, I was taking a stroll with this guy who'd been with Nokia for years. It was around the time when Nokia's market share had slided to a mere twenty-something percent, possibly a historic low.

I asked him what was going on. He said, "It's just that Nokia people have been too proud. That's all. We are not dumb, and we will come back hard. You gotta watch out."

And that's exactly what happened. Look at Nokia today - they're amazing.

Although due to the professional conflict I guess I'm not supoosed to say this, but I like Nokia -- for these reasons.

1. The company is smart and successful - see above, plus the fact that they are making 10 phones a second and yet generating around 33% of profit margin.

2. The company alone represents a good portion of Finnish economy while being not evil. This is remarkable - how many global companies are feeding large number of countrymen, while not so much evil? (The "not evil" part excludes Russian Oligarches, who by the way do feed large number of countrymen.)

3. They seem to be doing a fairly good job of treating its people right. I haven't seen many guys who had been with Nokia and say bad things about the company. Yes, I've heard some stories but Nokia is a big company and therefore it would't be able to please everyone.

* Picture source: Mobile Crunch