Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on October 19, 2008 – 5:54 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When George Godula from Web2Asia (story here) invited me on a trip to China with bloggers like Robert Scoble, Sam Lawrence, and Shel Israel a few weeks ago, you can imagine I didn’t hesitate for one second. Who doesn’t want to gain a deeper understanding of China 2.0? Spil Games is sponsoring my trip, for which I’d very much like to thank Marc van der Chijs and his team!
But you know what? Mashable and VisualCV might sponsor your trip! None of the full time Mashable bloggers was able to join the China 2.0 trip, so they partnered up with VisualCV.com. Tamar Weinberg writes:
We’re going to send one of our dedicated readers to take the trip. The winner gets their airfare paid for, can post about the trip in their blog (if you have one), post on the official China 2.0 blog and may even get to report back to the Mashable community throughout the week-long trip to China.
The trip is led by The China Business Network and co-organized by Web2Asia and CNReviews, the inaugural China 2.0 Tour is sponsored by Edelman Digital China. The tour leaders are taking an interdisciplinary approach by looking at social media, clean technology, gaming, wireless, and other areas where trends in China will affect markets around the world.
I’ve written quite a bit about China, especially their online video market - which looks like one big soap opera to me. Thus I can’t wait to actually visit the offices of the companies that are building the structures for world’s largest Internet market. And thanks to Mashable and VisualVC, YOU might be able to join me. Check out the Mashable post here.
Update: These bloggers will join the tour as well!
David Feng, @davidfeng, TechBlog86.com
Elliott Ng, @elliottng, CNReviews.com
Sheila Scarborough, @SheilaS, FamilyTravelogue.com
I hope you like that post!
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Written on June 10, 2008 – 8:00 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
That is, if you like to be connected to the Internet all day, while enjoying the fastest connections in the world! Enter the hyper connected society, with an astounding 90 percent of the country connected with 3G and a nation wide coverage of a South Korean version of Wimax.
How and why did South Korea become an overlord in Internet speed? In short; the South Korean government introduced a number of policy instruments to stimulate technological learning, aimed to strengthen international competitiveness of the economy. The government launched a five-year plan to create a ubiquitous networked world in 1995, meaning that the country developed a stunning 1.5 billion dollar wireless network to stimulate the use of the Internet.
Today, South Korea is the most connected country on earth, but the funny thing is that we hardly hear anything about Korea’s web scene. This made us curious about what websites are popular over there, and if Korea has a web 2.0 scene. To find that out, we reviewed the three visited websites in Korea and we interviewed Chang W. Kim, Korean web 2.0 enthusiast and initiator of the Open Web Asia ‘08 conference.
(more…)
Written on March 25, 2008 – 8:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
During one of the lunches at the LIFT conference in Geneva I met Markus Fuhrmann. He’s the co-founder of Web2Asia. A European service with headquarters in Shanghai that specializes in supporting western Internet companies and Mobile content developers to get a company or service going in China, Japan and Korea. Needless to say, there’s a lot of potential in these rapidly developing markets. Some of their clients are Jimdo (Germany), Xendex (Austria) and Vanilla Live Games. I kept in touch with Markus, and the business he runs turns out to be really fascinating. So I decided to ask him some questions about this hard to comprehend Asian markets.
Markus has a entrepreneurial history in games. His story in China began with an IMBA semester at Tongji University in Shanghai. “In the beginning I both loved and hated it in China, because I started my stay with one week in a Chinese hospital with pneumonia. After recovering and getting used to the cultural and environmental differences, I started to enjoy the dynamics and sheer endless opportunities available here.” He consulted several companies on how to launch in China. When he met his partner George Godula they connected immediately and it made perfect sense for them to team up.
How to bring a product from Europe or the US to Asia
So, when I want to enter the Asian market, what should I take in account? “The East Asian characters. This is a smaller problem for completely web based services but can amount to a lot of work if you have to change your client or back end infrastructure because you forgot to use Unicode and double byte support in the first place. In terms of function and usability there are a lot of things to watch out for, especially in Japan and Korea with the example of mobile phone support, which is crucial.”
“The second important part is the content side. Here you have to take care that the content fits the Asian culture, especially in terms of symbols and language. Another sensible topic is working specifically to local legislation requirements and restrictions on certain content.” I assume Markus is referring to dealing with censorship in China. Which probably brings some conscience issues.
The last part is less complicated and controversial, namely the feasibility of the underlying business model. Markus: “It’s already quite hard to earn money through advertising in Europe and the US, but it is even more difficult to earn money through this model in East Asia. The positive examples have been able to transfer a model of premium memberships, customizable content - micro payments - and value added services.”
Facebook doomed to die
These three different parts seem to create some obstacles for all the global players, since they failed to gain a foothold in East Asia. “One of the most famous examples that didn’t work out in China has been Ebay China, the local competitor Taobao realized that Chinese users prefer much more to buy products instantly than to wait for an auction to end. Same thing with Google; in Korea the company only has approximately 6% of the market share. As for other western hypes, they have yet to make it to East Asia, which are not good signs either. For example, jokes are already going around in China calling Facebook, “fei si bu ke” (非死不可) a transliteration which means ‘doomed to die’.” (more…)
Written on March 18, 2008 – 11:28 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
This weekend, fun avatar service Gizmoz dominated the tech blogosphere for a while because they raised 6.5 million dollars Series B financing from a round led by a subsidiary of the largest cell phone operator in Japan, DoCoMo Capital. Moreover, they announced new compatibility with AIM. TechCrunch, Mashable and VentureBeat were all eager to cover the news from this Israel-based company.
I thought this story could use a little background, so I’ve interviewed Gizmoz’s Founder and CEO Eyal Gever. First question that comes to mind: is Gizmoz going to focus on Japan and other Asian countries now?
Gever: “We think the US and European market are also very interesting to approach. Asia is an extremely advance market compared to the US and Europe in terms of Mobile entertainment and we therefore believe that Asia has a huge addressable market for our services. So focusing on the Asian market makes a lot of sense as they have clear and established business models of advertising and digital goods. Also, self-expression and consumption of digital goods have been extremely popular in Asia both on the web and mobile.”
“Japan represents a large and strategic market for Gizmoz”
“Specifically, Japan represents a large and strategic market for Gizmoz. The country is a world-leader in mobile adoption and Japanese consumers are eager to embrace innovative content and offerings. DoCoMo is a subsidiary of Japan’s largest cellular phone service operator, and NGI capital is a leading VC firm in Japan. As strategic partners, they can help us navigate and launch our services in the Asian social entertainment market in ways that would be much more difficult to do by ourselves. Details of our expansion plans remain confidential at this time, but in short we see an opportunity partnering both with media companies, mobile content aggregators as well as mobile operators.”
Gever also announced that they’ll soon introduce a full set of mobile services. (more…)
Written on February 29, 2008 – 11:00 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Young professionals, ambitious students and recruiters who are disappointed in the effectiveness of LinkedIn or Facebook, could look for better times at iHipo.com: ‘the High Potential network dedicated to empowering international careers’. It’s the place for young people with international ambitions to connect with human resource managers who roam the social networks of the world to find talented youngsters.
Companies are looking for the best people, regardless of their nationality
The founders, three recent graduates from Germany, the Netherlands and Singapore, believe to follow a globalization trend on the world-wide job market. Arnout Wagenaar: “Companies are looking for the best people, regardless of their nationality. Also, people have a growing need to work internationally.”
On iHipo, there are two kinds of profiles: as a business you can post jobs and search for new talent. As a professional, you can search for jobs and friends in your industry. There’s also the Knowledge Base with over 2,000 international HR contacts and interview preparation material. Further features include a Google maps mashup to geographically highlight the iHipo community, a Facebook application and a number of new networking tools.
I guess it must be a struggle to be successful in this job specific area of the web. It’s a niche with hundreds of players, and they’re are all trying to lure young talents into their professional network. Yet iHipo seems to do a pretty good job. The Singaporean company launched in July 2007 and managed to attract close to 1,000 registered users and 160 job offers by international employers in the first week. They were mainly successful in the US and South-East Asia and now plan to expand to Europe.
Well, this week iHipo has received some more capital for their European conquest, since they’ve closed a seed round of funding by Thymos Capital and the Media Development Authority of Singapore (MDA). And with the latter backing them up, they can face everybody. The MDA are those tough Senior Management rappers you might know from the YouTube video that was viewed more than 200,000 times:
Written on February 7, 2008 – 7:55 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Gen Kanai
This year, LIFT will also organize an Asian edition of the conference. With the session ‘A Glimpse in Asia’, they wanted to warm up the current visitors for LIFT Asia-style. Gen Kanai, a business developer for Mozilla Asia and director of marketing and partner relations for Mozilla Japan, offered an overview of open source in Asia. According to Kanai, there’s a lot to win on the field of open source developing in Asia. He summed up the barriers for open source programmers in Asia:
- Asians have a different style of communicating. They’re not comfortable with the direct way Western people confront each other. According to Kanai, Asians ‘might be intimidated’ when working with people from the West.
- Open Source defacto language is English, so the hurdle for non-native speakers is higher. Also Asian people tend to create islands of groups, such as Mozillagumi.
- In the US and Europe, most programmers work on open source projects after their daytime jobs. Most Asians however, don’t have any free time. Kanai points out that most developers in India work for Western companies and can’t choose how much work they accept.
- Asian open source programmers need institutionalized support.
Despite all the barriers, Kanai urged the attendees to look beyond the stereotypes about Asia. “The continent has contributed to open source”, he said, “Yet we need to do more”. After this visionary speech he couldn’t resist the temptation of promoting Firefox: “Anybody who tells a friend about Firefox, helps the open source community. We can all affect the future of open source”. Next time keep the marketing talk to yourself Kanai, and the applause will be even louder.
Written on January 12, 2008 – 12:02 am
Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
As we already in 2008, it’s a good time to look back and see how much the Internet landscape has changed in the last year in Japan.
Internationally there have been some big shakeups, led by the dramatic effects of the meteoric rise of Facebook to prominence, both good and bad. On these shores, too, there has been plenty of online action, so we’ve rounded up some of the events that have reshaped the Japanese Internet landscape this year.
The big hit
Nico Nico Douga
Any discussion about the top Internet stories of 2007 starts and finishes with Nico Nico Douga. This video-sharing site is uniquely Japanese, blending online video-sharing with user-created, short chat-like text comments that are synced to the movies, allowing whole conversations to flow across the frame. The type of content has ranged from the crude to the incredibly insightful and inventive, and some users have even subtitled music videos with the song’s lyrics. The videos themselves are a geek’s paradise, consisting mainly of anime, video-game footage and videos of young ladies. The unique format and addictive nature of the Web site has millions tuned in, giving it one of the most dramatic growth surges ever as it went from a January launch to become the seventh-most visited Web site in Japan as of December, according to global site-ranking service Alexa.com.
Mobile gaming gets the big company treatment
Disney Wonder Days
Following in the footsteps of the innovative 2006 avatar-based mobile-gaming platform MobaGe-Town, this April Disney threw in its hat with a big press push and its own avatar-based game and social-interaction platform. Disney Wonder Days capitalized on the brand popularity and makes its money from monthly subscriptions. The range of games is pretty slick and offers Disney fans a healthy selection of characters. What it represented mostly was media giant Disney jumping into the mobile social media space to capture the hugely lucrative children’s market. You know the scene is changing when the big names get involved. (more…)
asia, China 2.0 Tour, China Business Network, Edelman Digital China, robert scoble, Shel Israel, Spil Group, web2asia
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