Written on 6th March 2009
15 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Food vans are common place in most countries; whether it’s ice cream, fish & chips, sausages or soup – they each have their place, none more so than KogiBBQ.
The KogiBBQ team includes two food vans traveling up down and around Los Angeles selling a mix of Korean spicy barbecued food. The twist? To track them down you need to be following them on Twitter.
The Kogi twitter account already has over 7000 followers and respected news organisations, such as the LA Times, have already described the phenomenon as ”a burgeoning cyber-hippie movement”.
Kogi BBQ have also opened a permanent home in LA but there are no signs of the two van “cyber-hippie movement” stopping any time soon.
When will we see foldable e-paper on the street? Will advanced algorithms and Internet eventually put publishers out of business? – Nobody knows… But we do witness a devastating momentum for traditional publishers, how can these companies reinvent themselves? Are they doomed?
Chosun media, showing off newspaper 2.0
Doomed? Not by a long shot! at least, if we have to believe the marketing manager of Chosun. Chosun is a Korean newspaper giant, based in the heart of Seoul. I have to admit, I never heard of the company before I visited them today. But like many unknown Asian companies, Chosun is a prominent player with amazing proportions, newspaper circulation surpasses that of well-known newspapers like the USA today. The marketing manager believes that businesspeople will always appreciate an edited and selected overview on the daily hot topics. And if it isn’t on paper, it would be on a different medium. And as much as I like to argue the contrary, he might have a point. Financial Times recently announced that their amount of online (paying) subscribers is increasing fast. We got a tour at the HQ, and they actually got excited of the Nintendo Wii again! (has been a long time)
Epic 2015
But if you ask me; newspaper publishers are biased towards their believe that a good paper requires manual work, something that will seize to exist in the future. This three-year-old videoclip made by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson try to sketch that situation. Skip to 6:40:
Is Google finally becoming serious in approaching the Korean market? Blogging platform TNC has been acquired by Google today; making them the first acquired company by Google in Korea. (who’s counting anyway) TNC offers a blogging platform similar as Automatic. It’s fairly easy to use, and works close to the open source community. Biggest difference is that Wordpress is fairly unknown here, so they represent a big blogging market, being used by a lot of nation’s A-list bloggers.
Chang W. Kim, co-founder of the company explains that Google is the underdog in this region, but Korea is the worlds sixth largest market in terms of Internet users. The Korean users mainly use Yahoo-style portal services to do everything on the web. With the acquirement, Google created a new way to get to the customers.
The exact number on the contract stays unknown, but is claimed to be the first major Google acquisitions in the entire Asia by Chang. Another successful entrepreneur with the copycat approach!
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.
Written on 6th March 2009
15 COMMENTS 
Written on 24th October 2008
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
