Before a month, KT (wire phone, wireless internet) and KTF (mobile) were merged. KTF was one of candidates that could offer iPhone and there were many rumors from there. It was hopeful news too. But, there wasn’t good news in WWDC 2009. I couldn’t find the name of Korea in 80 launching country list of iPhone. So many Korean geeks were disappointed and thought another problem is still mobile carrier not to give up their closed mobile business.

Recently there is another hopeful news again. Apple gained a regulatory approval for sales of its iPhone 3G here. Radio Research Agency affiliated with the KCC released to grant certification to Apple for sales of its iPhone 3G A1241 on 12th June.

Its approval is mandatory for telecom equipment entering the Korean market. Not all of the products that received the body’s certification are sold in the local market, but the latest approval shows that “Apple is interested in entering the Korean market,” a KT spokesperson said and KT have been long in talks with Apple to launch its iPhone raising hopes among Korean consumers that the sleek device would come to the local market.

However, the older iPhone 3G may yet hit the local market. Someone are keen to see the possible impact that the iPhone may have on the local mobile phone market, which is dominated by Korean firms such as Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics. Also telecom companies have dominated all of mobile business with relatively expensive price for internet access. So Korean geeks is now alternation of joy and grief because of iphone.

Anyway it’s well going the status of Korean application for iPhone. According to the list of appstore developers, there are over 150 companies and 700 applications in appstore (about 2% per 50,000).

There was successful stories of top 5th game naming “Heavy Mach.” by Korean personal developer Mr. Byun and top 1st free application naming “9-Toolbox” by E2ndesign.

So it boomed up between Korean developers and there is Mr. Chanjin Lee who was one of heroes of software industry and developer Hangul word processor. He has tried to persuade many telecom company, to raise issue about opening market and to promote for many developer to join appstore by helping and consulting them. He also hosted several conference and workshop for iPhone and smartphones including Android, Windows Mobile.

I wish iPhone launches in Korea soon. It will be one of key milestones to open mobile market in here and increase Korean-made applications in mobile world.

1. Another process is made for a process. (There is not to do any more.)
2. Only CEO is speaking on senior meeting. (CEO blames someone to talk.)
3. No one thinks about new business. (All pressed by urgent business. It’s always.)
4. New business are always hushing up. (CEO is not interested in them.)
5. Ranking is down from second to below third in the market. (Heroes are needed in emergency.)
6. Internal competition is bitter than competitors in the market. (Everyone thinks themselves rather than company.)
7. When a strategy was failed, it finds victim in internal. (Everyone thinks I have to survive.)
8. Toilet is not clean. (Insufficient loyalty to the company?)
9. Everyone believe problems will be solved when CEO was changed. (Foundational problems still remained.)
10. It’s increased that employees want to back to school. (In fact, they want to move another company.)
11. Small reward programs are raised continually. (All medicines prove useless.)
12. Meeting schedules are over half day in everyday. (It has to make a piece of work.)
13. Employees blames there are rare educational programs. (How to find themselves?)
14. Communication with instant messaging despite of near person. (It’s tired to face-to-face.)
15. When idea is suggested, someone comments “Is there another company to do?” (Although creativity is the motto of a company.)
16. A manager often says “I have no authority to do.” (Because all rights reserved in CEO.)
17. Cigarette butts are increased in smoking room. (Boring or painful.)
18. A thickness of report paper is heavier and thicker. (a formality overwhelms contents.)
19. There are many people folding their arms in meeting. (It means I hate to listen.)
20. When CEO(Manager) is absent, everyone is active. (Everyone feel cheap in normal.)

If your company is applied in from 15 to 20 items, it’s very risk, you’d better go out company.
from 10 to 14, risky, you have to request the change.
from 6 to 9, normal, but you’d better monitor.
below 5, it’s good.

How about your company?

You can see it simple demo.

If you have GPS enabled device, geolocation returns your location directly to web sites. This is very useful in mobile web service to find coffee shop, restaurant and friends via iPhone and PDA with GPS. But, if you don’t have this kind of device, Firefox sends your information to Geolocation service providers as like Google and get your position from its server.

Firefox doesn’t save your information or send them to any other 3rd party. If you grant to get your position, your location informations may be sent to your web site as well Google’s geolocation server. But, Firefox also doesn’t send the informaton of web site that wants to get your position to Google.

Firefox user can change default setting for Geolocation service from Google to another 3rd party that supports W3C Geolocation APIs. You type “about:config” in address bar and change “geo.wifi.uri” from “https://www.google.com/loc/json” to another. Now there is no services to do.

For more information, please refer to Geolocation in Firefox

There is my concern for privacy. I knew there was a heavy privacy discussion in WWW2009 and refer to Privacy Diffusion on the Web: A Longitudinal Perspective that shows Google has been the strong collector by their family’s cookie and javascript.

Google’s Geolocation service means that Google can collect and organize user’s information related to position such as GPS position, personal profiles such as address, mobile information to get correct IP-address database. In my experience, the user profile can make probabilistic database between IP address and real address. Google can be real big brother?

Recently how to find good feeds is very important to me. Now I’m studying in Ph.D course and one of my professors focused on this issue and made feed search engine so called Feedmil.com. I used this for a month in closed beta and found some good feeds in my favorite topics.

Feedmil.com is a long tail of feeds to find good feeds for given topics. It analyzed millions blog feeds in the world and classified by popularity, quality, relavance and blog media type such as podcast, video, photo and micro blog (twitter) and social media(Facebook) and so on.

The search process itself can be refined by way of a provided slider that will let you set a popularity range from “Surprising” to “Well-known”. By this way, you will have a chance to check feeds that few people have heard about, and you can also discover popular feeds that for some reason or the other you had failed to notice before.

Feeds exist in everywhere in social network sites such as Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed as well as blog. Feedmil’s approach is similar with Technorati’s, but it focused only feeds that easily can be tracked.

Youtube is not exception. It was opened in one year ago with promotion of Steve Chen, co-founder of Youtube, visited Korea. During one year, Youtube seems nice growth but, it still struggles amang Korean big players.

In last year, online video market was dramatically changed in Korea. Video startups such as Pandora.tv and Mncast.com have been pressed by high cost to manage servers and network traffic because of high quality video upload and download over 700kpbs.

At last, Mncast.com shut down their service in December and doesn’t reopen it, so is getting claims by users. It seems to be caused by debt for CDN(Content delivery network) company. Daum tvPot(30%) is fast-growing in this market, and Pandora.tv(18%) slows down. Cyworld video(12%) also slow changed to get market share. Naver video(9%) is not invested in this area despite of many visiting members. Youytube Korea(9%) was not changed from Jan to Dec.

Daum has 30% market share and it has 11 million playback per day and 200 million page view per month. You can guess how big is online video market. The problem is how to deduce cost and make a money in Korean tough market in ultra-high broadband environment.

(Thousand Korean WON)

NHN has two business properties of Naver.com (search portal) 70% including search and display advertisement and Hangame.com (online game) 30% based on user-charged game service.

Myspace was launched Korean version in very enthusiastically in Apr. 15th, 2008. Chris DeWolfe, Myspace CEO who was visiting Korea, delivered a keynote at several places. Also, Miss. Sung Lee was assigned to VP in Asia Pacific region. She was one of Daum’s founding members, so it was very expected aggressive approach against Cyworld, Korean #1 SNS service.

But, it took just one year to decide to close Korean version. By notice of Myspace, user’s contents will be maintained in English version. Myspace has still local versions of Japan, Indian, Australia and New Zealand in Asia-Pacific region. It seems only for Korean version to be closed. Tough market in Korea.

On the other hand, Facebook just opened Korean localization group and translation was almost completed with over 1,500 members. It slowly grows up!

Update. Techcrunch reports MySpace Struggles In Korea, Shuts Down Regional Office.

Naver has still dominated 75% market share and reached 10 times profit compared with Daum’s. According to Comscore’s report, NHN was also #5 search engine in the world.

But, Daum caught up Naver slowly and maintained 20% share from August, 2008. On the contrary, Yahoo! Korea and Empas.com(a branch of Cyworld) was slowly down. Google Korea still struggled in Korean market with below 1.5% share.

Overtaking market share by #2 player is very hard in online business in general. But, Daum had some benefit from Korean political situation by focusing on online debate service named “Agora”. Internet users enjoyed political debates rather than in Naver.com for issues such as US beef and Minerva scandal.

In addtion, Daum’s efforts to lead user-participation has been aggressive rather than Naver’s. It acquired a Korean encyclopedia and its license and donated it to Wikipedia. Some users and Daum have been proceeding with Knowledge Sharing Project since then.

The Rules

• Link to your original tagger(s) (see above) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.

Seven Things for me

1. The reason to use Internet in first was to get examples from Wolfram Research Institute that made very good software Mathematica. Actually I majored in Geology and Physics in minor. When I studied differential equation in 1994, I found Mathematica book printed email address info@wri.com to get demo files. So I wanted to get email address scyun@pusan.ac.kr in my college. Thanks, Wolfram!
2. I was a student to become Creation scientist who believe there are scientific evidences of young earth created by God. The talk.origins was the most favorite newsgroup for me and joined voting to make sci.bio.palentalogy (succeeded) and talk.catastrophism (failed). As well my first paper was published as a title of “Creation Chronology based on so-called Viewpoint Hypothesis” in senior as the youngest author in Journal of Integrated Studies in 1995.
3. My first trip abroad was Dallas, Texas to present my poster paper in AAPG annual convention in 1997. I just shocked cultural difference and scale of continent. Especially I enjoyed southern style party with rock-n-roll band putting on cowboy hat in closing day. I cannot forget this memory.
   
4. I have the first XML 0.9 specification with red covered short paper. In my first trip in US, I also attended World-wide Web Conference 1997 in Santa Babara. In small booth of Sun Microsystems, it was distributed. It’s one of memorial papers in my life and web history.
   
5. Actually my first job for Mozilla was to contribute Mozilla 1.0 Korean version in 2002. But, the story goes way back to 1998. I was made Mozilla Korean page and let others know my job in i18n newsgroups. However, long milestone period failed to me.
6. My Korean blog has 6 years old in this year. I started it to arrange my columns in Mar. 27th in 2003. Now Feedburner reader reached 9,000 counts with 1,000 articles. My articles were tagged in order of Web 2.0, Firefox, Google, Daum, Web Standards and Microsoft.
7. I was the first founder Internet music broadcasting in Korea, name of Nine4u.com. (now it shut down.) It was one of top 50 Internet radios in the world by Timecast.com. It was my first job in this industry and very enjoyable time to do with my wife who majored in music composition. If you’re interested in Korean wave(Hanryu), you can refer to Pops Goes to Korea by Mark James Russell.

The Tagging

• Greg Stein - He is one of my respectable open source gurus and he lived in facebook now.
• Laurent Haug - Handsome, cool and passionate French guy. If you meet him, you cannot help falling into him.
• Raju Bitter - Technical architect with focus on multimedia portals and the semantic Web.
• Changwon Kim - He became buzz man by blogging first Korean acquisition of Google.
• Taewoo Danny Kim - Danny is the first full-time blogger in Korea and web 2.0 evangelist.
• Trustin Lee - He is one of the most skilled-up open source developers as a young member of Apache foundation.
• Finally I want to tag me again in Korean blog to extend to Korean bloggers.

It seems that someone don’t want to accept this fact even though Mr. Obama had the great victory in this year. His election of US president is very meaningful not only in his skin color but also democracy in the Internet. Many people helped him with online participation and campaign as like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

I remembered South Korea staked a claim to be the most advanced online democracy on the planet with Mr. Roh, Moo-hyun of a president who styled himself as the first leader fully in tune with the internet in 2003.

He just graduated a commercial high school and didn’t study in college and US before election of president. But, he just passed bar examination and became human rights lawyer. Also someone didn’t wanted to accept him as a president and the South Korean National Assembly voted to impeach Roh Moo-hyun for illegal electioneering and incompetence charges.

Obama and Roh is very similar cases to overcome their handicap background and make web based democracy. As like Mr. Roh, I guess Obama will be hard to do his job in economic crisis. Good luck, Mr. president!

1. Making culture of online social controversy and problems (Daum Agora was a playground user-participated debate in US beef import, economic crisis etc. As well malicious comments, rumors, libel on news articles and bulletin board made many social effects for famous star’s suicide and defamation of character.)
2. Governmental internet regulation over freedom of expression (Government strengthens monitoring obligation, real identity in web site and the introduction of a law of online contempt etc.)
3. Personal journalism and its growing influence (Fast growing of bloggers, Live news in candlelight protest, Online expert called Minerva etc.)
4. Internet presidential election Ohmaba opening president 2.0 Era (”the Internet led the most powerful tool for change”)
5. Economic crisis reflected in the Internet industry (Poor business performance in 2008)
6. Big connections between wireless and broadband companies (SKT + Hanaro Telecom and KT + KTF)
7. IPTV was started (IPTV operator selection including KT, SK Broadband and LG Telecom with real-time TV broadcasting service over IP network)
8. Mobile Internet of the global competition ignition (Apple iPhone’s sensation, Google released Android Phone, Symbian acquired by Nokia)
9. Acceleration open wireless Internet network (SKT - opening promise of the merger subject network, LGT OZ and full browsing service, the abolition of WIPI controversy, High-end smart phone such as T-Omnia Enabled phones)
10. Strengthening crackdown on illegal copyright (Three-strikes copyright law including site blocking, increasing a special judicial crackdown on illegal web sites by the police and prosecution, copyright infringement lawsuits and settlement by law firm)

As you know, some of guys made “Open Web Asia” work group gathering Asian bloggers to write their own market such as China, Korea, Japan and others. In October, the international conference also was held in Seoul, Korea. I respects these efforts to spread Asian activities to world because this blog also has same purpose.

But, I felt it’s very hard to do that. According to the statistics of compete.com, Most of representative blogs have very low attention from global readers although CK’s blog had a temporary popularity by Google’s buying his company. They have almost 1,000~3,000 unique visitors per month.

Recently I read a story of cultural collision about Silicon Valley and Europe between Michael Arrington and Loic Le Meur caused by LeWeb08’s Gilmore Gang panel. Though the controversy was focused on work-life balance, I think major point was the size of market. Valley has very high density of workaholics and money for one US market.

On the contrary Europe is very different market with different nations and languages although it seems like one market. Still the success in US doesn’t mean the success in global. (Myspace, Facebook still are based on US.) Most of Valley success stories are not global success.

I think Europe has still important possibility despite of claiming by Mike for their work culture rather than US. CrunchVision shows up Europe has meaningful numbers of startups. But, Asian is very small yet and it proves that it’s very hard to pay attention to Asian market. Here is the source of trouble to continue my blogging.

Korean twitter, me2day’s application is very excellent and fantastic developed by ias.

Also Daum’s tvPot - video sharing service also was released too. You can see Korean top playing video from iPhone tvPot player. The tvPot is Korean #1 video service property right now.

Fortunetly Korean govenment decided to finish WIPI regulation from 1th, April 2009. Although KTF, one of telecommunications company in Korea has tried to launch iPhone with Apple, it must be delayed to April in next year.

Some of iPhone developers made small programs as like Korean subway and dictionary for Korean iPhone touch users. But, we must wait for official iPhone release in here. This situaltion is one of a deep disgrace as the largest broadband country in the world.

I searched new web services except big portals and gathered them again. Over 70 sites were made from 2007 to 2008. Compared with Silicon Valley, it’s very small.

I’ll make a brief introduction for most of new services with above logos. You can see first logotype in May 2006 too.

FaceWorthy
FaceWorthy is a social discovery network that allows you to upload photos and gain recognition. Show your best through photos and get people to vote for you. If you collect lots of votes, you get to access special features, and may even earn money.

It is not designed for shy people but here for people who are passionate about expressing themselves and communicating with others. It is for people who have healthy desire to show who they are and get people’s recognition and understanding.

StoryBlender
StoryBlender is an online collaborative video production platform where people can work together to “blend” their media for rich, interactive storytelling. Story Blender CEO Hyoung Yong Joon is the original founder of Cyworld, which is South Korea’s first and most popular social networking community.

StoryBlend’s online editing tool lets users create videos by “blending” images, sound, text, and video clips. When users have created new video blends they can then share it with their friends and the StoryBlend community. (See Techcrunch 40 presentation.)

MusicShake
MusicShake is a Korea-based online music creation service developed and distributed by SilentMusicBand Corp that provides music composing solutions aimed at the general public without previous musical knowledge or expertise. The service lets users create personalized, professional quality music using various tools and pattern-combination methods.

They hope to meet the growing demand for customized ringtones and personalized music that mobile phone users and Internet users have for adding personalized creativity to their personal blogs, websites and social network pages. (See Techcrunch 40 presentation.)

Pagii
Pagii in one of social network sites where you meet new friends around the world. Users can make stylish and creative web pages about anything you like and upload and share your photo with friends, family and oter people and browse and search new friends and enjoy fun activities with a cute pet and talk and play with oter people in Pagii Forum.

It also offers “Friend Feed” is where users can check out their friends’ activities on Pagii. It is based on the most recent actions user’s friends take on the site, including photo uploading, page update, commenting, friending, status update, etc. It has normal social network functions.

PlayTalk
PlayTalk is another microblogging cum social network service inline with Twitter and Jaiku. However, instead of being limited to a mere 140 characters, PlayTalk gives you a more expansive 250—thus you need not limit your post to merely what you ate, you can also throw in a few details about the garnish.

Users can also choose to post photos in addition to text. The service works with mobile phones, iPhones, SMS and MMS. PlayTalk is available in English, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Messages may be tagged according to the content of the post e.g. usual, think, food, culture, sports and games. They may be kept private, for friends only, or available to the public. Posts are dated and time stamped. Networks contribute to the site’s interactive features; there are lounges for different countries, colleges, and high schools.

Papree
Papree is a simple tool to collect interesting pictures on the web. By using ‘Papree button’, users can collect any picture on the web with a single click that is really easy and quite fun to use.

There are gazillions of beautiful pictures out there, so start collecting all the pretty pictures you find. Paprize button is a kind of bookmarket that lets you collect any pictures on the web with a single click. Whenever you find a picture you like on the web, simply click Paprize button.

Sketchpan
Sketchpan is an open oline drawing community site where anybody can participate and share their pictures and animations made by drawing tools. It provides a canvaspan that users can draw, modify pictures with simple method and animationpan that make movie by order of drawing action.

If you share your drawing contents in public, someone can modify yours in togetherpan that lets you utilize collaborative artwork as a team. You can sell this artwork in shoppan too. It’s similar with Oekaki tool. The “pan” means drawing palette.

I decided to restart blogging with new prospects not to cover only Korean news that treats less important relatively. I regretted topics were limited in myself in this blog. There have been my own thoughts about global IT news, but I didn’t treated them. Also I has been interested in open source, open standards and open web too.

I’ll cover these topics related with Korean Internet culture although my English writing is very poor. If you’re my old readers in my blog, please encourage me.

Thanks.

Channy

With my lovely children in beautiful Jeju beach in this summer

They have developed Tattertools as an open source software under GPL and developed and sold Tistory.com to Daum - now Tistory became one of top 20 properties in Korea. Before this acquisition, TNC are preparing Textcube.com resembling Wordpress.com. Surely its success is based on philosophy of open and user-participation service model.

After announcement of acquisition, there are two prospects 1) recovering a lack of local search power by offering new blogging service, 2) giving synergy effects to blogger.com in dull compared with Wordpress and Sixapart’s excellent blogging functions.

But, many Korean people disappointed to read interview of Google Korea in ZDNet Korea. Ms. Jung of Google Korea said “The purpose of TNC acquisition is just for empowering search technique and there is no relationship with increasing blog contents and not to confirm whether the new blog business will be started or not”. They confessed its acquisition just absorbed the man power into Google.

Google has acquired many companies with rich cash. There are successful cases as like Keyhole for map service, Youtube for video contents, whereas some of them were disappeared or depressed as like Dodgeball, Jaiku and Zingku.

Three companies were a promising social network service with mobile capability, especially Jaiku was only competitor against Twitter. But, founders of Dodgeball were disappointed to Google and left their company and Jaiku and Zingku didn’t get registration any more after shopping by Google.

Measuremap.com was closed after “buying famous UI expert, Jeffry Veen” who recenlty left Google again. Feedburner also shows a downward trend that didn’t have offered own advertisement service (FAN) since May in this year. It is a matter of course how weird Blogspot.com is now.

There is a common point that Google is not successful to grow social communication and content-generating after buying services. According to Google’s mission to gathering all of informations for universal access, services based on social activities will be a sad lot. To so called “Information addict” such as Google, social messaging of gossip and small talk may not be treated as an information.

Short messages and blog comments are classified by garbage not to be indexed. It means social communication service may be excluded in the order of priority of Google. But, I knew Google has given efforts to build open platform for social network and communication such as Open Social. But, If Twitter or FriendFeed are acquired by Google, there will be high possibility that they become Google’s another dead ducks.

The Web is not only composed by “information”, which it has been made by human and “communication” called by the media power is one of important part of Web. I think it is a sole vulnerable point of Google. TNC was very hopeful startups for us. It depends on Google that their vague possibility becomes the success case that catches local big players such as Naver and Daum that have a great power of user-generated contents.

So Gmarket and Internet Auction eBay’s South Korean unit, when combined would control 87.2 percent of the local online retail market. You may wander this makes anti-trust issue for existence of big player with exclusive market share.

For your understanding, online shopping was divided into two categories of retail (B2C) and auction(C2C). Internet Auction was started from C2C and Gmarket was did from B2C as the Interpark’s branch. But, nowadays it’s hard to be inseparable with both because of existence of personal power sellers from auction market. In fact, Gmarket has invaded Internet Auction’s share.

The KFTC said in a statement that it will approve the deal under the condition that the companies ban themselves from raising sales commissions for the next three years and limit increases in ads and other fees to below the local inflation rate. Despite concerns over the impact on the country’s C2C market, the KFTC approved the deal as most Internet-based markets are easily accessible and new competitors may emerge at any time in online markets.

eBay is now authorized to buy a 36 percent stake in Gmarket from Interpark and it plans to further boost their ownership in the company through purchases in the stock market. Gmarket’s major stock owners are Interpark with 29.49% and its CEO, Mr. Ki hyung Lee with 7.48% and Yahoo! Korea 9.1%.

Gmarket generated $35.6 million in profit on $238.2 million in revenue last year, whereas Internet Auction did $10.3 million in profit on $182.4 million in revenue last year too. Internet Auction was already acquired by eBay in Feb. 2001 and it has been almost exclusive players in C2C market before rapid growth of Gmarket from 2002 to 2005.

I just researched iPhone price plan in the world including, USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan and France with similar price plan. Canadian’s is very expensive rather than other countries. Especially Australian Orange offers pre-paid iPhone 3G(8G) in about 900 USD because only monthly contraction is illegal in this country.

You can refer iPhone 3G World Price Plan Comparison Chart by me. I hope to get iPhone 3G in south Korea soon.

Also I attended BarCamp Miami and presented “Why not Web 2.0 in Korea?” that explains no boom-up status of Web 2.0 in Korea and why you check out Korea continually.

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Some people already knows Naver and Cyworld, but there is no famous successful startups although Korea has the highest broadband network and most wired people. You can see my presentation in slideshare.net too.