Nowadays the world of web browsers are definitely different compared with the situation of early 2000s to be dominated by IE6. Non IE browsers already reached 40% and over 50% in some European countries by Net Applications.

I surveyed what browser is dominant in each countries from StatCounters, log-based statistics from web counters. First of all, the red area (especially old USSR) is dominated by Opera browser(40~50%) including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

(If you want to enlarge, please click the image.)

In these countries, Firefox’s share is also high(30~40%), so IE’s share very low(10~15%). I guess it caused for people in this area not to prefer US products and have low broadband penetration. In case of Russia, Yandex has overwhelmed Google in search engine market.

But, in so called the East-European bloc, Mozilla Firefox (orange area) are dominant with 40~50% share especially in German, Poland, Czech Republic and Romania. It’s interesting that Opera browser share of Norway is just 6% despite of the home of Opera. On the contrary, IE still share high percentage in western Europe as like UK, France and Spain rather than Firefox and Opera. It means people in emerging market tend to choose the latest web browser.

In Asia, Firefox share average 10~15% in IE dominant area, but Indonesia, Philippines and Malaysia is very high Firefox share. In Africa, some countries is also very high as like Cameroon, Senegal and Kenya. It means Windows OS was supplied by overseas economic aid and pirated products, but the emerging market is also important in this area as like Europe.

Good alternatives as like Firefox give benefits by offering opportunity of choice for people in emerging market of Africa, South America and Asia.

This is the new entrepreneur internship of twelve teams to be interested in making new startup and presented their proto-type products and business plan to over 150 people in venture capital and Internet industry.

It includes various teams with good ideas: Dezine.by (user-generated t-shirt manufacturing), Onoffmix (hosting and management of events), Coordinator (WPF based UI-theme production engine), openFavor.it (social network personalization), PIC&Go (social e-commerce), StickPoster (location based social network), Cublic (Advertisement for coffee shops), Enter (online book service for blind people), APPtle (automatic iPhone app generator), Y-Road (secure baby carriage), TreePlanet(social planting application) and Quik (enterprise social networks).

Especially, Coordinator (WPF based UI-theme production engine) was excellent in technical aspects and can be good product. You can contact its developer, kimdaewook@witstudio.net directly.

Coordinator by wit from eundol on Vimeo.

TreePlatnet is iPhone application to support green planet. Users can plant a tree in iPhone and it can be done in real world donated by NGOs, companies and governments. You can contact treeplanet.k@gmail.com directly.

What is Primer Group?
There were several startup incubating program in the past as like Litmus by Softbank(venture capital) and Neoply by Neowiz (Internet company). The remarkable thing of this program is managed by top five entrepreneurs with successful story.

It includes Mr. Byungkyu Jang(Bluehole), co-founder of Neowiz and founder of Chutnoon, Mr. Jaewoong Lee and Taekkyung Lee, co-founder of Daum.net, the #2 largest internet company, Young Song, Founder of NComputing & Booga Ventures in Palo Alto and Mr. Dougguen Kwon, founder Inicis and Initech. They are well known successful exit story or stock owner over 3~10 million dollors.

So it is different from another startup incubation and means real startup eco-system begin in earnest in Koreal. In this aspects, people in this industry expected their activities and investment.

Globally it will be essential for web developers because the market share of non-IE browser reached over 50%. But, although Korea has been a situation of IE-monocluture under 2% share, the HTML5 are widely spreading into Korean web developers too. What happen in here?

iPhone, Android and mobile web
Last year, iPhone was released in Korea on December as almost final country. For several month, over 0.5 millions iPhone were sold and mobile Safari reached 1% market share in Korea. So there were many interests to support mobile web with HTML5.

As well, Samsung and LG pushed many Android devices against iPhone in local market as like Samsung Galaxy and LG Optimizer. Google Chrome is also good supporter for HTML5. It means HTML5 can be applied in the first development of mobile web.

Actually Korean mobile web has been under the fire because big telecommunication company dominated their wireless networks with their closed services. The iPhone was the first step to open their wireless network in real.

HTML5 open conference
It was held the first HTML5 Open Conference in Korea organized by Web Standards Korea and several communities on July 2th. 2010. Over 600 seat was sold in 24 hours after opening registration.

It covered the introduction of HTML5, new markup and webform, CSS3, Javascript APIs and mobile support by five speakers. You can see and download video files.

HTML5 free guide
As well, a Korean HTML5 Guidebook was written for web developers to learn basic concepts of HTML5 and to adopt it into the mobile web application in direct. It was made by five speakers of this conference too.

It has five sections of introduction, markup of HTML5, CSS3, HTML5 APIs and the mobile application development in iPhone. This book has 170 pages (A4 format) or 206 pages (Letter format). Now, you can download A4 printable size download HTML5 Guidebook under Creative Commons License.

In result, two HTML5 books were already released and some books are waiting translation including Introducing HTML5. Also several developer communities were made as like WebDevMobile and HTML5 user group.

As a HTML5 evangelist from 2007 in Korea, I’m very glad to see its real actions from web developers and expect more HTML5 based mobile web applications with good user experiences and it effects desktop web environment too.

Most of reaction in this story are “Wired is wrong” although it is just prediction. (Wired’s prescient was wrong in the past.). I want to argue this issue in several aspects and give my opinion in recent change in the Web world.

The Web goes Less Bandwidth
Especially it gave an extreme example of traffic chart that the Web has been declined because of video and p2p. As BoingBoing and NewYork Times indicated, the chart itself is misleading and is not proof of its argument.

The Web was always killed by another applications in terms of network traffic as like the push service, PointCast in early stage web, the streaming service, Real Player and Napster in mid-stage web and finally Skype and BitTorrent in right now.

As the Wired pointed out, the Web transferred the document based information written by HTML (CSS, Javascript and Images) over HTTP(80) protocol. It means its data is very small compared with compete applications. In recent, less data pieces have been transfered by Ajax technology, of course, user-generated videos were embeded as like Youtube and HTML5 video.

Chris Anderson is famous person, the creator of “Long tail” with the interesting chart presentation. But, in this case, it seems to be wrong.

Google is not the Web

Its main argument is the moving trend of ‘semiclosed’ platforms and business from the web: “This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.” in debate of Chris Anderson, Tim O’relly and John Battelle.

Certainly, there was such a trend to closed platform from Facebook to iTunes, as Chris said, which are ruled by Terms of Service and invisible to Google’s crawlers. But, most of the Web were always invisible and Google was a slave of internet potal sites in the early web. In the past, the internet portals as like Yahoo, Lycos and MSN gathered all of contents and ruled the Web.

Google’s success story was based on lots of the information diffusion by the users as like blogs, wikis and crowd-sourcing of links(PageRank) and keyword based searching intention in aspects of the business. Google’s fail is not dead of the Web.

Application vs. Document
Before the Web 2.0 era, the Open APIs of eBay, Amazon and Google were mostly closed to be offered only to contracted 3rd parties. In now, most of Data APIs are open in the Web protocol and makes the rich applications from desktop to mobile. As I said, Ajax technology enabled the data web based on user interactions. It means transactions of traditional Web documents has been decreased and frankly JSON is winner of the Web.

In 2007, Eric Schmidt already pointed out Web 3.0 will be “applications that are pieced together” - with the characteristics that the apps are relatively small, the data is in the cloud, the apps can run on any device (PC or mobile), the apps are very fast and very customizable, and are distributed virally (social networks, email, etc).

From Facebook to iTunes, most of the contents still delivered by Web framework either HTML or JSON and either web browsers or iPhone app (Over 80% iPhone apps are hybrid to the web contents).

The innovation was also made by Web browser vendors, which they made WHATWG in 2004 against W3C’s document Web and devoted to HTML5 for the smart web application. We still used the Web browser in iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android in the more rich Web environment.

In terms of technical aspects, the web framework was changed from MVC(model-view-controller) framework to transfer HTML documents composed of HTML, CSS and Javascript to user agent.

In HTML5 Era, the web application can be installed in user agent and communicate with the server for data pieces by Ajax and Web Socket.

It means actually Document Web was dead, but Web application will be long live.

Money: Sell or Broking
People said traditional business models are only two things: selling goods or broking it. Chris indicated the money left from the Web and followed AppStore, but Tim responded there still has been advertisement, eCommerce and subscription models in the opened Web.

Twitter sells user’s tweets to search engines and Facebook earned money from advertisement. Google will establish “Web Store” soon as well as iPhone users buy hybrid web apps in AppStore. I thinks Chris’s “Internet is long live” is right under Web framework in both technical and business aspects.

Diffusion or Concentration
In my viewpoint, the Web has been cyclic changes between diffusion and concentration as like Oscillating Universe Theory. It’s similar with Tim’s opinion “Open or Closed”. But. it’s little different in organic process of the Web itself.

Early web was born in diffusional properties with hyperlink of the document. Most of informations were distributed in global web servers. It means finding information is very hard and internet portals were raised in reaction. But, they concentrated all of Web contents in closed “CMS” in their platform. Another reactions are blog, wiki, video and Open APIs based web platforms (and ecosystem) in so called Web 2.0 in five years.

Chris’s argument is another reaction of concentration trends of sharing information in nowadays. But, I predict to reach a height of the diffusion trend by HTML5, mobile web and social media in five years. In next? It’s your turn.

Today he visited online communication team and sent his tweets himself and replied to several mentions by people. He wanted to type a keyboard by himself and enjoyed watching responses of people.

Some people told “Don’t tell a lie. Are you real?”, he replied “don’t suspect me. If it’s fake, it’ll be headline news” and uploaded a photo of him on tweeting.

Korean Twitter users are growing and reached over 100 millions. According to analysis of the tweet production, Japan is now No. 2, at 18 percent, while Indonesia has 10 percent of daily messages and South Korea has 2 percent.

Actually Presidential tweeting is not rare. In case of President Obama, he admitted in November 2009 that he had “never used Twitter”, which came as a disappoint to avid Twitterers–and his more than 3 million followers on Twitter.

But, he has sent his first Tweet on January 18, during a visit to the American Red Cross headquarters in D.C., the President finally posted his first Twitter update. Also Russian President Medvedev sendt his first tweet on @kremlinrussia_e at Twitter HQ in his U.S visiting on January. As well as, ex-Prime Minister Hatoyama was famous of Japanese Twitter top position.

Presidents seems to like Twitter to allow to contact with people directly whether it’s communication gesture or not.

But, Google noticed Textcube.com will be integrated to Blogger soon. Because two sites are completely different, in fact, it means that Textcube.com will be closed and user’s data must be migrated to Blogger.com.

Textcube.com was popular growing blogger platform and had many alpha bloggers in Korea. So there were over 200 comments and trackbacks and most of them were negative to Google’s unfaithful direction.

We have made innovative functions of Textcube.com and tried to move them to Blogger. For example, we played important part to make Blogger Template Desinger…. It is good example to contribute Blogger’s innovation and we want to offer efficient and useful services by concentrating on Blogger only… For smooth intergration, a new registartion of Textcube.com is closed in right now.

In fact, I guessed Textcube will be Google’s dead ducks as like Dodgeball, Jaiku and Zingku. But, many alpha bloggers supported Google’s decision and Textcube’s internalization because its platform is very excellent. Now they were disappointed and move to another services. (Actually Daum’s Tistory supports TTXML format and Textcube users can move their data to Tistory.)

It became another proof that Google is not successful to grow social communication and content-generating after buying services. 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 the most weak point of Google.

People believes iPhone sales will slow down with the launch of new smartphones like Samsung’s Android Phone but still expects the total number sold to reach 1 million this year. Because many people are waiting for new iPhone 4G device in June.

Ironically Safari users in Korea were increased about 10 times compared with 6 month before. The most Korean online news service, Media Daum reported web browser share: IE6 57.1%(-7.8%), IE8 21.2%(+12.9%), IE7 16.8%(-3.01%), Safari 2.54%(+2.15%), Mozilla Firefox 1.2%(+0.01%) and Google Chrome 0.96%(+0.34%). The number of Safari users caught up with Firefox’s and it became #2 web browser in Korea.

The move comes amid brewing competition between Google and NHN, Korea’s top internet search service, in the fast-growing mobile market in iPhones and Android phones. The government telecom regulator is considering requiring other handset makers and mobile operators to add Korean search services as options other than Google. Google is overshadowed by NHN’s Naver in the Korean market but is poised to catch up in the mobile arena on the back of the popularity of smartphones featuring it as the default search engine.

In addition, the government plans to adopt standard software to enable required security measures on iPhone and Android phone for mobile banking services. However, critics claim that the decision to pick a specific technology to control transactions over different mobile platforms is an ill-advised move, as it may eventually expose mobile users to a similar, shaky security environment experienced by computer users in the Microsoft-dominated desktop world.

Most of the people on the list will be of no surprise to veterans of the open-source world. Notables include Tim O’Reilly, Chris Messina and Jonathan Schwartz. But, surprisingly I was listed in there as rank of 17th.

In fact, it doesn’t mean that I’m the 17th famous person in open source industry. This survey is more about broadcast capability and less about influence and MindTouch already published the most influential in Open Source 2009 back in October. I think the individuals in the list carry a big megaphone and spread words with regular sharing information.

As a local person, I didn’t give an impact in the global world, but my effort has focused on Korean web industry based on the sprites of open source and open web with Mozilla’s mission. I humbled to be included in this list and thank you for my subscribers of over 1,000 in Koreacrunch and over 28,000 in Channy’s Blog as well as over 4,900 Twitter followers.

Today Google released Google Buzz, the Gmail based social messaging service. I think it’s quite fun and smart application and useful to share information within Gmail. But, how to move messages of Google Buzz in public to Twitter automatically?

There is a solution by Google Buzz APIs. It offered a feed for syndication, but the message was included in content area. So I made new RSS feed using a Yahoo! Pipes to transfer them to FriendFeed or Twitter. If you wan to do and have Google profile, the account of FriendFeed and Twitter, you can do this by as following steps.

1. Make a your new feed
You can go my pipe of Google Buzz Stream and input your Google account of your Buzz. If you click “Get as RSS”, you may get new RSS feed as a format of http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=d72af57d3ed302585a00bd9b67e850d6&_render=rss&id=googleid.

2. Add Custom RSS into FriendFeed
You can add Buzz messages to your FriendFeed stream by setting Custom RSS in services preference. If you do that, you can see Buzz messages in your FriendFeed.

3. Add Twitter publishing in FriendFeed
If you want to Buzz messages to publish into Twitter, you can add CustomRSS of Buzz in Advanced Twitter Settings.

Of course, Google Buzz is not limited in 140 characters, but you can show your status from Google to Twitter easily using open standards technology. Enjoy Google Buzz!

Hundreds of people began to stand in line from midnight in front of Jamsil Stadium in Seoul, waiting until 2 p.m. to get their iPhones — made available only to 1,000 people who raffled online for early purchases.

Some 60,000 people who made online preorders over the past week will have their iPhones delivered starting Saturday, said KT, South Korea’s second largest mobile carrier.

KT is so far the only mobile carrier in the country to clinch a deal with Apple to sell iPhones and related mobile services.

iPhones will be available to other buyers at KT shops starting Dec. 1th, the mobile carrier said. The 32-gigabyte iPhone 3GS costs US$341 for customers who subscribe with a monthly service fee of US$38 with 500MB data and 200 min free calling plan. Of course various optional plan were offered too.

As followings are pictures of scenes in launching day.

Linux’s Celebration for Windows 7 in Japan
Microsoft tried to torpedo the success of the Japan Linux Symposium by launching their Windows 7 product that same day. They even had setup a big promotion booth across the street from the conference center.

During a break, Linus Tobalds and Chris Schlaeger decided to make some fun of Microsoft and dragged him over there. When they arrived there, Linus was sold immediately on the product as you can see in the picture. At least that’s what the sales guy thought. He obviously had no idea who he was dealing with. But in the end Linus surprisingly did not buy a copy. Wise man!

Korean 777 Bloggers got promotional Window 7
In Korea, there was Windows 7 release party with 777 bloggers hosted by Microsoft Korea. Many bloggers requested to join there because it promised to give free Windows7 Ultimate. Most of bloggers thought “Windows 7″ box for sale.

But, it is just promotional Disc. written in not for resale and also 32bit only English version.

It was honest good, but got feeling of deceived.

Windows 7 Whopper with 7 patties
The Windows 7 Whopper consist of seven stacked beef patties that measure over 5 inches in height, and the whole thing costs an appropriate Â¥777 (or $8.55). It’s available for seven days only, completing the run of sevens.

There was popular news on top of Techmeme, but it’s hard to eat it despite of employee Microsoft Japan.

Still demo ghost in Japan?
On demonstration of Windows 7 touch function, Windows 7 was frozen. There’s no need for a translation here. A fail this epic speaks for itself and brings back fond memories of the classic Windows 98 fail. Enjoy. The laughs from the TV hosts are the best part IMHO.

Some people replied the monitor is made in China, but it’s still on demo ghost of the classic Windows 98 fail in Japan.

Windows 7 launched on Macbook Pro?
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was on NBC Today Show that is a morning news and entertainment program that airs on NBC, a big TV network here) to unveil “>Windows 7 on MacBook Pro in the background.

Adobe Photoshop is common marketing language in global as well as China.

Anyway, congratulation Windows 7 release!

I and my colleagues in web standards have been activities of NEAOSS working group 3 for 3 years and we closed our activities and summarized the status of China, Japan and Korea.

As following presentation was presented in 8th NEAOSS Forum in Tokyo.

The Status Of Web Interoperability And Activities In China, Japan And Korea

Of course, many issues still were solved yet as like Active-control based internet banking and e-commerce sites. But, for 3 years, many good signals were produced on three countries.

As following is the photo of Korean members: Hyeonseok Shin (Opera Software Korea), Channy Yun (Daum) and Hoon Cho (Dibidib)

Of course, iPhone hasn’t yet launched in South Korea. If it is released, this plan will be processed. Its plan includes 2 years guaranteed data plan. It was very big news in IT media and it about to make a big splash with its employees. As soon as iPhone launches, Daum plans to give away the highest spec iPhone 3GS to all of its employees (appx 1,000).

Daum already launched two applications for video-sharing and map services on Apple’s App Store and aggressively approached mobile web business, so all employees must be good at smartphone life as like iPhone.

We’re offering videos, photos and presentation for you in purpose of sharing information.

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Fortunately many people are interested in social web and media, so good talks were proposed to our conference and over 20 excellent talks were chosen from Europe, China, Japan, Australia and Korea. It covers social semantic web, social media and healthcare especially Twitter as a social communication. In Korean social web track, good social products will be presented by Korean major companies including Daum, NHN and Google Korea.

Above all things, we invited two keynote speakers with excellent insights in future of social media.

Dr. Issac Mao is a Chinese blogger, entrepreneur and social media researcher. He is Director of the Social Brain Foundation and a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He interviewed with New York Times and Guardian about criticism against “Chinese Green Dam”. In his talk of “Cloud Intelligence”, he will explore new social ecology – our shared intelligence and our collective future in the cloud.

Mr. Heonho Oh is also famous to found OhMyNews.com, the first online service of citizen journalism. He will talk about its future in innovative period of social media. He is heavy Twitter user in right now and so I contacted him via only Twitter’s direct messages. He accepted speaking via Twitter’s message too.

I know people are hard to journey because of global financial crisis. But, I’m sure that it will be good chance to meet and talk with both academic and industrial people in together. Forget beautiful nature in Jeju and co-located Lift Asia conference. You can enjoy both conferences with 320 USD at a time. If you want to be together, please check out practical informations right now because early bird is until Aug. 26th.

For Chinese, Jeju doesn’t require Korean VISA for temporal visiting and Jeju is one of favorite tour spot in Korea for Japanese. If you have doubt to go or not, please check our global speakers again.

Red line indicates me2day.net, a small Korean microblogging startup acquired by Naver in this year. In July, me2day caught up with Twitter’s traffic. What happened now?

As you know, Google and Facebook have very low user pools in Korea, also Twitter’s has been increased slowly in tech savvy community. As like abroad trends, Korean famous actors, politician and entertainers started to join Twitter.

A Korean famous figure skater, Yuna Kim @yunaaaaa) is representative with over 33,000 followers. There are many famous people as like Chanjin Lee, CEO of Dreamwiz @chanjin, Juha Kim, a famous news anchor and reporter @kimjuha, Junghun Park, a movie star @moviejhp with thousand followers in one day.

Liberal politicians also active in Twitter such as Hoechan Roh @hcroh and Sangjung Sim, @sangjungsim. Hyongo Kim, a chairman of Korean assembly @hyongo is also included.

It means the number of twitter celebrity is increased and general people joined Twitter to follow them. Especially fake celebrity is also popular for example members of TVXQ very famous Korea idol group in Asia area. @herojaejoong (Hero), @TVXQUKnow (U-Know), TVXQMicky (Micky), @dolphinking (Xiah), @MaxChangmin (MAX). Each accounts have over 10,000 followers, but it’s known that their accounts are not managed in official.

In most case, idol groups in Korea have been controlled by management company as like @BOA_usa or @WGsohee, one of Wondergirls.

It’s not good signal in viewpoint of me2day, so they contracted another Korean idol groups as like 2NE1 and G-dragon and starts to broadcast their normal lift via me2day and exposed me2day in search results of Naver.com. So it caught up with Twitter in this month.

In Korea, Twitter’s user is older than me2day’s too. I’m not sure whether Twitter will be successful against me2day with strong power of Naver or not. But, it’s sure Twitter crossing the chasm.

p.s. My twitter account is @channyun and @koreacrunch.

But, recently Korean web service made another remarkable map services in local scale. Daum and Naver invested many money to build these high quality service too.

Aerial Photography
Daum launched new map features “road view” and “sky view” on January in this year. The image of sky view is converted into high-resolution aerial photography, with the restaurant’s roof, driveway and the sea becoming impressively recognizable. Daum is believed to be spending over 20 billion won to develop the new service, collaborating with SamAh Aerial Survey for the aerial photos and Pix Korea for the street-level images.

Recently Daum also released Map API for 3rd party developers to want to adopt it in their services. You can feel very high resolution aerial photos too.

Panorama Photo
Naver also released panorama photo service for famous spots in Korea. It’s similar with Bird-eye of Microsoft Virtual Earth, but it’s possible to rotate 360 degrees for a look around.

Demo: Seoul N Tower, Mt. Halla

Indoor photography
Daum also released some of demonstration for indoor panorama view in specific building. Now you can see a campus of Sejong University.

If it is adopted in famous tour spot or educational resources in museum, it’s very excellent for people although it’s local based endeavor of online mapping service.

Most of news media wrote Yahoo! surrendered to Microsoft and Yahoo’s stock was down. In addtion Jason Calacanis wrote Yahoo committed seppuku today.

But, I think this partnership is very positive for sustainable survival of Yahoo! in long term. Yahoo has very strong properties as like mail, news, finance, entertainment and Flickr. If Microsoft acquired Yahoo in last year, I’m not sure whether most of Yahoo! service could go on not. This partnership is good for Yahoo’s employee although there are some of redundancies in part of Yahoo’s search technology. Ballmer also said this things in conference call.

Ballmer: The deal last year was tailored more towards an investor than an operator. This deal is different, not better. Less upfront payment, and definitely a higher TAC rate.)

Microsoft has strong competency in technology and channel sales, but Yahoo does in web based service that generates good search contents. Both CEO thought Yahoo’s flexibility is very important in future.

Bartz: When we talk about internal Yahoo search that is some of the innovation we are looking at doing. Paid inclusion we will decide on later. We have full flexibility on what to do inside our site. That is the important thing, there is a lot of value there to add search to our properties.
Ballmer: It was important to us to structure the deal to give Yahoo full flexibility (to add search to its services).

BTW, In Korea, Yahoo! Korea and MSN Korea is also minor under 5% (if it’s summed) as like Google Korea. Daum(23%) and Naver(72%) dominated Korean search market. But, in case of search advertise market, Overture has almost of them except Daum’s share of Google AdWords. Now Daum and Google’s contract will be finished in this year for three years. If Daum decides to back to Overture, Korean’s search AD market is Microsoft’s.

I) General web services
Google?
Naver

Wikipedia?
Wikipedia Korean (But, most people use Naver Dictionary)

Facebook?
Cyworld

Flickr?
No equivalent (most people used Cyworld‘s photo sharing.)

Digg?
No equivalent (startup? Mixsh? meta blogging site? Daum View, Allblog.)

LinkedIn?
No equivalent (rare business network but, startup? linknow and recruiting site has been developed as like Incruit.)

Twitter?
me2day (acquired by Naver)

Youtube?
Daum tvPot and Pondora.tv

Amazon?
Aladdin

delicio.us?
No equivalent (Daum and Naver were failed and ma.gar.in, a startup also was done.)

dooyoo (price comparison engine)?
Danawa (Now Naver and Daum focused on shopping gateway too.)

Netflix?
No equivalent (most people use VOD site and P2P sharing service as like Fileguri.)

Craigslist?
No equivalent (there is no culture for classifieds in Korea too.)

imdb (Internet Movie Database)?
No equivalent (Korean movie sites were failed now most information were stored in movie section of Naver and Daum)

Wall Street Journal Online?
ChosunIlbo (but, most korean consumed news in portal site in Naver and Daum)

monster.com?
Job Korea

Ebay?
Auction (branch of eBay)

Alexa?
KoreanClick

last.fm?
No equivalent (most of them offers paid music service.)

Technorati?
Allblog

Yahoo! Answers?
Naver Knowledge In

Zynga?
Hangame (It’s high competed market in Hangame, Nexson, Netmarble and Pimang)

II) Blogs
What is the Korean equivalent of Techcrunch?
No equivalent. Bloter offers similar service.

the Huffington Post?
No equivalent.

tmz.com?
No equivalent.

Boing Boing?
No equivalent.

Gizmodo?
No equivalent.

Engadget?
Engadget Korean

III) Web tools and software:
Gmail?
Hanmail, a branch of Daum service.

Google Docs and Spreadsheet
ThinkFree

Blogger?
Tistory, a branch of Daum service.

iTunes?
Melon and Bugs

BitTorrent?
clubbox

WordPress?
TextCube

How about think? If you want to add more sites, please let me know.

Lift Asia 09 will happen on 17th and 18th. The conference will be themed “Serious Fun!” and I look forward to welcome you in the spectacular Pacific shore for two days of incredible inspiration and networking. In last year of Lift Asia 08, many people felt this was a special event, offering some of the best ever social moments, incredible speeches and ideas never heard before, and unique networking opportunities with some of the most interesting people in the world.

Blog Talk 2009 will be held in 15th 16th in same place. It is also traditional European based conference continuing with its focus on social software, while remaining committed to the diverse cultures, practices and tools of our emerging networked society. You can submit just 1 page proposal to present your idea and thought till 31th. July.

Venue is very excellent. Actually I lived for 4 years in Jeju island via Google Maps, a famous Korean tour spot. Its nature is very beautiful and one of top world tour spots although people don’t know well.

Jeju is a volcanic island far from 130 km from the southern coast of Korea. The island contains the Natural World Heritage Site entitled Jeju Volcanic Island and Lava Tubes.

Mt. Hallasan, the tallest mountain in South Korea and a dormant volcano rises 1,950m above sea level and 360 satellite volcanoes are around all of island. You can feel different kinds of plants by level from subtropics to cold zone. (Volcanoes were already dead and not dangerous. They are covered by green glasses and trees with some of volcanic outcrops.)

It also has beautiful emerald colored beaches with black volcanic rocks and white sands. I have been in Miami beach in US, but both is almost similar except length of beach.

Recently Jeju island was listed in a finalist of New 7 wonders of Nature that includes top 28 natural spots in the world. If you visit Jeju via Seoul, you can also experience the 3rd. busiest routes in the world.

You can see many photos for Jeju and BlogTalk 08, Lift Asia 08.