BlogTalk 2009 was successfully finished with over 60 international attendees. We enjoyed good presentations from various areas as well warm weather and good meals.

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I spent the whole summer making good conference, Blog Talk Asia 2009 as I posted before. On temporary retirement from office, I’m studying in Ph.D course in SNU and my lab is organizing this conference too.

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.

According to Rankey.com, one of Korean Internet survey services, it estimates that Twitter reached 0.6 million unique visitor per month in Korea. Especially its growth is remarkable from May to July.

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.

Google has innovated online geospatial service as like Google Maps with high quality satellite images, street view, oceanic exploration and Google Earth with 3D images and SketchUP in global scale. They were brilliant ideas and many people were impressed.

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.

There was big news of partnership between Yahoo! and Microsoft. After the war of acquisition between Jerry Yang and Steve Ballmer, Yahoo got new woman CEO Carol Bartz and she finished remained problems that everyone minds.

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.

Asiajin updated Japanese equivalent of western web services. You may know Japan and Korean are very different from western. It’s different between Japan and Korea too. I listed up them to compare with Japan and western. Leave a comment if you want to know more or think one of these attributions is off.

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 and Blog Talk 2009 will be held in Jeju, Korea in one week from 15th to 18th September. I engaged in both conferences as one of supporters.

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.

Despite of launching iPhone in world wide before 2 years, Korean people still cannot use it. The WIPI was why iphone 3g couldn’t be launched in Korea. It was closed Korean national standard - “WIPI” that must be installed in all mobile devices to personal retails. So Apple rejected this duty for providing iphone, but fortunately Korean Communication Commission (KCC) decided to absolve from an obligation from April in this year.

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.