KoreaCrunch

Daum Communications Corp. decided to give iPhone 3GS to all employees as a gift. Daum.net is 2nd internet portal site and owner of Lycos.com in US.

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.

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.