People said Korea is a grave of famous global companies such as Wal-mart, Nokia Carrefour, Nestlé,and Google. MySpace also quits their business in here.

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.

NHN announced earning surprise of 2008 year with increasing over 30% sales and income compared with 2007. According to corporate earning presentation, the total sales in 2008 reached 8.6 hundred million US dollars and net income did 2.6 hundred million US dollars. It was just discounted because of weaken Korean won.

(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 Korean version officially will be closed in Feb. 18th. According to news media, Korean branch was managed by Fox Interactive, but it will be shut down in Korea too.

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.

Daum, the #2 largest Internet portal in Korea gains 20% share in Korean search market. As you know, Korea is one of Google failed countries against local search engine. Google is still behind others in Russia, the Czech Republic, Korea, China and Japan. Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Baidu and Yahoo! Japan are all the leaders in each of these nations respectively.

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.

7 things is very popular posting relay. I’m very happy to join this by Gen Kanai was tagged me.

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.

I read US Republicans who are vying to lead the national party offered a mix of reactions Saturday to the decision by one candidate for the job to mail a holiday music CD including the song “Barack the Magic Negro.”

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!

The Korea Internet Association was released top news of Korean Intetnet industry in 2008.

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)

My blog has been very long silence and its rare posting will be sorry for my “thankful” readers. Although I declared restarting of blogging, I could not keep my promise. One of reasons is still to focus my Korean blog. Another is because of low attention for Korean market from global audiences.

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.