Random Musings
the korea times just ran an article on soompi.com. soompi was started by my amazing business partner susan many years ago as a tribute to korean-pop. and over the years, it has really grown into one of the largest asian american communities - something of which susan should be very very proud. the article essentially describes the origins and growth of the site and summarizes the current reach of the community - so read on if you can read korean! dae-han-min-kook!
i’m heading up to the presidio today so i can attend the summit organized by the team over at get satisfaction. customer service has always been an unconscious reason why i support the brands/companies/products that i use, but i have become more aware of this fact recently due to the activities of the good folks at get satisfaction.
example: last weekend, i had to book a trip down to LA. i have flown virgin maybe 4 times r/t now to LA and, although i like their in-flight entertainment system, it wasnt working in on 50% of the flights, maybe 3 of the flights were delayed and when i had to rebook one flight, the woman i spoke with on the phone was very unaccomodating and the rebooking of one leg of a trip cost me more than the whole trip should have been! so i decided to book on southwest since i needed to be on-time and southwest has always been good to me with regarding to flight changes, etc.
lucky i did that. as soon as i booked and received my confirmation email, i realized in my late night fatigue, i had book the flight in the reverse order (departing from LA, arriving in SF). but no worries with SW! i called and explained the situation and they immediately cancelled my reservation, gave me a full refund and i was able to rebook (in the right order!) all within ten minutes. i <3 southwest!
my friend yongjoon just sent me a blog post from a Korean blogger/journalist who just caught an episode of the GigaOm Show and realized that i am Korean, so he wrote a post. pretty sweet. makes me happy to learn that tech folks in Korea are slowly learning about the show. since the show began, i have been approached by a number of Korean tech entrepreneurs who are happy to meet other Koreans out here in Silicon Valley. what is interesting to me is that despite the fact that the korean web experience is traditionally 3 to 5 years ahead of the US web experience (what we call web 2.0 here happened in korea maybe 5 years ago), we haven’t seen many successful korean start-ups translate into international success stories. i guess we will have to work on that, now won’t we!