Random Musings

First, congrats to Chester and Chang and the entire TNC/Textcube team!

Secondly, congrats to Google Korea for making such a smart buy.

Chang announced the acquisition of TNC by Google Korea today on his blog. When I was in Seoul in March, both Chester and Chang demoed their product for me and all I kept saying was, “Wow, this is better than Wordpress!” which is the blogging platform I use here on this blog.  I even wrote up a short piece about it here and told by buddy Om to check it out.

I am not sure if Google will roll it out internationally, but I can say it is a first-rate platform that can hold its own against Moveable Type and Wordpress.   Also, I think this bodes very well for the Korean startup market.  In many ways, innovation in the Korean start-up market has been stifled because of the lack of good exit opportunities and the dominance of Naver and Daum.  This move by Google will not only attract the attention of other international tech and media companies to the innovative work in Korea, but it will hopefully encourage a new generation of entreprenuerial coders in Korea who thusfar think that working at Naver is the best thing for their careers.

Congrats guys!

My friends in Korea are doing an amazing job putting together the first pan-Asia web conference - Open Web Asia ‘08.  The speaker list looks great. The timing is perfect as many US web companies are clamoring to get into Asia and as Asian web companies are starting to eye the US market.

If you plan on being around Asia in October, I would say this is a must attend event.   Also, side note on the location - there is a casino there for you gambling VC types;)

finally! someone writes a good post about social networks in asia (tho i do have to say, I think qq is more an IM client, even tho it is an IM client on crack).

as i have been discussing the future of soompi and the potential for growth in the asian market with a lot of really smart people in the valley, i have been amazed with how little people know about the largest internet market in the world! social network services in asia are for the most part profitable. that, in and of itself, is a phenomenon worth studying.  also, is virality a cultural by-product there? or is a result of product development? these are all questions that could have major impact on how we do business here.

well, go read the post - its got some great insight. in the meantime, i will keep doing my research on the matter:)

my buddy nick douglas just did an article on soompi.com, digg.com and colbertnation.com over on gawker. funny article about how all three online communities are battling it out on the TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People polls for our respective champions. personally, i love everyone in the top 5, but i have to go with the one my site is rooting for:) that would be rain…for those of you that don’t follow korean pop charts;) but it is an interesting point about how mobilized online communities can yield massive results online.

one of the cool companies i previewed in the latest episode of the gigaom show is olaworks, a facial recognition software company based in seoul, korea.  i stopped by their office while i was in seoul and saw a demo, played with a mobile phone that had their software and talked shop with the team.

founded by a very bright engineer from KAIST, junghee ryu, the team has been together since 2006. they have spent the past two years building a kick ass product that works better than anything i saw at techcrunch 40.  yet, since they are so far from silicon valley, no one is familiar with them. names like riya and viewdle are more common place, but i do think the guys at olaworks have an edge on our SV natives in terms of tech, though they may be lacking in terms of business development.

this raises the question - how should overseas start-ups go about getting a foothold in the US market? do you go for the US bloggers first? try to partner with a good strategic US partner? open an office? hire white guys? or gals? the options are many, but any decision must obviously be influenced by the product, target consumer, natural viral strengths or disadvantages of the product, the team…  however, i do think it is important to get people on the ground in the market you want to conquer, especially when you need to win over the tech folks.  the speed of development and business and the vocabulary changes fast here.  and it is very easy to fall behind.

well, with news that competitor viewdle announced a new round of funding today, i hope olaworks makes their grand entrance into the international stage sooner rather than later!