Random Musings

interesting news from my friends at Daum. with the expiration of current-ceo Seok Jong-Hoon, the board has announced the appointment of their CFO into the CEO position. what does it mean when a web company places a CFO in the top dog position? is it a sign of maturity or weakness? daum has had an uphill battle against #1 ranked Naver, which accounts for the lionshare of search in korea, and has been actively exploring web 2.0 trends. over the past year, i have had the privilege of sitting down to dinner with outgoing ceo mr. seok during his last two visits in the US. on each occasion, i found him to be an intellectually curious and open minded executive who was carefully watching online trends. he communicated genuine interest in embracing user involvement in product, as evidenced by his push for more UCC-focused development.

i hope incoming-ceo Choi Sae-hoon exhibits a similar curiosity and passion about his products as Seok Jong-Hoon did and does not focus so much on revenue that it undermines the product and community. i am not against the idea of a CFO leading a tech company as i have seen a few other examples of CFOs successfully taking the helm, but more often that not, the CFO in question was a major tech geek from the start. so maybe we just need to find out, how much does mr. choi love his gadgets?

best of luck to the daum team and to Seok Jong-Hoon and Choi Sae-hoon!

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:)

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!

ok – i hope i do not get skewered for this posts…

one of the companies I met while in Korea was TNC – a Korean startup which offers an open source blogging platform called textcube (links in Korean). at the moment, they have not launched their hosted version, but i got to play with their downloadable version while i was in korea. after playing with their demo and getting a sample acct, i think it is actually better than wordpress and other US blogging tools.  but, given the head start that wordpress has and the fact that WP has such a large, dedicated community, it may be very hard for this company to make inroads in the english language market.

A few of the advantages:

• cleaner dashboard
• easier to integrate videos, photos and podcasts into post.  they have this incredible drag and drop feature which makes it super easy to bulk add photos, format the text around images, create slide shows, resize images, etc. the simplicity is beautiful.
• intuitive comment tracking system – structured like an email inbox, i think their comment UI system will make it easier for novice users to become comfortable with interaction with readers and other blogs via comments.
• staff of maybe 15 programmers who are dedicated to improving the services – so requested feature development happens faster.
• better analytics on the free version.  they track everything and give it to you for free.  need i say more?

Disadvantages:

• At the moment, they only have support in a few languages – korean and english i think
• no widespread community support since they are still a small company.  one of wordpress’s strengths is that it has a huge community of developers dedicated to maintaining and contributing to product.  textcube may develop a community down the line, but at the moment, the company does most of the development themselves.

i will keep you all posted on their developments, but just wanted to share some of the cool companies i saw in korea with you.  pic below – from left to right – chester roh (founder and CEO), chang kim (CEO),  me, shin-young park (former ceo of bebetown and current nyu ITP grad student), ted grubb