Today is the first day of the VDZ Online Publishers Tour in Asia organized by CScout. The program starts in Seoul, South Korea. Here are just some notes about the morning.
Danny Kim did a great kick-off about the web 2.0 scene in South Korea. Danny is famous Korean Web 2.0 Blogger and is a TrendScout within the CScout Network. He has just finished his book “Meconomy” and talked about cool new services from openmaru. One service is called springnote. Springnote is a wiki-based online notebook platform first developed in korean and now rolled out in english. He used sprindnote to write his book in close cooperation with the editors. He said it was a really great working experience and made the wirting process very time efficient.
Our local TrendScout John Rajeski gave an introduction to the internet and mobile media market in South Korea. With roughly 10 Mio. inhabitant in Seoul, compared to 49 Mio. people in the country, the city plays a major role in digital media. John explained that you can get a 100MBits Internet connection at home for around 30 Euro per month. Via Wimax you have access to 3Mbits per second on the move within the City. GPS, 3G (UMTS) also play a big role for the korean market and is available since almost a decade.
The reason why South Korea has such a powerful infrastructure is due to the consistent development by the korean government. Another important factor is that the korean consumers are very early adopters, they just love to try new services and applications. Furthermore the mobile phone is the most important access to the internet for the consumers. Therefore it is not surprising that there are 9 million mobile TV subscribers in South Korea, that is 18,75% of the whole population.
S. Korea is the leader in Mobile Banking, Japan is a leader in Mobile Payments. Mobile banking in S. Korea has about 5 million active subscribers. The growth of the mobile banking market is very impressive.
Further meetings today are for example Cyworld, LindenLab Korea.
More pictures about the trend tour at my Flickr account.
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