Found out that this new phone is coming to the Korean market.

I think it's great, but if you watch the clip, perhaps you will ask the same question I asked.

Why are all those people putting their grubby hands on my emails???

Read this excellent summary of the problems facing Oiwan Lam at Rebecca MacKinnon's site to get some idea of the double standards, government pressure and strange conceptions of what is decent and indecent in Hong Kong.

After reading through it, tell me if you think the heat in Hong Kong has muddled our brains.

In which the blog's author sets about to administer a corrective treatise on journalistic misapprehension of China's true situation

From Roland Soong's blog, I find an article by Reuters in which Soong is quoted about China users protecting their identities while surfing the Net behind the Great Firewall.

The article says that China's Net censorship is top-down.

In which the blog's author gets a little bit snitty and picky!
Read more »

If a tree falls in a forest, does it have to make a sound?

Read/Write Web is pointing out as significant recent KoreaClick statistics that show Google has only 1.7 percent of Korean Web searches.

I never write about Korean tech or media for this blog because I live in Hong Kong, but I was recently in Korea and learned some interesting things from Korean media players there that might be useful to add to the conversation.

One of them is that Web search might not be as important as other factors of the media game, like video, images, social networking and grabbing audience share through interactive media.

Here's what I wrote on Read/Write's comment section:

Better or best? It's interesting that this search business seems to be the point of proving whether something is more competitive than Google.

Because I don't think that this is where Korean media businesses want to compete with Google. I talked to the CEO of CyWorld in Korea, which is a social portal, and he said that the main sticking point about Google was its monumental importance as a global advertising and media platform.

Search is the least of the worries. Korea has a very similar situation as Japan in that terrestrial TV is locked into lucrative deals with local advertising companies, meaning a lot of the money for programming and innovation goes to very large traditional types of media.

Okay, so Naver has been able to "strip search" Google by stripping away searchers, but what about advertising? What about sponsored links? What about video and image hosting and now the office applications field?

I think that search is no longer the go-to player in terms of strategizing market share acquisition. The field has multiplied to a global size and the terms in the field have multiplied dozenfold.

I think a very simple way of looking at it is that traditional media in Korea, Inc. is very protective of its own market. But the Web 2.0 generation in Korea is very focused on being international and reaching more audiences with both Korean and international content. That is true for everything from blogs to social portals, to video demand sites.

Google is more likely to fail than succeed in foreign markets because in the digital economy, the economies of scale that used to say that local content works only in local markets is no longer true. Local markets are now more sincerely trying to be international markets, but they don't need to do anything to become international since to be international in a media environment really means going to America.

Google is already international because it is an American-based search engine, so its biggest obstacle seems to be variegating itself into multiple foreign codes of culture to be truly international. I think it would be much harder for Google to be locally relevant, even if it does start putting locally relevant terms, or languages, or content into its local search portals. It is just a question of relevance and resource allocation.

It's the difference between sending one big box of goods to New York versus sending 400 small boxes to 400 different locations, on time, exactly as ordered and fundamentally appropriate for the market.

It's really a question of mindset in the end. Do you "Be Google" or do you "Be Korean Google", and how do you "Be Korean Google" if you have never been in Korea before and if the Korea that is working on making your product Korean has to work with people who are not Korean?

Koreans know how to be Korean. And Koreans working for Google know how to be Koreans working for Google, but at the end of the day, Google is run from Mountain View, California.

If you are a Korean company moving overseas, I think you're more likely to be successful being Korean overseas. You don't have to act like anything else. You are not struggling to find relevance. You are already relevant the way you are.

Or am I looking at this one-sidedly?

 

rion
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