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Net-Nexus Seoul
An anonymous reader writes: "Wired has a story in their new issue about Seoul, Korea and how it is The Bandwidth Capital of the World It is really interesting how popular the internet and cybercafes are as a social medium there. They also have a huge following of online game players, with over 70% of broadband users playing online. For me, the best quote about the business opportunities that have sprung up is '(We) wanted to focus on interaction. And what is more interactive than games? We made this market. We made new sectors. American media companies were just using online capacity to distribute offline media.'"
Later adopters of the technology, rather than sinking their Bux and building their models on the first, shitty generation of the technology, get the good stuff and then surpass the creators of the form.
China, for example, has skipped landlines for phone service in a lot of areas, and gone straight to mobiles.
We're going to see a lot more of this in the next decades, while America drowns under the weight of it's enormous, wasteful military budget (I'm not against a strong America, but I have worked for defense contractors and know the score here) and it's completely outdated model of global politics.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
A friend of mine hangs out with "Grrr..." (top French Canadian profesional SC player). He's a huge star there... people recognise him walking down the street, and ask for autographs, etc. Let's hope the rest of the world catches up with Korea someday :)
I worked with him for a few months and we put in TONS of fiber underground. Everyone, including me, thought he was nuts. Many people continued to think he was nuts because the fiber lay dark for a long time. But now, in retrospect, I think he was way ahead of his time.
The fiber was never used during the Expo (if it was, I never knew about it). And a few years later, it was written off, forgotten about - that is, completely paid for. It was ridiculously cheap to use the connection and Korea's telecom companies began using it like crazy circa 1996.
By end of 1998, I noticed that Korea was one of the most as well as best wired country in the world. Even during the worst of the IMF financial crisis, fast Internet connection was already considered a necessity by most people.
The Internet bust slowed things down a bit, but now three things are bringing Internet to the forefront and accelerating the fiber usage again:
1. Japan is in limbo
2. About a dozen money-sucking conglomerates have been shut down, so there's more money for startups and regular consumers. These two groups spend money like crazy - on Internet and wireless stuff like 3G Internet ready handphones
3. World Cup pried open many closed doors in Korea, prompting them to connect internationally, and fast.
Things are pretty dead here in Silicon Valley and I can't help but think about how exciting it must be to be alive in Korea right now.
If any of you have any potential endeavors in Korea, requiring a bilingual, bicultural, experienced network administrating Korean American, drop me a line at sosurim63@yahoo.com