Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
In the last paragraph, she kind of hints at what I was wondering for the last couple of pages:
She makes a big deal about the country's great bandwidth. But it seems like the big selling point involves real-world interaction -- playing games and hooking up in baangs, playing games and hooking up with people in other baangs. As she describes it, it's the social scene that's gelled around computer clusters that's important. (Sort of like pre-Internet CS clusters, except with much more attractive people.)
So, maybe providing bandwidth to the home is a dead end and it's developing cybercafes that's the key to a computer-centric culture?
(I've really got to visit Korea one of these days. I've changed planes in Kimpo plenty of times but never went outside. The biggest impression the country made on me was when I was watching a "Good Morning America" type show and the Katie Couric-ish host modeled the season's new thong bikinis. That was an adrenaline shot at 7 am, after a 12 hour flight.)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
After wandering around the city, I found a well-stocked Internet cafe that sold decent coffee and fairly decent cigarettes (Mild Sevens). The per-hour price wasn't bad, and it wasn't exactly difficult to master the Korean language keyboards. This particular cafe was classy, boasting a waxed wood floor and decorative plants. The drop-down Windows "run" menus of its 3-4 PCs were full of Ivy League servers, vestiges of touring American bluebloods.
Unfortunately, this particular cafe shuttered relatively early in the evening. Later in the night (when I wasn't occupied w/ meetings), I'd frequent an entirely different sort of Internet cafe accessible through a alleyway door and a staircase. This dim, windowless cafe was crammed wall-to-wall with high end PCs -- almost all manned by a stooped Korean teens mesmerized by StarCraft. For some reason, the beefy proprietor always waved away my cash, never accepting any of my proferred payment.
I haven't thought about Korean Internet cafes (or posted to slashdot) for some time, until encountering this article. Good to be back, and props to the trollaxor crew.
Insects and Grafitti Photos
This article describes something that could happen in USA: A revival of arcades based on broadband.
One of the major appeals of arcades was that they let you play on technology more powerful than anything at home, with your friends, for as little as 25 cents. They steadily lost that advantage in the 1990s until they got to today's point where home games are MORE powerful, and arcades games cost 50c to $1 per play.
But what if they got that advantage back? What if arcades were based on broadband? I've noticed that in USA broadband is far more likely to be set up in large buildings and institutions than in homes. And when it does become popular in homes, the standard connection for large organizations might jump ahead again.
I'd like to see broadband arcades where you could play with people in the same room and people hundreds of miles away at the same time! And of course it would allow for voice chat, and maybe videophoning as well. The arcade owner would only have to install hardware and software once: The cabinet/cocpit itself would auto-update software forever after. And it should cost have a reasonable cost, the way arcades used to.
Would you go?