Comparing Korean gas, wine and other prices with Europe

It’s cheaper to live in New York, Hong Kong, Copenhagen or Paris then in Seoul. But not everything is expensive, taking a cab here four blocks further costs about 2 Euros, the same distance in Copenhagen or Paris would cost a lot more. Korean food is generally cheap, so are a lot of other things. The greatest price differences can be found in western and mainly European products that… Continue reading... | 2 Comments

What can you leave to your descendant?

I visited a Korean art expo on Saturday the 23rd, and met a fascinating artist named Hae do Park. He dedicated his life to learn a new skill, and aims to inspire younger artists with his work. The combination of using silver and his apply his technique create objects that almost seem real.
The bird on the picture is so detailed and beautiful that it just attracted me, like most shiny… Continue reading... | 1 Comment

Meganova: Prepare for Urban lunches, Mc Donalds and a lot of beer

This summer, I woke up exited every day to go blogging for TheNextWeb at the Meganova office. The first week, we said to ourselves, wouldn’t it be great if we finally reach the magical 4000 readers on the blog? After some hard work, we broke through the limit in the third week.… Continue reading... | 2 Comments

Fast growing ad, gaming and education market in China

If you like the web, I bet you love South Korea too

This is the conclusion of my web series about the internet in South Korea, published on ReadWriteWeb and TheNextWeb.org two weeks ago; I put it on my blog for completeness of the serie.

That is, if you like to be connected to the Internet all day, while enjoying the fastest connections in the world! Enter the hyper connected society, with an astounding 90 percent of the country

Why most Koreans stopped using auction sites

If we talk about auction websites we usually think of Ebay, but not in Korea. The Koreans experience the fierce competition between two auction portals, but recently, something changed.

Gmarket was founded in 2000 by Young Bae Ku, and had a revenue of 188 million dollar in 2007.The second auction site is simply called Auction.co.kr and was founded in 1998, however they got bought by US based Ebay… Continue reading... | 1 Comment

Daum: boring, but innovative in user generated content

Daum communications is huge, they are the biggest operator of Korean websites and they also operate in China with 365ren.com, and in the U.S. with the acquired Lycos portal. The word ‘Daum’ is Korean for ‘next’, but at first sight, they might come over as another boring web portal aiming for sensational celebrity news, or is it?

Okay, Browsing to Daum.net feels like browsing through time at first. Don’t be surprised to see a banner in the middle of the screen, offering you a Daum car insurance, or other income streams in in-house finance or shopping products. However, Daum.net scores (40 million active users) with UCG (user generated content) and sensational news. Continue reading...

Search engine Naver is best in localized results, example for others?

We see increasing amounts of search engines popping up on the internet, they are using advanced algorithms to come up with better results. Not in Korea, at least not at Naver. Employees analyze, index and produces content for their search engine by hand. Even though this labor intensity, they count for 70% of the search queries in their country, leaving Google far behind. Naver, founded… Continue reading...

Introduction to five popular Korean websites

Today we will start creating a profile of populair South Korean websites. In the following days we will discuss the following websites:

 … Continue reading...

A profile of the connectivity in South Korea

South Korea is the most connected country in the world, their network leaps far beyond that of Europe, the Arabic countries, China or the USA. It’s all part of their vision to create an “ubiquitous networked world”.

Well, I had to lookup the word ubiquitous, and found out that it means ‘everywhere’. In other words, they strive for an network that is available everywhere. South Koreans are addicted to… Continue reading... | 2 Comments