exploring the intersection of new media and everything else

Chang Kim – blogger at Web 2.0 Asia and founder of Tatter Tools

Late 1990s were the haydays of the Korean internet because we had broadband infrastructure that was unrivaled anywhere else. Cyworld, Dialpad, digital goods and other web services and ideas emerged here long before they did in the west.

Korea, China, Japan are the big economies in the east. In regards to the economy their is not that much of a discrepency but in regards to landsize it is very small. If China was a watermelon, and Japan was a strawberry, then Korea would be a pea… actually half a pea.

There are 48 million people in a very small land area. This is bad… until you look at connectivity and broadband penetration. 94 percent broadband penetration in Korea.

Koreans are a homogenous group of people. Things / ideas spread very quickly because of this.

Tehran Valley is the equivalent of Silicon Valley in the US.

Cyworld preceded Facebook by 5 years.

Korea leads the worlds in many areas including how much time ppl spend online.

11 million went to gaming sites. 13 times/ month

Usage is here. But innovation seems to have stopped. Why?

Walled gardens. Portals have lots of traffic coming in but little being sent out. Also mono-culture for browsers… only uses Internet Explorer

Many types of phone plans in Korea but no unlimited data plan in Korea. Korean companies are not giving consumers what they want.

47% of all internet users in Korea illegally downloaded 55 movies per year.

Korean used to be innovators in internet web service but seems to be going backward now.

Mobile data usage is very low too because of the cost.

Entrepreneurs are here. But VCs need to support them.

Second Speaker is Bill Dresselhaus – former Apple designer and professor at Hongik University

Presentation is paraphrased:

Design is a natural innate human ability that is waiting to be released. By educating everyone in design thinking… it is possible to change the world.

Hosted many design thinking workshops and the results are always exciting. People who attend are from all fields and ages.

Participants build mockups at these workshops.

Three part process to get people to design:

1. Provide the opportunity and enviroment (encouragement) to solve real world problems
2. Materials and coaching to build their solutions
3. Show creative results at the end

Today I am attending an event that I have been anticipating for awhile… TEDxSeoul. As a huge admirer of the TED conference, this for me is a great opportunity. And probably as close to the real conference as I will ever get. Props to the TEDxSeoul team, especially my friend Mark Whiting for organizing this event. I think they did a wonderful job.

The line up of speakers is quite impressive, from a former Apple lead designer to the Founder of Tattertools (Korean version of the Wordpress blogging service). For speakers who present in Korean, they even have headsets so that us Hangul inepts can understand what is going on. Not to mention the Microsoft Surface sitting outside the conference room to play with… also a first for me.

The event host is this guy…. didn’t catch his name

Here is a list of the speakers:

Jaram Lee – a traditional Korean music performer
Dongwon Hong – designer and founder of Typomedia (Geulsee Media in Korean)
Hwang Doo Jin – Architect fusing traditional Korean and modern western design sensibilities
Jihoon Jeong – Medical engineer
Bill Dresselhaus – former designer at Apple and founder of a design consultancy the Dresselhaus Group
Eungyul Lee – world class magician
Seungbum Kim and Haejin Jung – General physician
Yeonho Oh – Journalist
Chang Kim – founder of Tattertools and blogger at Web20asia
Chibok Song – Copywriter for among other things ex-president of Korea Roh Moo-Hyun

Before anyone gets any ideas. This is by no mean a definitive guide to Ruby on Rails. I am an absolute newb to Ruby on Rails and really developing web applications in general. I have working knowledge of HTML and CSS. I can stumble my way through PHP. I know next to nothing about MySQL. And this is my first ever attempt to extend my skillz (or lack there of) into application development a la playing with Ruby on Rails on my mac.

This blog post is as much for my benefit so that I can look back and see what I did. And most importantly what mistakes I made. Hopefully if you are reading this blog, you will learn from my mistakes so that you won’t have to make them.

So before I begin here is the system I am installing this on:

2.16GHz Intel Mac Book Pro running OS X Version 10.5.6

Installing Ruby on Rails.

I installed Ruby on Rails by following this excellent step by step post Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) which is the updated version of this guide, both of which I found on Hivelogic. The post is a bit dated but just about everything works perfectly. I did have make some minor changes to the installation to make sure I got the latest version of Ruby and Rails, but all that requires is that you find out what the latest version is a replace it in the code.

(You can find out what the latest version is by checking out the Ruby on Rails and Ruby Gems websites.)

So for example to install the latest version of Ruby Gems, everywhere I saw:

rubygems-1.3.1.tgz

I replaced it with:

rubygems-1.3.2.tgz

See easy as pie.

The only real problem I had was in installing Subversion. If you see these two error messages when trying to configure Subversion:

error: –with-openssl requires a path

error: –with-zlib requires an argument

then try removing the –with-openssl statement and add =/usr/ after –with-zlib so it looks like this:

./configure –prefix=/usr/local –with-ssl –with-zlib=/usr/

Now I don’t know what this actually does, but the installation does seem to work if you do this. Don’t blame me if something happens to your computer though… I am still learning too.

Anyway that is it for the installation. All in all it took me about 2 hours to install everything. Although I am sure that someone seasoned at this could do it much faster.

Google just released Latitude, a mobile social networking application that is capable of tracking your location, and I am patting myself on the back right now. I picked up adlatitude.com as a domain two years ago, and now the biggest game on the internet has essentially vindicated my choice of name.

I know that I am being self-laudatory, which most… including myself… would find to be annoying, but I feel like I deserve it. I have been running this blog for the better part of two years (I know… there is not much to show for it) and I have taken my fair amount of jostling, rib nudging, nuggies from friends who ask me if it is really worth it to write a blog that no one but myself probably reads.

Well now I have my answer… Google thinks my name is cool. Admittedly they didn’t copy my name (which would have been even cooler) but at least now I can say that me and Google think along the same lines or shall I say latitude.