Transcriber: TED Translators admin Reviewer: Jihyeon J. Kim
So the late 1990s were the good days for the Korean Internet,
because, first of all,
we had a very great infrastructure for broadband.
The three important countries in the Northeast Asia
would be China, Japan, and Korea.
And obviously, Korea is being the smallest country of them
but in terms of economic size, we're not that small,
I mean, not by a very terribly big margin.
This is our GDP, and as you can see,
the export-- we're doing about one third of China's,
or actually, slightly more than half of Japan's.
So that was, you know, not terribly bad.
But, when it comes to the land size, it's a whole different story.
So if China were the size of a watermelon, and if Japan were a strawberry,
(Laughter)
then Korea would be the size of a pea.
(Laughter)
And don't forget to cut that in half because, you know, the country is divided,
(Laughter)
My teacher would say that 70% of the whole country
is actually mountains where people cannot live,
so that leaves us only 30% of a half pea.
But surprisingly, this is also home to some 48 million people,
so obviously, Korea is one of the most crowded, busiest, and craziest society.
We thought this was a bad thing,
Korea being a small country, that's a bad thing,
until, that is, the broadband penetration came around, and when it did
Korea being a small country, that actually added to its advantage.
This are the figures from 2000,
and already in 2000, 94% of all Internet users in Korea were on broadband.
And if you see the numbers from other countries,
this is really amazing and dramatic.
And wireless, too.
I mean, the wireless connection in Korea was so good
that we couldn't actually get out of it.
So people who were getting a call-- really, we couldn't get out of it.
When we're watching the American movies
where the good guys are being chased by the bad guys,
and then they pick up the phone to make a call to get some help
and there's no signal, we're like, "Why?" (Laughter)
When I was working at a phone company, we actually had to create a shield room,
something that looks like a refrigerator, just to keep the wireless connection off.
This was pretty amazing.
So that was the infrastructure, and now there's the people.
Koreans are really homogeneous people, and we share a lot of interest,
ranging from World Cup Games to [inaudible].
Koreans share a lot of social interests.
As you can see here, one example is the X-file, what we call X-file.
This is like the dirty laundry secrets of Korean entertainers
that had got leaked a couple of years ago, and everybody--
There's a figure that says that within the first 24 hours,
half the nation actually saw this.
So it really shows how much of a viral effect Korea had.
And also on top of this, there was the Government support.
There were pro-venture policies, and as a result we had this Tehran Valley,
that's an equivalent to Silicon Valley of the U.S.
This led to a lot of new innovations, a lot of interesting innovations,
and many of those innovations were actually world's first.
For example, we're using Internet [inaudible] service a lot
already in the late 1990s, thanks to a company called Dialpad.
Everybody was having one of these; they were calling this Dialpad headset.
And this actually preceded Skype by nearly four years.
The U.S is all about the virtual goods and virtual economy these days,
but Koreans were used to these from the 90s as well.
And Cyworld happens to precede Facebook by five years.
Nearly five years.
Also, Naver Q&A service, this is a Q&A, question and answer service,
and it has ten times more entries than the whole Wikipedia,
and this was before Yahoo! Answers by three years.
And also Korea, of course, gave birth
to the first professional gaming league, online gaming league of the world.
This, what we call E-sport,
is now one of the most popular sports of any sport:
baseball, football, and there's E-sport.
So this is pretty amazing.
This head-start actually continues to this day,
where Korea leads the world by a lot of numbers,
in terms of Internet usage,
99.9% of teens are using the Internet.
People spent about 1,600 minutes on the Internet in February 2009,
and this is an average of 56 minutes per day.
This includes everyone, including your own grandmother.
So this are really amazing numbers, if you think about it.
11 million people [visited online gaming] sites.
This is 13 times per month, [and every time]
they were spending three hours on each site.
So, Korea was amazing, but now, you know, the usage is there,
but Korea is not really innovating anymore.
Korea used to [have] innovators, but now it's not really innovating; why?
First, there is a walled garden.
Internet portals send most of the traffic to content within those portals
rather than sending the traffic out.
So you can see there a lot of portals,
a lot of traffic is coming within the portals.
Also, the mono-culture and the walled garden
actually started from the browser itself, where--
This is a recent figure from Internet Trend
that says 98.5% of Koreans are using Internet Explorer.
This is pretty bad because--
(Laughter)
I know, you're laughing because you've seen like that many times.
And this essentially [inaudible] in Korea:
you cannot buy a Macintosh computer on Macintosh.
You have to buy a PC first,
because you cannot buy one from the online store,
because your credit card doesn't come through.
(Laughter)
Also, the mobile: this is from my service carrier, KTF,
and they have all these different plans.
They even have a plan called World Cup 2002 plan.
They're giving 2,002 minutes of free calls
but they're not giving me what I really want,
which is an affordable, unlimited DATA plan.
I want that, but I cannot get it.
This is interesting because one time my sister paid a visit to our place,
and my nephew, a small kid, was playing with my phone.
I heard my sister yelling,
"Don't ever press that button, who told you to press that button?"
And that turned out to be that middle button
that connects to the wireless Internet.
And the interesting thing was at that time I was writing a piece,
a column about the Korean mobile Internet industry.
And that, I realized that if my own sister is doing this,
this is [certainly] bad.
Just imagine that mothers yelling at kids who are using the computers.
"You can double click on any icons, but not that one,
because that's expensive, and that [inaudible]." (Laughter)
You know, we don't have that, right?
So if you think about this, you can see how seriously wrong this is.
And another issue is the Government control.
Obviously, in order to use major services in Korea,
you have to go through a real identity verification system.
Obviously, this makes it a lot more difficult for foreigners
to try new Korean services.
And this is also in a very stark contrast
with the simple registration forms we're seeing a lot these days.
And the idea of the Government
being able to know who you are when they want to is really jarring.
And a lot of people actually went out of the Korean services,
so called Cyber Exiles.
This person is a Cyber pundit,
who used to write a lot of critical pieces about the Korean government.
The Government prosecutors got to learn his real identity
and tracked him down.
So this is really another factor.
I don't think peoblem lies
only with the Government, or the service [provider].
It actually lies with the people as well,
where there's a lot of rampant illegal downloads.
This are figures from last year:
47% of all Internet users in Korea illegally downloaded 55 movies a year.
This is again the average, so this is pretty bad.
So alarming signs.
Korean Internet used to be innovative,
but not any more; it's actually going the other direction.
We're actually decreasing.
This are the annual figures.
We saw some of the figures go down this year.
Community service, social networks, Mini Hompis, down 20%,
and the mobile as well.
The mobile Internet is pretty expensive so people don't really use it.
So we have the lowest, if you see on the right hand,
we have the lowest percentage of mobile data services
out of the total ARPU.
This means the most people use either voice phone calls
or SMS communications or MMS, and that's pretty much it.
So this is pretty bad.
And you know, I'm just wondering.
I'm writing a blog about the Korean mobile and Internet innovations,
and these days my blog posting has been a little bit slow,
and people are like, "You have to write more."
The reason why my blogging has slowed down
is partly because I'm busy,
but also because I don't see a lot of innovations around.
So do we have any signs of hope? Do we see any signs of hope?
That's the next question.
And I think we're seeing some signs of hope.
But definitely, there have to be more signs of hope, I guess.
The major services are opening up,
they embrace open [source] and open Internet a lot, these days.
iPhone's coming out finally
so as you can see there, at least we're beating Qatar.
Yeah, that's a good thing, yeah. (Laughter)
Even though we're behind Equatorial Guinea, who cares?
(Laughter)
And just people here would know that [inaudible],
since there has been so much rumours about iPhone
is coming out next month,
iPhone is actually nicknamed the next month phone.
(Laughter)
But finally, we're having iPhone in the "next month".
(Laughter)
So people, I mean, you know, we've seen a lot of parodies
about these iPhone stories,
people are getting frustrated, but finally they find their ways like this.
(Laughter)
You know, people are better now,
because we've been through all this time.
And Twitter's [inaudible].
I just saw that a lot of people are twitting at this moment,
so with iPhone and Twitter, I think Koreans are finally
at least giving a chance to the global services, I guess.
People like Professor Kim Gi-Chang, he's been fighting
against this IE mono-culture,
and the thing is that he lost a lawsuit again [inaudible].
But I don't think this is only a legal issue, though.
It's all about-- let's just imagine that we have cities like this,
where a big city, IE city, with 40 million people on it,
and there're smaller towns like Fire Foxville and [Chrometown],
but we do know that people are living here.
Then, would we not be interested in building roads for them,
and building electricity for them, and water system?
We would probably do that, right?
But we're not doing something like that in the online world,
and that's really, I think, fundamentally wrong.
Illegal movie downloading is decreasing,
and the legal use of digital content is growing up,
which are the good signs.
But are all of these signs of hope?
I think the most important thing is this:
the young entrepreneurs.
We have a group of young entrepreneurs
that are really new generations,
and they embraced the globalness from day one.
They are the ones who are really the brave souls,
they want to fight against all the odds, they want to beat the odds,
and they want to build great products, and they want to make it rich.
I think these are the greatest signs of hope for the Korean Internet.
In fact, yesterday, two new services came out of these people;
only yesterday, so that's a very good thing.
I think the society has to give a chance to these young entrepreneurs.
For example, we know
that the Government is spending a lot on the civil [inaudible] stuff,
but I'm just hoping that they'll spend more money
to support these young entrepreneurs,
and venture capitalists have to step forward
and invest more in these young start-ups.
Because without these people,
if you ever want to revive the Korean Web,
I think you have to start with these people.
And without these people, there's really no future for the Korean Web.
Thank you.
(Applause)