'Business'에 해당되는 글 2건
What does it mean that you are located in Asia and you offer global services?
(This post is cross-posted on Springnotes and also a re-writing of my previous post on Springnote and the Asian wiki market.)
I understand there are many of you guys that are located in the Asia/Pan-Pacific region and that are aiming for global markets. I'd assume your primary language for the service offering is probably English.
So I'd love to hear from you guys: What are the advantages and disadvantages of being physically located in Asia and going global (or Western for that matter?)
I guess another question would be if a service like Springnote is offered in Chinese, what's the chance of that doubling the market?
Wikis on the rise in Asia
Springnote is based in Korea. It has multi-language offerings in
Korean, English, and Japanese. (We're planning to expand the language
set in the near future!)
A question that naturally follows is this: "Why Asia? Do you think
you can ever invade the invincible U.S. market while based in Korea?
Stop dreaming!" Well, let me walk you through one step at a time to
show what's really going on.
(click here for a larger view of the chart)
As a starter, needs for wikis are soaring higher than ever. If you
study the search trend on Google, as shown in the charge above, there
are far more queries for the word "wiki" than "blog ", i.e. Internet
users are willing to learn more about wikis than blogs.
However, what's even more surprising is that most of those queries
are indeed coming from many Asian and pan-Pacifc countries, such as
Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and Australia. That means 1) we've got an
astonishingly fast growing market in wikis, and 2) the market belongs
to Asia. That seems to be a great business opportunity right there,
doesn't it?
For example, Springnote, the sole online wiki service in Asia,
gathers many users from around the world through its English and
Japanese service offerings. A great number of them indeed come from
China, Singapore, Japan, and Australia, in addition to many from the
U.S., U.K., Germany and Canada (We spotted an Swedish team today!)
Openmaru, the maker behind Springnote, is located in Seoul, Korea,
garnering a huge opportunity to explore the market here just by being
local, i.e. Asian. While it's a service aiming for global
presence, it's been so lucky to enjoy a success in Asia that could not
easily come with many companies from the West .
The Web 2.0 revolution didn't stop in the Silicon Valley. It's
spreading throughout the entire globe. Do you want to be global or
local? It's a very important question any business development people
should be asking themselves every single day. After all, the Internet
increasingly blurring the boundaries bewteen countries, or even
continents. :)
brought to you by
State of Play V: Building Businesses in Virtual Worlds
Virtual world builders now encourage third parties to develop content inside their worlds, and so we’ve seen the rise of businesses built inside virtual worlds. This panel will explore the nature of these businesses, and look at how businesses get built within virtual worlds. It will ask whether the trend has played out, and examine the future of businesses inside the virtual worlds.The first session was on "Building business in virtual worlds." I liked how the conference started off with the business aspect because you typically get the information that's very "real" when talking about businesses.
Discussion was started with a question about the different branding strategies for real world and virtual worlds. Can the same branding strategy be applied to virtual worlds, too? Obviously, the answer was No". Like in Web 2.0, it's a lot more about having conversations and engagement. There's so much social going on here that virtual world branding strategies must incorporate the social nature of the medium. It's better to start your first chatper and hand the pen over to fans and users. This way you can totally up your innovation speed, too.
The question of "open vs. closed" came up here as well. Again, like in Web 2.0, not everything needs to be open all the time; however, people in this field are increasingly discovering the value of open in virtual worlds.
So I decided to act brave and went up and asked a question:
"It seems like given the strong media nature of virtual worlds, much of their business aspect has to do the marketing/advertising after all. Within the context of convincing the clients, what are some of the metrics and methologies to measure the efficiency of marketing and advertising in virtual worlds?"
I really wanted to know the answer because with my background in Web 2.0/Media, I needed to know how things are different in virtual worlds. Answers were basically that virtual worlds are a lot more about interactions themselves than information flow like on the Web. Also scales are far smaller in virtual worlds than the Web. Thus, we get smaller scale, but much higher engagement in virtual worlds. One of the most frequently used metrics are the amount of time spent by players around a certain advertising object. It could easily go up to hours and hours every day.
The session closed with a question, which I thought was very appropriate for closing, which was "what are some opportunities for enterpreneurs in virtual worlds?" Answers really varied. And when you get diverse responses like that, what that really means is "it's up to your imagination" :) Some of the answers were:
- Creating consultancies within virtual worlds
- Real companies/organizations can use virtual worlds as collaborative spaces
- More opportunities in developing countries because they can move in with so much less barrier-to-entry. Product designer/developers will have huge opportunities
- Turn the World Wide Web into the World Wide World
- Short term: Infrastructure - code developement, design skills, creative (story lines)
- Long term: any job you see in real world will be seen in virtual worlds
- Collaboration applications
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