Founder & CEO
Greetings!
Thanks For visiting us! You might be curious about Asia’s digital space, or intrigued by the existence of a company focusing on bringing Asian innovations to other markets. To explain how this can be, I would like to share with you an old story: the invention of the movable type. I learned at school that it was created by Gutenberg in the 1400. When I moved to Korea, I saw a metal type created circa 1200. In China they had a wooden one since 1040.
From this I understood four things:
FIRST, innovations don’t have a nationality. Fortunately. All the rest is branding and narratives.
SECOND, things can be invented more than once. Gutenberg probably did not know about the Asian types.
THIRD, shortening the transfer time creates new opportunities. Imagine the difference if Europe had started using the Chinese type 400 years earlier!
FOURTH, an invention can be better adapted to other markets than the one it comes from. Chinese has thousands of characters, no wonder the movable type there did not take off fast. European languages have very small sets of characters, making the invention far more usable!
Despite the idea that everything moves at Internet speeds, market structures and cultural stereotypes get in the way of benefiting from what has been already proven elsewhere. Our business is to help you get a significant head start and reduce risk by leveraging Asia’s best practices in the digital space.
Why Asia? Simply because Japan and Korea are the world’s most advanced mobile and Internet markets: faster speeds, cheaper price, higher penetration – and China is simply the host of the world’s largest mobile and Internet populations.
About Benjamin Joffe
Benjamin Joffe is a renowned expert on Asia’s digital scene and Founder & CEO of Asia-based digital strategy consultancy +8* | Plus Eight Star (www.plus8star.com). During the past 10 years, he has been part of Japan’s mobile revolution, Korea’s Internet boom, China’s mobile crash and web 2.0 revival. His research today covers trust networks, digital identity, virtual economies and social dynamics.
+8* has brought strategic advice, innovative service concepts and business models to clients such as Microsoft, Adidas, Nokia, China Mobile, IMVU, Tumblr, Harvard Business School and the European Commission as well as digital and traditional media companies worldwide.
Benjamin has been quoted in Forbes, The Economist, CNN and The New York Times, has been invited to keynote dozens of tech, media and investment events in 16 countries including at Stanford University and Berkeley. He was selected among China’s Top 100 Mobile Industry Influencers in 2007 and 2008.
Last, he is also a Founding Partner in the 3D social gaming company Cmune (www.cmune.com) and founder of Mobile Monday in Beijing, where he held over 35 events welcoming more than 3,000 participants since 2006.
