We received nice coverage from:

• Virtual Goods News: “Asia Driving the Virtual Goods Marketplace“
• VentureBeat: “Asian Venture Goods Market is 7 Times Bigger than US“
• VentureBeat: “Video of Day Two of the VGS – Updates on Asia, Facebook and the iPhone“
• Inside Social Games: “The $7 Billion Asian Virtual Goods Market in PowerPoint“.
• Gamasutra: “VGS 09: Asian Virtual Goods Worth $7 Billion in 2009″
• Dave McClure: “Virtual Goods in Asia – The US Gold Rush Begins”

Key points:

• Virtual goods market in Asia over $7bln
• 9 Online gaming companies listed on Nasdaq and HKSE
• Total market value is $52bln, twice as much as Blizzard + EA + Ubisoft + Take Two
• With similar maturity as China, the US VG market could shoot up to $35bln
• Mobile already making hundreds of millions with virtual goods in Japan

To download the presentation, please fill in your contacts below.

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If you think you need to have Einstein’s brain to experience the space-time continuum, here is a way to do it from your living room – or by boarding a plane.

By working with different geographies, you can effectively get to travel back and forth in time: many things happening on Japan’s mobile scene are the future of the rest of the world, many key web ideas such as real-name social networks, virtual goods and online games were proven first in South Korea and as China’s web and mobile populations are exploding, more and more innovation is taking place there, pioneering new revenue and service models. But there is another way that can be just as effective.

Enthralled with the future

People working in the IT industry tend to get excited by new technologies, trying to make the future “happen faster”. People working in more traditional industries, especially those threatened by the rapid evolutions of digital media, tend to protect the present status-quo.

In addition to researchers, there is a special group of people whose passion is to imagine new possibilities. They are the science fiction writers. In many ways, Da Vinci and Jules Verne were science fiction writers. According to a friend of mine who is both a web entrepreneur and a writer, the CEO of Linden Lab was visiting investors on Sand Hill (a Palo Alto neighborhood where venture capitalists gather). He was showing the novel “Snow Crash” by Neil Stephenson and telling them “I want to build this”.
In addition to using today’s science fiction for inspiration, I found that one could use old science fiction to understand better how to solve today’s problems.

New solutions from old stories

With the ubiquity of digital cameras, the flourishing of social networks, the social sharing, tagging and other Twitter following, I am concerned with privacy. By researching the topic I came across three interesting stories I would like to share with you, my anonymous reader.

The first story is over 200 years old and is about prison. Quoting from Wikipedia: “The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the “sentiment of an invisible omniscience.””.

Does that feel familiar? Would you be self-censoring your blog posts or your shared pictures already? It might sound like a far-fetched comparison, but have a look at the following pictures, comparing the Panopticon with the “Conversation Prism”, a visualization of social media services proposed by PR executive Brian Solis. Simply replace “The Conversation” by “You” at the center of it. People are watching you from all sorts of angles, and you can’t tell who is watching.

Though many cities around the world are equipped with a closed-circuit television system for surveillance (it is a humorous coincidence that China’s main public channels are called “CCTV”), web innovators have successfully built what I would call a “Digital Panopticon”.

I understand the idea as applied to criminals, but what about regular people living in a “Panopticon Apartment”? This is what is happening online right now. If you are not convinced, go to 123people.com and type your name (note: this service works better in Western countries).

The second story I found in a novella written in 1981 by Vernor Vinge, a math professor, computer scientist and science fiction author. The story is called “True Names” and envisions a near-future where the most important thing for people online is to protect their real identity, or “True Name”. I will explain why this matters.

Why True Names matter

First, in the social networking and virtual worlds industries, there is an ongoing debate whether users should be anonymous or use their real name. Facebook is a strong promoter of real-name, MySpace uses nicknames. It is possible to find equivalents of both in many countries. In Korea and China, the government is also part of the debate, which has spilled over to whether or not bloggers should be identified. In recent news, I found three interesting cases that got me to think:

The first case happened last year in Korea, when one blogger nicknamed “Minerva” started to blog economic commentary on the forum of Daum, a leading web portal in Korea. Within a few months, Minerva gained a large following and massive influence on stock prices until the Minister of Justice mentioned a possible investigation. In January 2009, the person-believed-to-be-Minerva was arrested as according to Korean law:

A person spreading a false rumor maliciously intending to damage the public interest by using an electronic machine can be sentenced to imprisonment for under five years or given a fine of under 50,000,000 won (~US$50,000)
– Electronic Communication Fundamental Law Article 47 Clause 1, Republic of Korea

Minerva was eventually acquitted and released in April. The reasoning of the court was that if any of the statements he made were false, he did not know they were false. One point that was raised is that the regulation itself might be unconstitutional.

The second case happened already in several places: it is what is now called “human flesh search”. Unsurprisingly perhaps, one of the most famous cases is again from Korea, back in 2005: a girl refused to clean after her dog relieved itself in a subway car in Seoul. Pictures of her circulated and she was rapidly identified, vilified and pressured for apologies. The girl eventually threatened to kill herself if not left alone. She is rumored to have quit her university. In late 2008, a famous Korean actress committed suicide due to Internet pressure around money matters. Readers familiar with the Chinese Internet have surely heard of similar cases. Again, the online mob – I would not call them “netizens” in that case – found the people’s true names.

Finally, to highlight a case where anonymity is not only welcome but important: Match.com, the world’s leading online dating service, announced last month that it was integrating a voice function allowing users to talk with a prospective match without having to divulge any real contact information. Though not overly innovative, this is obviously a useful feature and shows how the ability to manage personal information is critical to interactions.

Identity crisis

While Facebook is trying to force its real-name policy on users – just like Cyworld did in Korea 10 years before – and celebrities get impersonated on Twitter, being able to chose to express ideas under real name or anonymously while respecting others’ identities is increasingly important. By the way, did you know US president Barack Obama was on Twitter? I re-tweeted a recent message of his.

benjaminjoffe: RT @BarackObama: I can never find fortune cookies in China – how odd!
Surprising comment from a President-elect – maybe because I wrote it for him?

Though one could argue that privacy was a momentary inefficiency between life in the woods and total transparency, you are most likely born like me in an age when privacy mattered. I hope we will be able to phase out gracefully before transparency make things too uncomfortable.

Comments are welcome to benjamin [at] plus8star.com. Our presentation on “Digital Identity” is available on www.slideshare.net/plus8star.

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+8* | Plus Eight Star lives in the future in Asia and can get you there too.

• Our assumptions get in the way of our understanding
• Asia not only innovates, but can be leveraged by foreign companies to accelerate innovation by way of “innovation arbitrage“

This presentation covers China, Japan and Korea with about a dozen examples of interesting service concepts and business models. We recommend checking:

• Our “5C of Innovation“
• Tencent, a billion-dollar web company in China
• Profit margins of online gaming companies in China
• Japan’s mobile advance and various web examples
• Mobile social networks Gree and Mobile Game Town in Japan
• Korea’s web and online gaming innovations

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+8* | Plus Eight Star looks at China, Japan and Korea because we don’t believe 500 million web users and 800 million mobile users in China, Japan and Korea can’t have good ideas.

• UnConference in Singapore | We went there to present on Asian Digital Innovations and moderate a panel on the same topic.
• Infinity Ventures Summit in Sapporo (Japan) | This event is the largest web & mobile conference in Japan with over 300 C-level participants. It is invitation-only and they don’t have an event website. We joined the event to present our partner company Cmune developing 3D social applications at the startup launchpad (video in Japanese with English voice-over).
• Geeks On a Plane! | We co-organized the visit to Asia of 30 Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors lead by Dave McClure of Founders Fund and our friends from Web2Asia. The tour took the group to Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai.
• Startonomics Beijing | In Beijing, we co-organized the “Startonomics” event where a lot of interesting things were said.
• Startup2Startup Beijing | Based on the popular US format, we helped put this event together, giving a chance to early stage startups to get mentored by experienced execs and investors.
• BarCamp Shanghai| After attending this event, we’re thinking about working on the Beijing chapter. We presented there on the topic of “Digital Identity“.
• And now for something completely different… | Since we’re not always working, we also attended TEDxShanghai where Kris Krug, author and technologist said “If you don’t stick it on the internet, it didn’t happen“. Surely, presentations with no Twitter back channel or events not reported about are like “trees falling in a forest”. As a side note, we are giving a hand to the upcoming TEDxBeijing. Is that work?
]]> http://www.plus8star.com/2009/07/01/if-you-dont-stick-it-on-the-internet-it-did-not-happen/feed/ 0 http://www.plus8star.com/2009/04/27/celebrating-100000-views-of-our-presentations-some-thoughts/ http://www.plus8star.com/2009/04/27/celebrating-100000-views-of-our-presentations-some-thoughts/#comments Mon, 27 Apr 2009 07:30:33 +0000 plus8star http://www.plus8star.com/?p=201
read more..]]> A few days ago while exchanging ideas with our friends at Slideshare (“the YouTube of presentations” that is possibly going to monetize better than YouTube and certainly cost a lot less), we thought about making a count of the views and downloads we had over the 20+ presentations we put on there. All those presentations we put online after presenting at a couple of dozens events around the world in the past year or so (Beijing, Helsinki, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Paris, San Francisco, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo, Washington DC, …).

We mentioned previously that we had an “A-Ah” moment when after a conference in Sydney last year with 300+ in attendance, we had several thousands online viewers of our presentation, some of which led to… more presentations (we were invited to GSP East in Washington then to San Francisco thanks to it) but also many contacts, leads and several research & strategy projects. Should we spend more efforts on “offline appearance” or PPT design?

In addition to having more time to share insights and interesting stories in conferences than in blog posts, conferences are still a very good value proposition in terms of branding and visibility. Someone wrote that he was now preparing presentations so that they could be posted online. You’ll see below that this is not a bad idea as the “online reach” is way higher than “offline reach”.

In most conferences we join, the audience varies between a few dozens to a few hundreds, now here are the figures for the presentations we put online:

Total presentations: 24 + 3 off-site presentations
Total views: 101,563
Total downloads: 6,978
Most downloads/views: Mobile payment

Top 5 views:
#1 | Comparison of Leading SNS, notably thanks to the interview by ReadWriteWeb
#2 | Comparison of mobile SNS
#3 | Inside QQ (the 2009 update is coming – a bit delayed by projects ^_^; )
#4 | Digital Korea
#5 | Mobile SNS – best practices from Asia

Our favorites:

• Overview | Asia’s best of breed
• Mobile | Is 3G a dog or a demon? Hints from 7 years of 3G hype in Asia
• China | Mobile & Web innovation in China
• Korea | Digital Korea
• Japan | Mobile handsets innovation
• Online video | Future of TV and Video from Asia
• Virtual worlds | Virtual worlds in Asia
• East & West | The Digital Silk Road
• E-commerce | From o-commerce to e-commerce
• Creativity | Inspireware

In addition to providing exposure, Slideshare also offers many interesting resources. To name a few in our field, we gladly recommend Morgan Stanley’s star analyst Mary Meerker’s slideshows, CIC Data’s China IWOM presentations by Chief IWOMer Sam Flemming and Sequoia Capital’s “RIP Good Times“.

While experimenting with remote presenting (via Skype, for instance), it is interesting to consider the value of being physically somewhere vs. being “reachable” via IM, email, Twitter or else during an event. Our feeling is that many event organizers are yet to tap into the value of enabling higher levels of discovery and connectivity between on-site and off-site participants, as well as providing exposure and connectivity not only during but also before and after events. If you know of good examples of “conference 2.0″ or best practices, you are welcome to contribute ideas on twitter with the tag “#event20″.

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