http://www.bing.com/twitter/ just opened 20 minutes ago!
Anyhow…
Web 2.0 Summit just opened yesterday (and is still ongoing until Oct 22, 2009) at San Fransisco. Probably the biggest event in the world for web 2.0 business, nearly every company whose service avid web surfer have used participates in it. CEO of MySpace, President of PayPal, Chairman of NY Times, VP of Facebook, and many other representatives from renowned companies, Google, O’Reilly, and so on.
The recent activities in the web 2.0 world across the globe probably indicate that there are still vast of opportunity in web business, regardless of the burst of dot-com bubble in 2001.
The technology-heavy NASDAQ Composite index peaked at 5,048 in March 2000, reflecting the high point of the dot-com bubble. (ref: Wikipedia)
Morgan Stanley even predicts recovery in tech sector, especially in mobile internet sector enabled by smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone (ref: VentureBeat). A quote on the article:
Japan is years ahead of the U.S. in mobile data and Meeker believes it will serve as a model for what will come. She said that the U.S. has a long way to go to catch up with the patterns of mobile Internet usage in Japan. By 2013, the number of heavy web mobile users will triple to a billion users.
The article makes some promising prediction on mobile web businesses, but I still doubt Japan would also enjoy a similar growth. Indeed, Japan has always been ahead of any other countries in the world in mobile phone technology. However, Japanese mobile phones has myriad varieties and that there is currently no any standard interface across all these phones. Despite their advanced hardware, handsets here often have primitive, clunky interfaces. Most handsets have no way to easily synchronize data with PCs as the iPhone and other smartphones do. Because each handset model is designed with a customized user interface, development is time-consuming and expensive (ref: NY Times).
Moreover, the mobile market in Japan has enjoyed big waves for quite some time and there is a possibility that it will saturate soon. Will the recent introduction of iPhone (which has standard interface) in Japan be able to produce spark in the market? Probably. As far as I know, there have been 3 startup companies established soon after the sale of iPhone in Japan. (I forgot where I put the links)
Anyway, in the interview with Twitter CEO, Evan Williams, in one of the Web 2.0 Summit session, he mentioned Indonesia and Japan being the top 5 country users of Twitter. It is actually surprising to me to see Indonesia in the big 5 list considering that there was not much web activity when I left there. You can see the full interview here: TechCrunch.
Related posts:
Recent Comments