Daum continues to give a positive impression to Korean Internet professionals by promoting a Daum edition of Firefox 3 in partnership with the Mozilla foundation.

Korea is often considered as home of the best Internet in the world, but one fact still keeps the Korean Internet in the past: about 99% of Koreans use Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows.

An early government initiative required a proprietary ActiveX encryption for every secure transaction, resulting in practice in banning all alternative solutions and pushing local web agencies to build non-standard and IE-centric websites.

Consequence: the Korean Web is hard to export, invisible to major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, etc…) and almost inaccessible for foreigners (who often use alternative browsers ).

Remedying to this situation became a recent government priority and Daum is certainly one of the most proactive companies in this domain: it was the first major Korean portal to be fully W3C compliant and to implement strict cross-browser compatibility and accessibility standards.

As a part of its new online strategy, Quiksilver Korea has just launched a new Café on Naver called “Quiksilver Life”.

Even though the brand identity is very strong in North America and in most western countries, the Quiksilver brand is still largely unfamiliar to a lot of young Koreans.

Therefore, following our recommendations, Quiksilver decided to start its online presence by opening a Naver Café that is clearly targeted at young people and provide them with a popular tool that let them interact with the brand.

Our work consisted mainly on creating the design, implementing the Flash video on the homepage (which was quite tricky due to Naver’s policy) and working with Quiksilver to make sure that the Café appeals to its core audience.

You can find out more on http://cafe.naver.com/quiksilverlife

Created in May 2006, Afreeca became rapidly one of the most popular free Internet TV broadcasting service in the peninsula when more than 7 million people watched live streaming of candlelight vigils against the U.S. beef imports in the spring of 2008.

On Afreeca, you can find live streaming of all major Korean TV channels like MBC, KBS 1, KBS 2, KBS Sport and SBS Sport. But the most interesting part is that people can create and broadcast their own TV channel.

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We definitely had to provide more space to our team and we did find a solution within our building by just breaking down the wall. We are located in one of the oldest building in Seoul just behind the Deoksugung palace in a quiet and beautiful street just next to the famous Chongdong theater near city hall.
Have a look at our building on Daum Maps.
More picture on Flickr!

This year, Asiance will be main partner and co-organizer of the Lift Conference in Asia.

Lift is an international Conference, originally from Europe (happening in both Geneva and Marseille) and now in Korea, that focuses on future trends and social impacts of new technologies through a mix of presentations and interactive installations. Previous speakers include Vince Cerf (“Father of the Internet”), Florence Devouard (Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation), Jaewoong Lee (Founder of the Korean portal Daum), as well as famous authors like Bruce Sterling, artists, researchers, investors, designers, etc..

This year, Lift Asia will happen on September 3 & 4 in Jeju Island and the conference will be themed “Serious Fun!”

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