November 19, 2007

My first trip to Korea

Last week I visited Korea for the first time. The primary reason was to give an invited keynote talk at the International Semantic Web Conference. I have posted about that talk separately. This post is about what else I did on my trip to Korea.

The conference came at a busy time for me so, I had to keep my trip to Korea very short (less than 4 days on the ground!). This was sad for me because I have heard about Korea for such a long time, having grown up with Korean family (my step-father was Korean). I did manage to make a visit to two interesting Korean companies.

First was NHN, the parent company of Naver, Korea’s dominant web portal / search engine. Naver pioneered human powered search, as now seen in Yahoo Answers, among others. It turns out that the technical folks at NHN are already collaborating with the tech folks at Powerset on Hbase, the Powerset-initiated open source project for big distributed tables, ala Google’s BigTable. They are also working with a local university to apply Hbase to distributed storage of large RDF databases, a perfect tie in to the activity at the Semantic Web conference. NHN is a pretty amazing company, especially for one that most people in the USA have never heard of.

Second, I visited KT, formerly Korea Telecom. I met with there with SanKu Jo, Vice Present of New Business Group, and Dongmyun Lee, Vice President of BcN business Unit, who are also quite visionary in semantic technology.

While there was not much time for fun, my hosts at NHN (Paul Sung and Ed Yoon) picked me up at the airport and took me out to a meal at a traditional Korean restaurant. We sat on the floor which was heated from below. I was told this is traditional for Korea and it makes for a comfortable bed, without needing a mattress. It also helps relieve the fatigue of sitting cross legged on the floor while eating from the low table. The next day, during an hour between my company visits and catching the next flight, we went to a high-up mountain fortress in the clouds, from which we could see all of Seoul.

My only other time out in Korea was at a dinner in Busan with the conference organizers and other invited speakers. We went out to a Korean seafood restaurant. The highlight of this for me was eating some other-worldly sea creature that responded to prodding as though it didn’t realize it was no longer alive.

Although I only got a taste of Korea this time, I look forward to visiting again soon and hopefully to have more time to see this amazing country.

Posted by barney on November 19, 2007 at 9:13 pm | No Comments

November 9, 2006

John Battelle interviews Yahoo’s David Filo and Bradley Horowitz at Web2.0

Here are my raw notes from the talk just now.
It came right after a fascinating panel with teens and parents, in which almost everyone knew and used Google and Myspace, with Yahoo receding in the distance. In contrast, David and Bradley seemed very positive about Yahoo’s situation and prospects for the future. They have had competitors over the last 12 years, and this isn’t much different from the past.

At least we had a promise from David Filo that there wouldn’t be any announcement about Microsoft acquiring Yahoo tomorrow.

continue reading the John Battelle interviews Yahoo’s David Filo and Bradley Horowitz at Web2.0

Posted by barney on November 9, 2006 at 5:32 pm | No Comments

November 4, 2006

Amazon Web Services and Powerset in Business Week article

Jeff Bezos Cover of Business Week
Rob Hof at Business Week just came out with an article called Jeff Bezos’s Risky Bet. The article talks about Amazon’s Web Services initiative, in which Amazon is enabling other companies to take advantage of the massive technology infrastructure Amazon has developed to power its own operations:

Amazon has spent 12 years and $2 billion perfecting many of the pieces behind its online store. By most accounts, those operations are now among the biggest and most reliable in the world. “All the kinds of things you need to build great Web-scale applications are already in the guts of Amazon,” says Bezos. “The only difference is, we’re now exposing the guts, making [them] available to others.”

This article was the first to announce that Powerset is one of the major early customers for Amazon’s new Electric Compute Cloud (EC2) Web service. Here are the relevant paragraphs, which mention Powerset and some of our key angel investors:

continue reading the Amazon Web Services and Powerset in Business Week article

Posted by barney on November 4, 2006 at 2:57 pm | No Comments

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