Alan and I have written and spoken a lot about CyWorld. CyWorld is probably the most advanced converged service around broadband internet, 3G mobile telecoms, videogaming and music.
So briefly for those who might not know what is CyWorld. It is the online virtual home (mini home page), similar to Habbo Hotel, in that you have a personalized room which you can decorate to your tastes. You get to make your own persona through a customizable avatar (online digital puppet) called a "minime". So if you would like your room to be a clean white, minimalist, with some abstract art, and a grand piano. So be it. Another person may want to copy what the current real home is like. Someone may like the room to continuously change and evolve. Who likes bright colors, whatever. The same with the avatar. What color skin, what length hair, what dress, even what sex do you want your avatar to be. Your mini home page and your mini-me.
Then you can visit other virtual rooms and others can visit yours. So far its like Habbo. Then it adds blogging, your journals and diaries and thoughts. It adds picture sharing. All of this either through broadband internet or 3G mobile phone. So its also a mobile blogging service - in fact 12 million Koreans are active in mobile blogging through CyWorld (contrast that with 27 million active online bloggers in the whole fixed internet world globally)
CyWorld has been built very intelligently in the context of the digital Korea, the country with the highest penetration of broaband internet, highest usage of online videogaming, highest penetration of cameraphones, highest penetration of 3G advanced mobile phones, and where already over half of all mobile phone users make payments with their mobile phone (replacing credit cards). Oh yes, and Korea is miles ahead of everybody in the new handheld digital TV technologies, having launched both a satellite and terrestrial variant of portable digital TV technologies (ie building in your digital TV set-top box right into the mobile phone handset). In just six months they signed up 400,000 paying customers to this type of mobile TV service.
With this kind of digital Korea environment, the innovation within CyWorld has been incredible. On the one hand, while initially targetted at kids (like Habbo Hotel) it has become the place where housewives share cooking recipes; where politicians share their thoughts on policies; where pop stars and celebrities interact with fans.
The money involved? CyWorld has its own currency, the Dotori (ie "acorn") and the trade of virtual goods and services in CyWorld is already over 300,000 USD worth of Dotoris per day. Or 10 million dollars worth of trade per month. Quite a vibrant marketplace where you consider it was not set up to be an e-commerce place like an Amazon or eBay. One of the areas of exceptional success is the sale of digital music. Universal Music said that CyWorld has become its biggest single sales outlet in all of Korea, for the sales of music. But you don't buy full-track downloads or ringing tones through CyWorld (there are other services like Melon for that). All of the music sales in CyWorld are purely to entertain your guests in your room. The music is sold as background music. But certainly, if I am a good host, I would want to play for you the kind of music that I would play if you visited my real home. Why not.
With all this. CyWorld is already used by a third of all Koreans. It is the world's biggest mobile blogging service by users and revenues. It is a massive hit by the youngsters with over 90% of the under 20 year olds maintaining a minihomepage in CyWorld. CyWorld was already launched in China and has about a million paying users there.
Now it is going to be launched in America. Our blogging colleague Russell Beattie has blogged about it at his blogsite, here is the link to the story [CyWorld US to Launch Next Week].
Will it be big? Time will tell. But my money is on CyWorld. They have a very good record of finding the right mixture of online, mobile and media, bringing in that "Y of Convergence" that Alan and I so frequently talk about, combining internet, mobile telecoms and media.
I am from Spain and i have been living in the US for a while, and i also have Korean friend who i usually visit. It is awesome go there and see how nice is their technology and how backward we are over here.
My question is if we are going to have Cyworld over here and if it´s going to be welcome among the users. we do use Menssenger spaces but I´m very disappointed with it. You cannot customize them or at list not enought.
thank you for your attention, and im sure Cyworld is going to triumph
Posted by: igor | December 21, 2006 at 01:34 PM