I’ve seen the future… and it’s just 10 hours away

Posted September 12th, 2006 at 9:33 am by David Riemer, Yahoo! Connected Life

Number of Comments 2 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

In this neck of the business woods, where thriving web companies are created virtually overnight, it’s often about the next, next thing. I work with a team at Yahoo! that is creating new digital experiences on emerging mobile, digital home, and other devices, so knowing “what’s next” is crucial.

Recently, I’ve had the good fortune of looking right into the future, and the good news for time travelers is that it’s only 10 hours away (from California anyway). No teleporter required. Hop on any flight to Tokyo or Seoul, and, well, just look around! I’m lucky enough to have visited our teams in both Japan and Korea in the past few months, and it’s been a revelation.

Our team is spending more and more time with our Asian team leaders, because so much innovation is happening there. We all know the story of Cyworld in Korea presaging MySpace and Facebook in the U.S., but many wonder if that story will repeat itself. Of course it will (and it already has)! Our Korean team showed me a web site they have just launched for mashing up videos online. This concept originated at our Berkeley research lab but the Korean market has been ready to embrace it.

During our visits to Korea and Japan, we saw kids living the digital lifestyle everywhere we went. We visited consumer-electronics companies that are inventing devices that would make Steve Jobs’ head spin. In this “future” world where bandwidth is bursting from wireline fiber and broadband wireless spectrum and portable devices are all-powerful, it seems that almost anything is possible. Web interfaces are routinely in 3D, pocket TVs are appearing on the subways, phones have become the Swiss Army knife of daily life, and virtual economies are blossoming like so many floral wallpapers on Cyworld. (The personal Cyworld tour we got from one of our young product managers in Korea was a highlight of the trip!)

I watched people using their phones to enter subway turnstiles and photograph barcodes in magazines and web sites to buy ringtones. I met with our mobile team at Yahoo! Japan and learned how families are using GPS-enabled phones to monitor their kids; how phones with motion-control sensors are being used to track the stars in the sky; and how real-time auctions are exploding in the mobile space.

It was fascinating to see and hear how phones are becoming debit and credit cards, gaming devices, high-end IDs, and even TVs. But most importantly, we’re seeing that phones are being used as — drum roll, please — advanced communications devices! The only difference is that people have completely different expectations for how they communicate. This is a world of mobile blogs, new messaging tools, personal videos, and photo sharing. In Korea, we saw mobile photo blog applications that you could get lost in for days and a Yahoo! web site that you could use to create your own mobile web page. Anyone can be a mobile web developer in Seoul!

Thank goodness we have operations in Japan and Korea where our teams share their ideas. They are also some of the first to deploy the more advanced Connected Life technologies that we’re developing elsewhere in the world. We’re even launching a mobile service in Japan with a Yahoo! logo hot key on every phone to take you directly to your Yahoo! stuff.

Think global, act mobile, I always say…

So if you want to know “what’s coming next,” just jump on a plane and take a trip to Akihabara and Harajuku!

David Riemer
VP Marketing, Yahoo! Connected Life

2 Comments Add your own

Comment havi hoffman | September 12th, 2006 at 9:59 am

thanks for the thoughty post — let the mobilization begin. (if only we had ubiquitous bandwidth and coherent mobile infrastructure back in the USA… )

Comment Mark | May 18th, 2010 at 10:39 pm

Great Post Dave.
I live 12 hours away from Harajuku by bus in country Japan. Its a totally different world here. Yahoo totally dominates the internet in Japan. We have a white-water rafting business in Shikoku called HappyRaft. While we live deep in the countryside, our clients come from the bustling city and are all coming through mobile network sites.
Google is way behind here…
Next time your in Japan maybe look us up