Ejovi Nuwere

I lost my case agaisn’t soumushou. That and work related stuff has left me a little less motivated to share my thoughts / feelings on the blog. Sorry for the absense.

Today I landed in Seoul, Korea. Next week I will give a speech at Korea University on VoIP security, Dug Song will also be speaking and we plan on hanging out with Korean hackers (techies) after the speech.

Its my first time in Korea. First impressions, people stare a lot. I went to a restaurant for lunch and watched as other dinners used a knife and fork to eat sliced pickles, the kind of sliced pickles you find on hamburgers. They also ate bread with a fork. They put the bread on a fork and dip it into olive oil and take tiny bites out of it.

While in Japan I came to the conlusion that Japan is a great place to start a company, assuming you have connections. The vast majority of consumers are concentrated in two major cities, Tokyo and Osaka. And because few companies tend to corner markets if you make one or two partnerships you can build a extremely large company overnight. If you don’t have any connections or can’t make connections, its not such a great place to start a company.

Take for example icecream. Lets assume you are at a party and meet the purchaser for 7-11 Japan and they agree to sell your icecream. Because the convience store market is cornered by 4 or 5 companies that are on nearly every corner in Japan, doing a deal, even with the smallest of the 5 could mean having your product placed in thousands of convience stores over night. Sounds good to me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 14th, 2006 at 5:07 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.