Ejovi Nuwere

I’m back in NYC now and recovering from jetlag. You would figure with all the travel I do that I’d have a proven routine for dealing with jetlag. I don’t.

As always I consider my travels learning experiences more than anything. I learned a lot this time and met with plenty of interesting people. Like Brian Tannura an American in Japan who has become the vending machine king. A strange story of unlikely success that he explained on camera for my fellow ejovien’s (people who read my blog, just made it up).

My trip and speech at Korea University went over well. Koreans are much better English speakers than Japanese, no idea why that is, though the hotel staff preferred to speak to me in Japanese rather than English. They get more Japanese tourist than they do American. I think there is a strong sense of nationalism in Korea that is very much overt. I think the nationalism in Japan is much more hidden. People say young Japanese aren’t nationalistic but I was in Japan during the world cup, when push comes to shove the Japanese are extremely nationalistic.

Korea is wired with fiber to most homes. There is a huge hacking culture which was a surprise to me. Where there is access there are hackers. I was surprised because Japan, a very close neighbor has almost no hacking culture. Power of Community is a security / hacker conference organized in Korea that expects a few thousand attendees rivaling the attendances of the longest running hacker conference in the world, Defcon.

In Korea there is a strong sense of the importance of security and innovation, missing from Japan. And now I’m back in NYC in the cold of October wondering why I’m here with the weather turning against me.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 8:55 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.