Web 2.0 Killed the Moleskine Star: How Web Apps are Transforming the Entire Country

SungHwan Kim, on a subway commute, reads blogs and newspapers using Web RSS readers. He also watches Youtube or even Joost on his ride back home on the highway. Inter-collegiate project groups and corporate teams have meetings at public parks taking notes and collaborating through wikis. People in suits walk around checking their schedules on online calendars. Young couples sit in a café searching and planning for their next trip to Hawaii.

Sounds like scenarios of the future, right? Nope. These are real events happening in Korea. With faster-than-DSL ubiquitous wireless access to the Web everywhere in Seoul, you can use web apps walking around, out in the parks, riding buses and trains, or even sitting in a public bathroom. Just for $500, you can get a UMPC the size of a book. The mixture of all of this with Web 2.0 will get you the future of Web 2.0: the Web in our everyday life.

In this session, we’ll discuss what the next steps for web applications are by taking examples from Korea. In particular, we’ll take a look at various examples of the usage patterns in Springnote, an online notebook application by Openmaru, and examine how web apps are replacing many traditional offline tools and media and how they are transforming all our activities at schools, work, and in our daily lives.