In Asian countries, iPhone won’t be as popular due to the high number of “other” devices out on the market.

iPhone price cuts in Japan prove that iPhone is still priced too high for Asian consumers.

Let me explain why iPhone cannot be popular in Asia:

When I used to live in South Korea for years, we didn’t goto BestBuy or the local AT&T shop.  For the cheapest prices in South Korea, there’s this “town” called the Electronic Town.  You go here and there’s about 1000 different phones in each store.  (And there’s about 1000 different cellphone shops lined up everywhere)

Above is a screenshot of a typical “electronic” mall in Korea.  As you can see, this is just one of the many (usually around 7-10 floors) floors in just one of the many electronic malls.

Each of those circles represent a cellphone shop.  Some cell Samsung phone, LG phones, and some sell a mixed variety.  Each of these cellphone shops have different prices and the consumer must haggle for the best prices.

Now, can you see how iPhone can pop in one of these stores usually sponsored by big companies in Korea like LG and Samsung?  Even if iPhone does get sold in the stores, there’s usually 100s of other great phones at fraction of the price.

Aside from competing in these cell phone “malls”, iPhone itself isn’t really practical enough for people to cash out double, triple for another similar-grade Samsung phone.

On top of that, Asian countries have about 2-3 years advanced models of Samsung and LG phones.  The Samsung and LG phones you see in America are about 2-3 years old, they are the “leftovers” Samsung need to sell off.

So the mystery is, there’s so many new, innovative phones in Korea, why would you need iPhone?

Most phones in Korea come with air-frequency-enabled TV, iPhone is still selling outdated technology (YouTube) to us American consumers.

Don’t get me wrong, iPhone still have the best mobile browser, but it’s simply made for the “English” speaking countries, not localized for any Asian people.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at how popular Google search engine is in Korea, not very popular indeed, worse than Yahoo by many factors, and Yahoo ranks lower than Korean search engines.

Localization is not a part of the iPhone, therefore failure of sales in Japan and probably other Asian countries.

I think for iPhone to be popular, there’s gotta be reasons more than the great Safari browser, right now, that’s the only reason I’d buy one.

For the ultimate DLP TV, you might want to consider this Sanyo Z2000 HD Projector instead, capable of projecting 80-inches of viewing HD.

All said, for the price of this projector overseas, it’s a bargain. The only downsides are that you have to replace the lamp after so many hours, which is not inexpensive. But for a home theater–WOW! This would sure inspire me to stay home and watch movies–and save the 1800 yen it costs to watch them in Japan! On that note, purchasing this projector in Japan at the current going price of 268,000 yen in a store would be equivalent to watching 148 movies in a theater. While that sounds like a lot, it only translates to about 300 hours of video time, and upon asking, the lamp should last about 3,000 hours on the brightest setting, meaning that you have only covered 10% of your lamp by the time you finish watching the movie theater price equivalent in Japan. Not bad at all–especially when you add that you can use this to play your video game consoles as well. The Sanyo is also very cheap compared to similar models, providing amazing lens shifting for a similar price that others sell theirs for. I suggest you go pick one up if you’re a hardcore movie watcher or gamer!

Here’s a screenshot of the HD screen projected:

via akihabaranews

Wow, now you can use njection.com to find out where the speed camera traps are. Since I live in San Francisco and there are so many speed traps everywhere, I did a search for my zip code and that’s what you see in the above screenshot. Pretty accurate too as I can verify some of the speed traps from back of my head.

You can also download this information to your GPS device, how cool is that?

Hopefully less tickets for you and you come back to Zedomax for more… :p

Shannon Atkinson launched Njection.com as a place for gearheads to shoot the breeze about anything and everything auto-related. It wasn’t long before he sensed a theme in the posts. “One of the biggest topics on the site became speed traps and cameras,” Atkinson told us. “People want to know about those whether they’re a truck driver, a road warrior or just someone who wants to drive without worrying about it.”

So Atkinson added Speedtrap, a feature that combines drivers’ tips with Microsoft Virtual Earth to identify speed traps - either a real, live cop with a radar gun or one of those damned cameras - throughout the U.S. There’s even a few foreign cities, such as London, Toronto and Rome.

Now, the information can be downloaded directly to portable navigation devices from Garmin, Mio, TomTom and others via Njection.com so that drivers can pinpoint speed traps on a given route. Atkinson says the identity of Njection’s many speed-trap tipsters is kept confidential, and they include more than a few police officers who like the site because what “they’re mostly interested in is getting people to drive safely.”

via Wired

Hi All,

We just launched private beta testing of SiteHoppin Toolbar.

You can e-mail me at zedomax [at] gmail.com to get a private beta invitation code then go here.

Remember, we are only looking for 1,000 beta testers at this point so I highly suggest you get in early as the doors will close within couple days.

Here’s a screenshot of the new SiteHoppin Toolbar:

Basically, it let’s you surf the web, bookmark sites, and hop them really really really fast. And also, private beta testers will become the “power” users, just like power users on Digg…

Cheers~

Max

HeeKyong Yoon from SpringNote.com, was nice enough to chat with me on their cool “wiki” product, SpringNote:

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

FYI, SpringNote.com is a subsidiary of NcSoft.com, the creators of legendary online game, Lineage.

Well, I tried out SpringNote, here’s a screenshot:

It’s very simple to use, just like a real notebook except you have unlimited number of pages plus you get bunch of already-made templates like Bookshelf, Monthly Plan, Recipe, and etc…etc…

What I found most interesting was that it is a “wiki” site but you don’t need to know any wiki markup language and start editing your online notes right away. You also have the option to share your notes or keep them private.

As far as technology goes, I love the fact that SpringNote has incorporated a LOT of AJAX. (probably mostly AJAX)

I might start using it more real soon. The only downside I saw was that SpringNote’s servers are hosted in Korea. Although the site does fairly fast, I measured, 168ms ping times from my PC in San Francisco.

FYI, Zedomax.com get 41ms ping times, 4 times faster as servers are hosted in San Diego, California.

Although they could keep running servers from Korea, I think they can grab much larger audience in the U.S. by simply serving their pages from servers in the U.S. (Besides, it’s probably much cheaper to host it here.)

Other than that, I find SpringNote as the next generation online note web app. I will have to dump my MS Outlook all together and start using SpringNotes, way simpler and easier for mass collaboration.

David, an affiliate manager from Etology.com, has given me a $25 coupon for FREE traffic for NEW affiliates.

To test out Etology.com and get $25 worth of free traffic from their advertising network, you can sign up for an affiliate account here, then use the coupon code “01KLSY” at ad checkout to get the $25 of free advertising.

Here’s an interview with David from Etology.com:

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

(Thanks again David for the interview and your time!)

Etology.com offers a wide range of advertising/publisher’s programs including text ads, banners, thumbnails, and more. They offer a wide range of banner ads, which I liked since I need to be flexible when I am offering advertising on my blog.

The greatest feature about Etology.com is that they allow you to set your own prices for your ads.

For mine, I chose a 125×125 pixel ad, I haven’t put it on this blog yet, but I will do that later this week to test out the effectiveness and also conversion rate of Etology.com.

You can also set your ad to be sold at market prices, which is great since there’s a standard price for the advertisers.

For advertisers, it seems like you will have tough time finding the right site to advertise on as there are so many sites at Etology.com as shown in this screenshot of their marketplace:

But Etology.com does offer personal support so you don’t have to do the work and let the affiliate manager find good ones for you.

Another great thing about Etology.com is that they offer 5% commissions on any affiliates you refer. So you can make 5% of any advertising that your friends sell.

I will be trying out Etology.com for banner advertising on my blog later this week and also a breakdown of all affiliate programs will be given at the end of all AdTech 2008 reviews.

Yey, although there has been numerous Jailbreak HOWTOs for the iPhone since the birth of the “Safari-browsing” device, LifeHacker shows you a clear and easy method to jailbreak that iPhone. (Jailbreak is btw a aftermarket firmware/software for your iPhone. jic)

The screenshot app does work; I’m not entirely certain on this point, but I think it required the reinstallation of the BSD Subsystem. Your mileage may vary. That said, I think the 1.1.3 trade-off is worth it, and hopefully—if Apple puts together a reasonable system for downloading and installing applications once the SDK is released next month and apps don’t cost an arm and a leg—this is the last jailbreak you’ll ever need.

via LifeHacker

Google is trying to compete with Wikipedia with its new Knols Project. We don’t know how successful it will be as we have seen Google Video and Youtube before.

But one thing is for sure, Google is trying to get into the Wiki business. (Knol Project is very similar to our QuarterWiki, OneBuckWiki, EntreWiki, FiveDollarWiki, and other wikis that we are developing right now.)

The interface does look pretty neat from the screenshot here:

What amazes us is that we are trying to build the largest commercialized Wiki with our new QuarterWiki but Google is also making similar site. We don’t intend to compete with Google of course, but we think we are going in the right direction if the Big Guy thinks so too.

You can get to the new Knols Project login by going here:

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=knol

But unless you got an invite, you can’t access it. Does anyone want to give us an invite? We’d like to incorporate Knols’ features on our paid wiki sites before Knols’ launch date. Lol…we are being too honest here huh?

Here’s what the Google Knol Project is briefly about:

Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

We do not want to build a walled garden of content; we want to disseminate it as widely as possible. Google will not ask for any exclusivity on any of this content and will make that content available to any other search engine.

As always, a picture is worth a thousands words, so an example of a knol is below (click on the image twice to see the page in full). The main content is real, and we encourage you to read it (you may sleep better afterwards!), but most of the meta-data — like reviews, ratings, and comments — are not real, because, of course, this has not been in the public eye as yet. Again, this is a preliminary version.

[via] OneBuckWiki