Interview with Preetam Rai, Educator and Media Socialist

We have a lot of talk lately about web 2.0 in Singapore. An interesting question to ask will be, “What is the development of web 2.0 in Asia look like? Are there any interesting web 2.0 companies in China, Japan or Korea that we might learn some best practices from? To enlighten us with the subject, we are honoured to have Preetam Rai, an educator, media socialist, technological ethnographer & educator (coined by Kevin Lim, from Theory.istheReason.com), and also an editor of the famous Tomorrow.SG to offer us his thoughts about Web 2.0 companies, culture and virtual worlds in the Asian landscape.

SGE: Hello, Preetam, welcome to SG Entrepreneurs. To begin with, can you tell us about your background and what you are currently doing?
Preetam Rai: Currently, I help some teachers understand technology and use collaborative web tools with their students. I started my career working with tech start-ups in India in the mid 90s. Before that I ran a small company specialising in cable TV advertising. I have been travelling and living East and South East Asia for the last 8 years.

SGE: Let us start on the subject on web 2.0, what are the common features that you see in most successful companies in this industry? (please give some examples)
Preetam Rai: Ease of use, the most successful companies for example YouTube or Flickr can be used by someone with very little technical expertise. The second feature is ease of sharing. Both these services are good at this too allowing people to plug the video and images on their blogs etc.

SGE: Of course, a lot of discussion has been centered whether Asia is really ready for a web 2.0 industry. For example, the concepts of open access and group collaborations are not very well received by the community here. Do you think that this is so? If so, how do Asians break the mold to embrace the web 2.0 ethos?
Preetam Rai: Chinese web users have been very active on forums and online discussion boards for almost a decade and same is true for Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Singapore. I don’t think that the problem is with people not used to group activities. I think the problem is size of users. I think Asian developers want to be like the US web 2.0 guys and that I think is too much to aim for. China has a fairly successful web 2.0 community and so does Japan and to a smaller extant Korea and Taiwan. Outside these territories the net-using population is too small.

SGE: Since you have travelled widely around Asia, have you seen any web 2.0 companies that are of interest to you? If so, can you tell us which Asian web 2.0 companies have impressed you and why?
Preetam Rai:

Douban from China – http://www.douban.net/
This was one of the early Asian web 2.0 sites I saw. If you are familiar with Chinese sites, they tend to very crowded with information. Douban created a very friendly user interface. They are a reading habits-based social network which itself is not a new idea. Chinese are big consumers of books and I think this service helps people find recommendation.

Mixi from Japan – http://mixi.jp/
The Japanese are very privacy conscious. While there are big blogging platforms in Japan (livedoor etc.), there was a need for a closed network where only your close friend and people approved by you can read your thoughts. Mixi implemented these features and again with a decent UI. Mixi users also engage in buying and selling stuff with other and that gives more value to this network.