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.

Zoho and Toufee from India- http://www.zoho.com/, http://www.toufee.com

Zoho makes a set of web based productivity tools. They seem to be pitched against Google in this space. Toufee.com that lets one make online flash presentations.

There is a whole bunch interesting services from China. Meetpretty.com (A site to cash in on the increasing number of beauty parlours and women interested in beauty products),

SGE: Let’s come back to Singapore, what are the immediate conditions you need to make web 2.0 a viable industry here? Which aspect of web 2.0 should we focus on, application of web 2.0 technologies to industries or development of web 2.0 technologies?
Preetam Rai: One thing we much understand is that there is no way South East Asia based sites will get the valuation that the US or Chinese services get as we don’t have the user base. And this is particularly true of Singapore. Given that constraint, I think we can develop smaller fun applications – I see some food recommendation sites. I think there is nothing wrong in being a small service as long as you are useful to the community here. To develop serious applications we need developers and any entrepreneur you ask here will tell you how difficult it is to get developers. The good thing is that there is interest in learning AJAX and related technologies. Also, I see more user-generated events like e27 happening with people meeting each other and talking about ideas. This is the first step and we should let this interaction happen. I am sure interesting ideas will emerge with time.

The other thing is to develop services for global/regional audience. I think Singapore has some advantages in building education and travel related services. I like the idea of travel community site Travelfish, a site run by Australians. Singaporeans with so much travel experience should be able to do such content+community site.

SGE: Do you think that web 2.0, after the success of YouTube and MySpace, has passed the tornado phase in the “crossing the chasm” (a concept by Geoffrey Moore)? Are there any scope to really thrive in this industry?
Preetam Rai: Many people with ideas of developing web 2.0 sites define success as selling their service for couple of millions of dollars. I would define “thrive” as a service that runs with users creating content and real revenues coming in. There is still scope, we must look at niche areas. There is a web 2.0 site I found in Japan (sorry, can’t find the link now) that lets schools do their timetables online. Again these may not be mass market solutions but schools would give you money to subscribe to this service. Once you have the data on what teacher is doing what class, you could let schools exchange or hire teachers from each other and build more value for your service.

SGE: If a young entrepreneur wants to venture into this space, what are the three important lessons that you need him to know?
Preetam Rai: I do not have any big lessons as I am myself trying to put shape to couple of entrepreneurial ideas. These points are from someone who is probably at the same stage as people reading this

• 1. Be close to the end-user community – try to hang out as much as possible with your target audience.
• 2. Attend low key tech events in India/China/Philippines – the best place to network with individual developers or small companies who might be able to take on your development/user experience work.
• 3. Don’t give up if you see someone else developing a product in the same space as you. More competition means there is someone else who thinks that the idea is worth doing.

SGE: We understand that you are also part of the 2nd Life (SL) community in Singapore. What attracted you into SL?
Preetam Rai: I like the possibility that SL (and other virtual worlds) offers for communication (IM with gestures) team work and brainstorming. You can change the world around you depending on the context.

SGE: In the space of game development and virtual worlds, do you see that as the next revolution after web 2.0?
Preetam Rai: While I do believe that the web will one day be 3D (with text elements co-existing). I would say web 2.0 will evolve in to hardware wi-fi widgets that we carry with us. One of the big problems with web 2.0 is the signup fatigue. People sign up but then hardly use the service. An hardware widget dedicated to a particular service with a little screen, dedicated UI and wi-fi connection will always keep you connected to the service. Another interesting area is building services over IM. Your user’s IM is always on and your service can appear as a IM buddy that the user can interact with.

SGE: What is required before the transition from web 2.0 into virtual worlds fully happen or instead, do you foresee any parallel development?
Preetam Rai: One can see web pages inside SL, I think HTML pages will still be around. People might write a layer over HTML that renders some information on the page as 3-D objects parts of a web page but I think there is no real need to convert all kind of information into 3-D.

SGE:Thank you for joining us in this interview, sharing with us your insights. We wish you all the best in your future endeavours.

Related Links:
[1] Preetam’s presentation on web 2.0 in Asia in the recent E27 IV: You are the Media in this URL.
[2] Preetam, E27 SG Unconference And interesting Web Services in East Asia.

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