Event Wrap-up: Asiajin Readers Meet-up In Taipei

Asiajin held a readers meet-up event in Taipei on Sunday. Several Taiwanese geeks reading our blog came together for networking, and exchanged their perspective on the tech scenes of Taiwan and Japan with Asiajin contributors Akky, Shunichi and Masaru.
Here’s a summary of what we were talking about and what we’ve learned.

Micro-blog services such as Plurk and Twitter have regional characteristic in the level of service activity and user engagement.
What are Taiwan’s most popular web service top 100.
Japanese Internet users prefer to write about what they eat for lunch on their blogs.
In Taiwan, you have to expose your face on your blog in order to make your readers believe you. Otherwise, the readers consider you as being irresponsible for your words.
Forum is the most popular part of the Taiwanese Blogosphere as well as that of Mainland China.
Taiwanese entrepreneurs Jerry Yang (Yahoo!’s co-founder), Steve Chen (YouTube’s co-founder) and Kai-Fu Lee (the founding president of Google China) – All moved from Taiwan to the U.S. in their early days. Most of the meet-up participants believe Taiwan has not born the talented web business players, but the U.S. education system has highly contributed to it.
Most of Taiwanese job sites have numbers in their domain names.
Taiwanese domestic tech market is so small that Taiwanese start-ups make their interest move into the global common platforms such as Facebook and the iPhone.
Approximately a half of all Internet traffic in Taiwan is dominated by Taiwanese Yahoo!(雅虎奇摩)[C]. That’s why it’s so hard for new start-ups to be launched and survive.
You need to get an ICP license to launch a website in Mainland China. And you’ll be also ordered to place servers physically in the country to be authorized by the Chinese government.
A micro social network service in Mainland China, Renjian (人间网, meaning human being. Inaccessible temporarily as of this writing.) is now so popular. It has features similar to the combination of Twitter and IRC, and looks like Google Wave.
When the two sides of the Taiwan Strait shake hands on the ECFA, Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, it makes Taiwan much easier to do business in Mainland China. The participants expect they will be able to enter the Mainland and invest there as easily as do so in Hong Kong.
In order to launch a web business in Mainland China, a Taiwanese company has to set up a joint venture with a Chinese company.
Both sides over the strait use the same language, but doing business in Mainland China is very hard due to a number of complicated regulations.
iPeen(愛評網)[C] is a Taiwan’s popular social network specializing in introducing good places to dine. It started three years ago and the business goes well so far.
In Taiwan, the population of Facebook users has rapidly raised in the last six months because Facebook app Happy Farm(开心农场) attracts the users. The app is developed by Shanghai-based social app developer Five Minutes Inc.(五分钟)[C]. The rapid growth of Facebook users in the country follows Taiwanese Yahoo’s social network service Wretch(無名小站)[C] and will overtake it very soon.
There’s only one Internet start-up who has ever succeeded IPO in Taiwan. The country’s main industry is still remaining in semi-conductor manufacturing business, there’s no boost for breeding more tech business.
When a Taiwanese start-up goes to a venture capital for fundraising, they are always requested to focus on the market of Mainland China.