Thomas Crampton, sometime correspondent for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times, is usually the one pointing the camera and reporting the wisdom of others, not gracing a lens and sharing it himself. So when he does, it’s almost always worth a listen.
Such was the case with a recent short and insightful interview that blogger Monty Metzger captured after Crampton moderated a panel on the topic of social media in Asia at Le Web in Paris.The big takeaway was that despite Asia often being lumped geographically together, the region has some tremendously different “digital topographies”. Crampton cited the differences between South Korea’s near complete Internet penetration and Cambodia’s relatively small Internet penetration as examples.
He also spoke about how significant mobile is in the Asian market:
“Mobile, mobile, mobile–it’s a hugely mobile part of the world.””The caution I have about this, like a lot of things in Asia, you don’t know whether it’s going to export. Whether it’s just something that’s going to stay in that country, in that culture, because some of [the technologies] are very precise to that culture.”
Check out the interview here:
