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Like most young people in the Bay Area, Mike Kim grew up believing that the future of technology was being forged in Silicon Valley. Raised in Piedmont, an affluent suburb of Oakland, Kim was in college during the rise of Facebook, and he watched in amazement as tech start-ups transformed the world around him. After graduating in 2006, he found work in the industry, at Zynga, Monster.com and LinkedIn.
麦克·金(Mike Kim)像美国湾区的大多数年轻人一样，从小就相信硅谷打造着科技的未来。金在皮德蒙特长大，那是奥克兰的一个富裕的郊区。Facebook崛起时，金正在上大学。他惊奇地看着科技初创公司变革着他周围的世界。2006年毕业后，他在科技行业找到了工作，先后效力于Zynga、Monster.com和领英(LinkedIn)。
Then, five months ago, he accepted an offer to work for Woowa Brothers, a South Korean company that runs a food-delivery start-up called Baedal Minjok. The job was great — but living in Seoul was nothing less than a revelation.
后来，就在五个月前，他接受了屋瓦兄弟(Woowa Borthers)的工作机会。这是韩国的一家公司，运营着一家食品递送初创公司，叫做Baedal Minjok。工作本身非常好，而且在首尔生活的经历让他大开眼界。
“When I was in S.F., we called it the mobile capital of the world,” he said. “But I was blown away because Korea is three or four years ahead.” Back home, Kim said, people celebrate when a public park gets Wi-Fi. But in Seoul, even subway straphangers can stream movies on their phones, deep beneath the ground. “When I go back to the U.S., it feels like the Dark Ages,” he said. “It’s just not there yet.”
“在旧金山的时候，我们都把旧金山叫做世界手机之都，”他说。“但是我根本想不到韩国（比旧金山）先进了三、四年。”在美国，金说，公园有了无线网络人们都要额手相庆。但在首尔，即便是乘地铁上下班的人都能在手机上播放流媒体电影，哪怕是在地下很深的地方。“我回到美国，就好像回到了中世纪，”他说。“我们还没发展到那种程度。”
While Silicon Valley is the largest and most enduring locus of tech innovation, a number of cities around the planet are nipping at its heels: Tel Aviv, Berlin, Bangalore. But Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is in a sense the Valley’s closest rival. American investors are beginning to catch on, and venture capital is starting to flow west, across the Pacific. An early-stage American venture firm called 500 Startups recently spun off a small fund called 500 Kimchi, which focuses exclusively on South Korea. Last fall, Goldman Sachs led a round of investment in Woowa Brothers and its delivery service. In May, Google opened a campus in Seoul, its first in Asia. The office is in the trendy district of Gangnam — yes, that Gangnam — which is already home to a growing cluster of mobile start-ups and a handful of technology incubators to mentor them.
尽管硅谷仍是最大也是最持久的科技创新中心，不过世界上的不少城市正在急起直追：特拉维夫、柏林、班加罗尔。但在某种意义上，韩国首都首尔是与硅谷最接近的对手。美国投资者开始意识到这一点，风险投资也向西流动，跨过了太平洋。美国一家名叫创业500(500 Startups)的早期风投公司最近将一项名为“泡菜500”(500 Kimchi)的小基金分离了出来，专门聚焦韩国。去年秋天，高盛集团引领了一轮投资，投向屋瓦兄弟及其递送服务。五月，谷歌公司在首尔开放了一个办公园区。这是谷歌在亚洲的第一个办公园区。办公地点就位于新潮的江南区——没错，就是《江南Style》里的那个江南——这一地区已经聚集了一批手机初创企业，其数量日益增长，那里还有一些科技孵化公司对他们进行指导。
Tim Chae, who runs 500 Kimchi, said that American investors have begun to think of Seoul as a sort of crystal ball. In it, they can glimpse a future where the most ambitious dreams of Silicon Valley — a cashless, carless, everything-on-demand society — have already been realized. Nearly all of Seoul’s residents use smartphones, and many of the services just now gaining in popularity in the United States have been commonplace in South Korea for years.
泡菜500的经营人蒂姆·蔡(Tim Chae)说，美国投资者已经开始把首尔当作某种水晶球，通过它可以看到，硅谷最宏大的梦想——一个无钞、无车、一切应有尽有的社会——已经实现了。几乎所有的首尔居民都用智能手机，很多现在才刚刚在美国流行起来的服务，在韩国早已司空见惯。
Much of this was made possible by two decades of enormous public investment. Seoul is blanketed with free Wi-Fi that offers the world’s fastest Internet speeds — twice as fast as the average American’s. Back in 1995, the government began a 10-year plan to build out the country’s broadband infrastructure and, through a series of public programs, to teach Koreans what they could do with it. South Korea also eased regulations on service providers to ensure that consumers would have a multitude of choices — in marked contrast to America, where a handful of cable and telecommunications monopolies dominate the market. Such healthy competition in Korea keeps the cost of access low.
这在很大程度是由于20年来巨大的公共投资。首尔已被免费的无线网络覆盖，且网速为世界最快，为美国平均网速的两倍。早在1995年，政府就开展了一项十年计划来建设国家的宽带基础设施，并且通过一系列公共项目来教韩国人如何使用这些设施。韩国也放宽了对服务供应商的管制，以确保消费者有多种选择，这与少数几家有线与电信巨头统治下的美国形成鲜明对比。在韩国，这种良性竞争使得网络接入成本保持在较低水平。
To maintain South Korea’s lead, the country’s Science Ministry recently announced a $1.5 billion initiative to upgrade Korea’s mobile infrastructure. By 2020, the government predicts, it will be 1,000 times faster — so fast you could download a feature-length movie in approximately one second. In the same time frame, the Federal Communications Commission hopes to wire most American homes with broadband Internet with speeds of at least 100 megabits per second, or roughly one-sixtieth of South Korea’s goal.
为了保持韩国的领先地位，韩国教育科学技术部(Science Ministry)最近宣布了一项投资15亿美元（约合93亿元人民币）的项目，对韩国的移动基础设施进行升级。政府预计，到2020年，网速将是现在的1000倍——快到你可以在大约一秒钟的时间里下载一部电影长片。在同样的时间段里，美国联邦通信委员会(Federal Communications Commission)的希望是给大部分家庭装上速度至少为每秒100MB的宽带网络，这个速度大致是韩国的目标的六十分之一。
South Korea may be futuristic in some regards, but from a design perspective, many of the country’s most popular web services look outmoded, like throwbacks to the ’90s. Most mobile apps and web pages are crammed with chaotic boxes of information, stacked headlines and flashing lines of text.
韩国在一些方面可能非常新潮，但从设计的角度来看，韩国很多最受欢迎的网络服务看起来颇为过时，像是回到了上世纪90年代。大部分移动应用和网页上塞满了杂乱的信息框、堆砌的标题和闪烁着出现的一行行文字。
This is certainly true of KakaoTalk, a messaging app that is installed on 93 percent of Korea’s smartphones. KakaoTalk was developed in 2010 by Beom-su Kim, an early web pioneer in Korea who built a popular online gaming portal called Hangame. A failed effort to take Hangame to the United States happened to coincide with the release of the first iPhone. Beom-su Kim bought several and began developing apps for them, a full two years before the device would arrive in South Korea. KakaoTalk was one of his first creations.
这一点无疑可以在韩国93%的智能手机都安装了的即时通讯应用KakaoTalk上看到。KakaoTalk是韩国早期的网络先驱金凡秀(Beom-su Kim)于2010年开发出来的。金凡秀创建了一个用户众多的在线游戏门户Hangame。他试图将该门户推向美国，不过失败了，当时恰逢第一代iPhone问世。金凡秀买了几部iPhone，并开始为它们开发应用。这比iPhone登陆韩国早了足足两年。KakaoTalk就是他的首批作品之一。
The app was quickly adopted by Korean users as a free alternative to text messaging. Part of its success is due to the fact that KakaoTalk functions like its own version of the Internet within a smartphone: Users don’t have to close the app, ever, to check the news, talk to friends, order dinner or play games. To an American, the app’s design is insane, like stepping into a demented fun house. Pages are drenched in neon and populated with googly-eyed cartoon animals.
这款应用很快在韩国用户中得到普及，被当成了短信的免费替代品。它的成功部分是因为，KakaoTalk的作用有点像在智能手机内自成一体的互联网：用户任何时候都不用关闭这款应用便可以查看新闻、联系朋友、点餐和玩游戏。在美国人看来，它的设计不可理喻，让人觉得像是走进了一座能把人逼疯的游乐宫。页面通体闪烁着霓虹灯，还有瞪着眼的卡通动物。
By contrast, American mobile design is fetishistically minimalist. Silicon Valley applauds itself for good taste in this regard, but this aesthetic has sprung up partly in response to a deficiency: Americans have learned to strip out bandwidth-guzzling elements because they slow down loading times. Korean designers, lacking such bandwidth restraints, can stuff their apps full of all the information and widgets they like. On-screen real estate isn’t an issue, either, because Koreans prefer massive phones. While the “phablet” — the missing link between a phone and a tablet — is popular as a punch line in the United States, it’s been in high demand in South Korea for years.
相比之下，美国的移动应用设计有一种极简崇拜。硅谷在这方面自视品味卓绝，但这种审美部分一定程度上是某种缺陷导致的：美国人已经学会剔除应用中会消耗大量带宽的设计，因为这些会增加载入时间。韩国设计师们由于没有类似的宽带限制，可以在应用中任意添置各种各样的信息和小部件。屏幕空间也不是问题，因为韩国人喜欢大屏手机。介于手机和平板电脑之间的平板手机，在美国常被当成笑料，在韩国却是热销多年。
This trans-Pacific gap in bandwidth is so pronounced that Korean developers often have to strip down their software if they want to take it stateside. Nicole Kim, chief executive of a file-sharing service called Sunshine, which recently opened an office in San Francisco, said the service had to be adapted to inferior American broadband. “We made Sunshine simpler because the speeds are quite lower than the Korean and Hong Kong networks,” she said. She says her engineers recoded the app to allow for the sharing of smaller items, like design files and business documents. In Asia, people use Sunshine for more bandwidth-intensive files, like music and videos.
太平洋两岸宽带速度差距之大，通常让韩国软件开发者不得不删除软件的部分功能才能推向美国销售。文件分享服务应用Sunshine最近刚在旧金山开设分部，其执行总裁妮可·金(Nicole Kim)说，公司的服务必须要考虑到美国较低的宽带速度。“我们简化了Sunshine，因为美国的网速比韩国、香港低了不少，”她说。她称她的工程师因此要重新写程序用于分享较小的文件，比如设计文件和商业文件。而在亚洲，人们用Sunshine分享对宽带要求较高的文件，比如音乐和视频。
Even when Korean firms don’t encounter technological issues, the design gulch can confound their attempts to lure American customers. In 2014, Doyon Kim was tasked with taking Band, a South Korean mobile-messaging app, to Silicon Valley. Band lets friends chat, plan outings, share video files, split bills and even conduct informal polls about where to go to dinner. Doyon Kim says that the sheer number of Band’s functions confused users who were not accustomed to performing all of those tasks within a single app.
即使韩国公司不面临技术难题，设计方面的鸿沟也会为吸引美国客户增加困难。2014年金东阳(Doyon Kim)负责将韩国移动讯息应用Band打入硅谷。Band支持朋友聊天、计划出行、分享视频、分摊账单，甚至还可以发起非正式投票讨论就餐地点。金东阳说，正是Band的多功能性使用户感到困惑，他们不习惯在一个应用里处理这么多事务。
“As a newcomer in the United States, products have to have one strong feature to market,” he said. “Band had so many features and functionalities, that when people saw the product, they didn’t really get it.” The app got lost in the mix of services like GroupMe, Venmo, Tilt and Dropbox — well-established stand-alone products that let people perform the individual functions that Band offered. Despite attracting 30 million users in South Korea, in the United States, “It barely made a blip.”
“作为刚刚登陆美国的产品，产品本身在市场上必须有一个瞩目的卖点，”他说。“Band有太多特色功能，人们用它时无法完全掌握这个产品。”这个应用淹没在了比如GroupMe、Venmo、Tilt、Dropbox这样比较成功的产品中，而Band所提供的服务正是这些专注于某一项功能的产品的集合。Band在韩国吸引了3000万用户，但在美国“几乎没多大动静”。
Silicon Valley’s single-use obsession found its most absurd expression last summer in the infamous rise of an app called Yo. Yo allows users to send messages saying one thing only — “Yo.” — and thanks to its charming idiocy, it became an overnight sensation. It quickly raised $1.5 million and was valued at as much as 10 times that, despite having, to put it mildly, extremely limited utility. Still, it spawned a series of other hypersimple applications, including “Lo,” which lets you share your location, and “1minLate,” which automatically alerts your friends when you’re running late. The success of Yo revealed a lot about Silicon Valley ideology: For all the changing-the-world talk, novelty frequently outweighs functionality.
硅谷对单一功能应用的执着，最荒诞的例证是去年夏天风靡的应用软件Yo。这个软件只允许用户发一种信息——“Yo”，这种傻乎乎的可爱，让它一夜间引起巨大轰动。虽然它的实用价值，委婉地说，极度有限，但却很快吸引到150万美元投资，身价据估计更是这个数字的十倍。它也催生了其他一系列超级简单的应用，其中包括分享用户所在地点的“Lo”和自动通知朋友你会比约定时间迟到一点的“1minLate”。Yo的成功很大程度上揭示了硅谷的理念：嘴上说着“改变世界”，但实际上新奇往往胜过实用。
Among the wave of single-use apps is a category that has come to be called “Ubers for X” — firms that, as Uber does with cars, promise the delivery of a service in physical space at the tap of a button. A site called Product Hunt lists dozens of them, and, as a group, they’re enlightening. There’s Shortcut (Uber for haircuts), Minibar (Uber for alcohol), Doughbies On-Demand (Uber for fresh chocolate-chip cookies), JetMe (Uber for private jets), Eaze (Uber for marijuana) and many more. None of these has radically altered the way Americans live, perhaps because the ideal customer of all these services — wealthy, likes snacks, smokes pot — probably already works in Silicon Valley.
单一功能应用浪潮中，还出现了“Ubers for X”类应用，这类应用和提供汽车服务的Uber一样，用户只需按一下按钮，就能获得它们提供的实地服务。一个名叫Product Hunt的网站罗列出了数十种这类应用服务，总体来看令人耳目一新，其中包括Shortcut(提供理发服务的Uber)，Minibar(提供酒水的Uber)，Doughbies On-demand （提供新鲜巧克力碎饼干的Uber）, JetMe （提供私人飞机的Uber），Eaze（提供大麻的Uber），等等。这些应用都没有彻底改变美国人的生活方式，可能是因为所有这些服务的理想客户——富有，喜欢零食和大麻——都已经在硅谷工作了。
In Korea, apps that depend on widespread demand for convenience stand a much better chance. Eric Kim, a founder of Goodwater Capital, a global venture firm that invests heavily in South Korea, said that the country’s high population density and relative homogeneity makes it ideal for testing out new mobile services. There are about 50 million people in South Korea, and one in five of them lives in Seoul. Services that would be logistically difficult to deploy in much of the United States scale easily in the capital.
在韩国，为广大用户提供便利的应用有更好的市场机遇。全球风投公司古德沃特资本(Goodwater Capital)在韩国进行了大量投资，其创始人埃里克·金(Eric Kim)表示，韩国人口密度高且相对同质，因此韩国是检验新移动服务的理想之地。韩国大约有5000万人口，其中五分之一居住在首尔。一些在美国会受制于物流部署困难的服务，在韩国的首都可以轻松实现规模化。
Eric Kim offered the example of Coupang, a rising e-commerce company that offers same-day delivery, and sometimes same-hour delivery, for things like groceries and diapers. (He is on the company’s board.) It helps that delivery culture is so deeply established in Seoul, where people are accustomed to having couriers meet them at the subway station near their homes to deliver their dry cleaning and, occasionally, their dinner. Meanwhile, most Americans are still adjusting to using Amazon for more than books and gifts.
埃里克·金还以Coupang公司为例，这家刚刚崛起的电子商务公司提供当日送货服务，有时还提供一小时内送货的服务，送货物品诸如生鲜食品和纸尿片。（埃里克是该公司董事。）韩国的送货文化根深蒂固，这对Coupang十分有利，人们习惯了约快递员在家附近的地铁站签收他们的干洗衣物，有时还有晚餐。相较之下，大多数的美国还不适应在亚马逊(Amazon)购买图书和礼物以外的东西。
South Korea’s biggest start-ups are still dwarfed by the behemoths of California. But the Valley is keen to learn from their businesses, many of which turn healthy profits — something that many celebrated start-ups don’t do.
在加利福尼亚的巨头面前，韩国那些最大的初创公司仍旧是相形见绌。但是硅谷热衷于学习韩国公司的经营方式，虽然其中的很多经营方式创造了可观的利润——许多声名显赫的初创公司尚做不到这一点。
One thing Silicon Valley hopes to learn is how to get Americans to actually pay for things on their phones. For years now, Koreans have carried out important daily transactions, like paying bills and shopping, on their smartphones. They’re also more inclined to pay for virtual accouterments that liven up digital interactions: for example, virtual stickers that, for $1 to $2 per pack, can be pasted into online and mobile chats. Line and KakaoTalk are among the largest mobile chatting apps in South Korea, with revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and only a portion of their income is derived from advertising. The rest comes from selling those digital stickers, as well as music and games.
如何让美国人真的在手机上付费，这是硅谷需要向韩国学习的一件事。韩国人很多年前就已经开始在手机上进行重要的日常交易，例如用智能手机支付账单和购物。韩国人还喜欢购买虚拟商品，这为数码互动增添了生气。比如说，价格在1至2美元的虚拟表情包，可以贴在网上和移动聊天室。连我(Line)和Kakao Talk位居韩国最大的移动聊天应用之列，收入在数亿美元的级别，其中只有一部分来自于广告。其余的来自数字贴纸以及音乐和游戏的销售。
Silicon Valley might also learn how to cater to more customers in more countries around the world. Most Korean companies have been internationally minded since their inception, aware of their own limitations: South Korea is such a small market that entrepreneurs are forced to consider how they might adapt to business abroad.
硅谷可能还要学会如何迎合更多国家的顾客需求。大部分的韩国公司在创立之初便具备了国际头脑，很清楚自己存在的局限性：韩国的市场非常的小，因此创业者们不得不考虑如何适应海外的商业环境。
But without a more affordable, better mobile web, even the best new offerings from American entrepreneurs will be stuck in the past. Perhaps one of the biggest lessons Silicon Valley’s innovators should learn from South Korea is that to radically change how everyday people live their lives, they’ll need to convince their nation to invest in infrastructure, so that we can actually use the services they want to sell us.
然而，如果没有一个更廉价、更优质的移动网络，即便是美国创业者推出的最佳产品也会跟不上时代。或许硅谷的创新人士应该向韩国学习的最重要的经验之一便是，如何给人们的日常生活带去剧烈的变化，他们需要说服自己的国家进行基础设施投资，只有这样我们才能够真正使用到他们想要卖给我们的服务。
