So I got back from Seoul two Sundays ago. It was great to see friends and family during that week. We also had a family picture session with Christine's side, which was interesting trying to take photos with five kids 5 years old and younger.
During the week, I just worked from our hotel room, had a couple meetings related to my advisory roles, and a few 6AM calls with the U.S. so it felt like I never left Palo Alto. :) If you're working constantly, it sometimes doesn't matter what time zone you're in. Christine was occupied with Google Korea's new office launch, Eric Schmidt visiting and speaking at the Seoul Digital Forum, and various other duties. It was interesting to note during Schmidt's time in S. Korea that Google deviated from their standard user-interface for the Korean market:
Looking at everything as a whole, I would say this was a signal to the Korean market that Google will finally pay attention to the South Korean market (5th largest online advertising market in the world). It's taken a while, but Google has hired engineering talent in Korea to localize products and also made a couple key senior hires. It still will take a long while, if it ever does, to make a significant dent in a market dominated by Naver.com (search) and Overture (advertising). Let's see how this all plays out over the next 5 years.
Web 2.0 Asia has some more comments here.
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