Notebook On Cities And Culture

In Seoul's Sinchon district, Colin talks with Danny Crichton, researcher and writer on regional innovation hubs and a contributing writer for TechCrunch. They discuss the hardest thing about being a Korean entrepreneur; what the concentration of Seoul has facilitated about Korean innovation; how he got from an interest in China "because it's China" to a more fully developed interest in Korea; what happened to Sony, and thus Japan; how he responds to the current Korean of question, "Is this really a developed country?"; how people have stopped putting up with the country's corruption, perhaps one of the drivers of its astonishing growth; how the ideas of the "heterodox" economist Ha-joon Chang apply to all this; why the concept of the subway-station "virtual grocery store" caught his eye; why Silicon Valley is so much more boring than Seoul; the significance of Kakaotalk and its abundance of purchasable "culturally ambiguous stickers"; why so many things, like playing Starcraft in stadiums, seem only to work i