Two Asian-American men have crossed their own cultural divide to create a Web portal aiming to bring Asians from across the U.S. and - in due course, around the world, they hope - together.
Korean Joe Cheon and Chin Yao, Chinese by ancestry, think their Click2Asia will work because of one communication universal even among their fellow Asians - "the online community all understands English," as Cheon tells the Los Angeles Times. "There are not many players out there. This market has huge potential."
The Times says that what makes this significant is that, while Asian Americans are perceived on the cutting edge of technology, they have their own language, cultural, and geographical divide which keeps such a large and diffuse community from taking complete advantage of the cyberrevolution. Cheon and Yao are most likely banking on the financial and commercial success of Web portals targeting women, Latinos, African-Americans, homosexuals, and teenagers, opening a large path for sites catering to specific demographics, the paper says.
And with the Asian online community approaching what the Times calls "critical mass," it may be extremely lucrative for Webpreneurs to make otherwise unlikely alliances to reach them.
"The U.S. ethnic market represents one-third of the U.S. population and $1 trillion in annual purchasing power," says Webpreneur Benjamin Sun, chief executive officer of Community Connect, Inc., to the Times. "Buyers and sellers will want to know the best way to reach them. We can be that intermediary."
Sun's company, in fact, runs AsianAvenue.com, now the most visited Asian American Web site with an estimated 300,000 registered members. It has all the expected Web features like chat rooms, message centers, search and news - but it also has marquee advertisers like General Motors and Microsoft, the Times says. "The biggest hurdle we faced was that people didn't think Asian Americans saw themselves as a collective group," Sun said.
They're the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States but only three percent of the total population, says the U.S. Census - meaning some polls and surveys tend to show them as statistically insignificant. But not in cyberspace, the Times says - a Forrester Research survey discovered Asian Americans the most wired of any American households, with a 64 percent share. And they spend more money in cyberspace than any other racial group.
That's not why they're online, though, says Forrester analyst Ekaterina Walsh to the Times. "(T)hey are very educated, very positive about technology, and have the income to buy new technology," she says. "That makes them a very attractive audience to advertisers."
Not to mention a very potent social pressure point. The Times notes that AsianAvenue, for example, registered a throng of online volunteers to help an Asian leukemia victim who was looking for a rare bone marrow donor, and also stirred protest which forced one liquor distiller to drop a national ad that some considered racist.
But Cheon and Yao are aiming for bigger fish. Cheon says Asian Americans "can be a great bridge" to the global Asian community. Cheon first got wise to the Internet's potential for doing just that when he launched KoreaLink four years ago, the Times says. You guessed it - he got that idea after watching his neighbor's Internet business explode almost immediately: EarthLink.
He lost $300,000 of his own money before he shifted his focus to chat, dating, and special issues forums letting users build relationships and generate their own material, while his future partner Yao gave him a cold call based on KoreaLink's network success. They exchanged talents - Cheon showing Yao a successful cyberpresence, Yao showing Cheon his strong reach into the Chinese American world, the Times says.
"If we had Click2Asia during the Taiwan earthquake, we could have immediately united the global Chinese community, send supplies, and check the latest news," Yao tells the paper. "With the Internet…we can break geographic boundaries, we can use English as a unifying language to bring together Asians in the global community."
