back from asia

whew! Eric and I just got back from a whirlwind tour of China and Japan - it was really amazing on a lot of levels, but especially the excitement around blogging and feeds. we were glad to finally have annouced both of our partners over there - Bokee in China and GMO-A in Japan, who have both started integrating FeedBurner in different ways.

Bokee will integrate the services into some upcoming offerings, which without giving anything away, are already pretty impressive and I am sure will take the Chinese market by storm. They have some talented developers on the case. And yes, the Chinese food in China is *totally* different than the Chinese food in the U.S. - and really, really, good.

GMO-A is partnering with us to create feedburner.jp, a localized version of feedburner.com as well as be a distributor of our services for feed publishers in Japan. We will also integrate our services into JUGEM, yaplog, and Autopage - three of the leading blogging services in Japan. We met with a number of commercial publishers in Japan as well and the excitement is clearly growing there in Japan!

Finally, I probably don't have to mention how big mobile services are in both China and Japan. Having spent a few days going from place to place in Tokyo - it became so clear how i-Mode got it right - people use i-Mode like they would any other website for finding information, including navigation around the city. No click and wait experience - it's just second nature for everyone in our generation. very, very cool. the interest around 3G in Japan is also huge judging by the activity at the Vodafone.jp phone stands.

mobile content is such an afterthought for media publishers in the US right now. that is changing, but i wonder if it will ever get to the level you see in Asia.