The Korea IT Times interviewed David Lee, vice president at Zenitum Inc, earlier this month using his company's new online service wetoku. He spoke about many subjects including online services in Korea and the software industry. The entire 15 minute video interview is accessible just below this paragraph; just click the play button.We have reprinted excerpts from the interview below, which is only about half of the entire conversation.

Q: So this is wetoku, I guess, based on the URL. Can you tell me a little bit about that

A: It's a place for bloggers to record interviews. So they can meet their interviewee online, they can record the meeting, and they can immediately embed that recording into their web site. Just like we're doing here - after this meeting has completed you can go ahead and take the embed code, the snippet of code that is included in the web site, and paste it into the koreaittimes.com web site. And instantly you'll have video from our interview on our web site.

Q: You were telling me that you were using agile development to develop this. How long did it take you to get this web site up

A: Its interesting that you mention agile. Agile is something that we've adapted a little bit for our environment here, and perhaps for my personality and for the personality of the people that we're working with. We like the general principles of agile, in that instead of working on layers of a project one by one, we work on complete slices. Yesterday, one of my colleague's James here, who actually made wetoku, drew a metaphor for agile development versus the waterfall method which is that it is complete slices of cake - that's a cycle in agile. Versus the layer of a cake. So you might have a multi-layered cake, and with the waterfall method of software development you would develop an entire layer of that cake. So with us we're focused on developing entire slices of cake - so its got multiple layers, you can taste the entire cake in that single slice.

You asked also how long did it take to develop wetoku, and that's something that I'm glad that you asked because wetoku - the web work, the initial prototype web work was done in about three or four hours. After that, it took about a week to do the flash work - so everything you see here was done in about a week. And after that was done we started to play with it - we had some scheduling issues previously and our web server went down, which is why we weren't able to meet last week. But once we played with it and tested it internally, we were happy with it at least as a prototype, so then we decided hey now its time to apply some design to it. So our fantastic designer YoungDoo went ahead and sketched something up - provided the design files to Dave Jansen who has recently joined us from the Netherlands to work with us as an html publisher and php developer. So he went ahead and applied those designs to html and css, and what we have here today is wetoku version 1. So in total it was about nine days of development for the prototype, and after that with the design applied it took an extra day.

Q: You're located in Korea and Zenitum is located in Korea, which is an online software company you could say. There's a lot of talk in the Korean media these days, and a lot of worry, about the Korean software sector. The Korean hardware sector seems to be really strong and always generating a lot of income and growth, but there are some worries that the software sector will never really measure up. Do you have any thoughts about the Korean software sector

A: Well I came to Korea in October 2008, and since then I've made a serious effort to get out there and meet with some of the people here in Korea involved in the software industry. And if you have met the people that I've met - and you do know some of the people that I'm working with here today - but if you've met all the people that I've met here in Korea, you would disagree very strongly with that statement. The software industry here in Korea, like anywhere, depends heavily on the people. And the people here in Korea are absolutely brilliant. They can compete head-to-head, toe-to-toe, with developers anywhere in the world. And I think the downside - the challenge that we need to overcome as a country here in Korea - is to overcome the issue of weakening or holding back the brilliant developers that we have over here. What can we do to stop holding them back We can give them a better environment to work in. And by environment I don't mean maybe triple monitors or a bigger, fancier desk or anything like that. I mean an environment that's conducive to innovation. Surround them with equally bright people, let them collaborate with each other freely, give them exciting projects and bigger dreams to spend their time on. So that's hopefully what I'm doing over here; because earlier you described Zenitum as a software company, but I think of us an innovation lab. Zenitum does innovation.

Q: You mentioned that Zenitum is an innovation company and that you're doing good things there. Are you familiar with any other companies in Korea that are also doing the same thing

A: Sure, well, a lot of them are very small. Zenitum is a small company, but we are a lot bigger than the one-man, two-man, three-man shops that are out there. But a lot of those micro-businesses that are working out there are working on a lot of leading-edge stuff, and they are very global in nature - more global than some of the conglomerates here in Korea. They're on the leading edge - people like Chang-su Lee, who is a one-man company doing Innoovate. The guys over at Paprika Lab are also very good; very global in nature and in their way of thinking. I think that if we can get more young Korean developers excited and energized about the idea of building global solutions - now they've got the knowhow and capability on the technical side to do this themselves. Lets put them in touch with more people to get out there and take their ideas global, and execute quickly in shorter iterations.