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OCTOBER
27, 2000 VOL. 26 NO. 42 | SEARCH ASIAWEEK
Asia's
Digital Elite
Horii
Yuji |
| Director,
Enix Corp. Age: 45 Favorite Movie: The Matrix |
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Horii
Yuji found his way into Enix, now one of Japan's top five video game publishers,
after winning a programming contest in the early 1980s. "I turned my hobby
into my job," he says. It's a prize that's paid off for gaming fiends
ever since. At Enix, Horii designed Dragon Quest, the first console role-playing
game and one of the hottest game series in the world. In Japan, new releases
have been restricted to Sundays and holidays because too many students
were skipping school to get copies. Horii now sits on Enix's board of
directors, where he is helping shape the future of the gaming industry.
"I still love games," he says. "I cannot take my eyes off them. They constantly
evolve."
You wouldn't
expect to apply the label "techno-geek" to someone in his 60s. But having
been active in South Korea's computing industry for more than two decades,
Lee Yong Teh was one long before the term was coined. Lee founded Dacom,
now Korea's No. 2 telecommunications company, in 1982 and since then has
managed to stay at the top of the tech game despite the industry's love
affair with underage CEOs. He's the mastermind behind the eMachine, a sub-$400
PC that was the third-best-selling desktop computer in the U.S. last year.
At Thrunet, one of Korea's broadband Internet access providers, Lee hopes
to use the recently launched mega-portal Korea.com to challenge the hegemony
of Daum and Yahoo! Korea. His likes are decidedly last millennium: He is
a fan of classical Chinese calligraphy and admires T'oegye Yi Hwang, a 16th-century
Korean philosopher.
Edward
Tian leads one of China's best hopes for a wired future. As the head of
China Netcom Corporation, he's helping build a fiber optic backbone for
broadband Net access across the country. It's a far cry from his childhood
ambitions. But then, Tian's dreams have changed with his country's. Growing
up during the Cultural Revolution, he wanted to be a soldier. "Those were
the only heroes back then," he says. "I was brainwashed by revolutionary
movies." When those dark days ended, science became a national priority.
Tian traded his dream of guns for one of lab coats, eventually earning a
PhD in environmental management in the U.S. Then as market reforms swept
China in the '90s, Tian vowed to become a successful businessman. He swears
this third career goal is his last. And it's one he's well on his way to
achieving.
Sparking
an entire city to seize the day might seem a tall order, but Singapore's
George Yeo is giving it his best shot. He likes to refer to the government's
goal of ensuring that every child in the fifth grade is able to construct
a simple Web page. Yet he's also a realist, acknowledging that the city-state's
small population of four million requires a steady infusion of foreign talent
to keep moving forward on the technology front. But should Singapore's budding
minds require a local role model, they need not look further — Yeo
has a degree in engineering from Cambridge and earned an MBA with high distinction
from Harvard.
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Vol. 2 No. 7
COVER: Digital Elite: Twenty-five
Asians who are driving the region's big I.T. bus
Infested: Call the exterminator
— Singapore's home of the future is crawling with software bugs
Pulse: Palm robots, Aibo has
puppies and why Jenny can't surf
Face Off: Sizing up the Nomad
jukebox and Nomad II, Creative Technology's extreme music machines
E-vesting: Teaching your
sixth-grader to be a day-trader
Net Gains: Korea's NCsoft
is winning big in the gaming market
Tech Index: Bears ravage
Asian technology and internet stocks
B2B: Is Japan the sleeping giant of electronic
trading, or is the country just sleeping?
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