a color story: kakao and the banana

I received a phone call that my nephew wanted to do a video call. It was time to reinstall Kakao, a Korean social media platform. 

I noticed that Kakao's logo consist of colors that deeply resembled a banana. My natural intuition felt like that the design had racist innuendos. Like a banana, Kakao was yellow (Asian) in the outside, and white in the inside. 

Of course, it sounds silly to make such a comparison but why did I feel this way on this Korean messenger?

When I think about innovations in technology, Asian companies aren't in the top of my mind. As an Asian-Canadian, I see America as the leaders. I even see Asian companies as copycats. Samsung survived the cold cell phone wars by blatantly copying the designs of the iPhone where Apple has settled for over 1 billion dollars.  The behavior of Asian companies stealing American innovation is quite well known. There was a parody about it on The HBO show, Silicon Valley. One of my favorite characters, Jing Yang, has a plotline where he would create Asian versions of American technology companies: it was hilarious watching him create them. 

Kakao Talk is no different than Facebook's messenger - it is curated for the Korean demographic. It is definitely a move Jing Yang would do in a Korean parallel universe.  Remember this is real life. As someone who tried a technology startup with pending patents, I felt like copyrights did not provide any protection to the brutal realities of the technology industry. It is difficult to engineer your own technologies but easy to reverse engineer. Seeing copies didn't sit well with me from that standpoint.  

Now that I am out of that space, I am enjoying myself as a technology user. Choosing to play "naïve", I couldn't care less on who did it first or who does it better? I don't think about the background noise that would be of interest to copyright or tech startup lawyers. When my sister called to say that her son really wanted to video call with me, I only cared whether I can meet my obligations as an uncle. 

Quicker than expected, I had access to my old Kakao account and found my sister's number. I facetimed with my nephew and we enjoyed each other's company (minus the random tantrums). We laughed and made silly faces. Our physical distance apart didn't feel so far on our screens.  

After we said what we needed to say (verbally and non-verbally), we waved our good byes and then I closed the Kakao application. Turning the phone off, I noticed my cracked Samsung phone screen. I have no intentions of fixing it - it was still functional to say the least.  It is my phone after all.