Webware

News Corp.'s MySpace.com has launched the latest of its international editions, MySpace Korea. Like many of its other regionally focused portals, MySpace Korea includes popular music and video content and social-networking profiles. No surprise there.

MySpace Korea's homepage: a little bit more Web 2.0 than what we get here in the U.S.

But in Korea, MySpace faces an extra snag: The small Asian nation is famously tech-adept, with broadband penetration and mobile technology seemingly light-years ahead of the U.S. (and here, MySpace doesn't exactly have a reputation as a technology leader, though it remains the most popular social-networking site). Other social-networking sites, like the virtual world Cyworld, already have a lock on the youth market. So what is MySpace doing? It's deliberately courting Korea's high-tech and digital-creative crowds.

MySpace Korea, as a result, has a sleeker design than most of its global brethren, as well as a few features created locally: a "Minilog" platform, which sounds a bit like Twitter-esque microblogging, and design "skins" created by Korean artists.

The site's official launch party, on Tuesday night, will be held at a design museum near Seoul's Hongik university; later in the week, MySpace will be holding a conference for developers at which Travis Katz, general manager of MySpace's international effort, will be speaking. Co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe has also traveled to Seoul to spread the word about the site launch.

PARTY! If you're in Seoul, that is...

MySpace has more at stake with its Korean launch, too: The site hopes that by broadening its base in Korea, it can take advantage of the country's tech talent as it attempts to catch up where rival social networks like Facebook have jumped ahead in innovation. More specifically, MySpace aims to win over Korean programmers to contribute to its OpenSocial-compatible developer platform, which launched last month.

Later in the week, MySpace plans to launch another site in another crucial tech market: India--which happens to be one of the hot spots for Google's social-networking site, Orkut. Surrounding the debut of MySpace India will be a developer "hackathon" in Bangalore as well as a rock concert in Mumbai.

Unlike its Korean counterpart, the beta site for MySpace India appears to be primarily English-language.

Yahoo announced Monday that it has joined forces with the Pune, India-based Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) in order to support research in cloud computing, a way to outsource hardware and software to service providers rather than host it locally. Under the terms of the agreement, researchers will be able to use the EKA, a supercomputer owned by CRL that contains 28 terabytes of memory, 14,400 processors, 140 terabytes of disks, and a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations per second.

According to CRL, EKA is the world's fourth fastest supercomputer.

"We are excited to partner with Yahoo to advance cloud computing research in India as it opens up a new arena of exciting opportunities," Gautam Shroff, a member of CRL's steering committee, said in a statement. "We are initiating dialogue with leading Indian academic institutions to collaborate on research using cloud computing."

At the core of Yahoo's involvement is its role in the Apache Hadoop project, for which it opened an open-source research and development center last November. Yahoo and CRL's announcement was timed in conjunction with the inaugural Hadoop Summit, sponsored by Yahoo and the National Science Foundation-funded Computing Community Consortium.