KoreaCrunch

Cyworld is one of very unique social network services in the world. Before Cyworld, there were a success case, ILoveSchool based on networking school alumni in 1999. So trying of new startup for SNS has been very rare. Recently there are new startup services for SNS such as LinkNow.kr, Hutory.net and People2.co.kr. I reviewed these in detail, but I couldn't find unique things compared with abroad SNS services. The Web 2.0 trend makes a duplication of ideas and innovations too such as a example of Germany. Korea is not except, Me2day and PlayTalk was on debate who copied ideas and concept ...

A Korean famous blogger, Danny Kim started new blog TechnoKimchi to write on digital generation in Asia especially focused on Korea young people enjoyed wired life. His Korean blog has over 5,000 subscribers and popular to Web 2.0 mania. He studied in Cornell University and worked in Samsung SDS as a system engineer. Recently he took decisive action to quit his job and swings to full time blogger after his brave journey. He wrote why he starts new blog as followings: But, here's what's important. The gap between the young generation in East and West is closing. The reason is ...

Even though Google, web search giant conquers all search world, there is exceptional country. In Korea, Naver became David against Goliath. What's different Naver from Google and How's different Korea from others? Naver explained their unique characteristics of its search engine and service evolved by Korean user's requirement over time. It's different style with Google and foreign search engine. They called it as 'Multiple or Integrated Search' that shows results by information collections such as own-made databases and web documents together whereas global search engines are based on only web documents. Of course, other search engine have tried how to give ...

The Korean first meta-blog site, BlogKorea.org will be relaunched braking a gap of two years in July 17, 2007. The meta-blog site means news style-blog gateway based on blogger's subscription and crawling of their RSS feeds. It started in 2003 and most of early bloggers registered BlogKorea.org. Its outset is concerned by many blogger fans who miss old friend. In 2004, the number of registered bloggers is over 3000 and there were the latest new article by unique bloggers. It was different from foreign blog search engine such as Technorati or IceRocket. Even though all of them are based ...

Daum launched Open ID Beta service to provide Open ID account to its users in July 13th, 2007. Daum has over 56 million Hanmail accounts. Everyday most of Korean over 7 million people logged in Daum to read their email and news articles. So it is very big news to Open ID ecosystem in the world. Daum gives a type of http://openid.daum.net/myid URL format as well ones blog URL such as http://blog.daum.net/myid. Daum Open ID sites is also secures with EV SSL cetificates.

I introduced various online video sharing sites in last year. Even though Korea was developed in broadband, there were mostly payable VOD and web casting sites in Korea. The video sharing service needed high cost of network bandwidth and server systems including encoding and distribution. So most of service providers mind to enter this market. After the success of YouTube, many of service providers started to enter this area such as portal sites. Now there are two separating providers: one is the video section service of portal sites and the other is independent service providers. The former is Daum TVPot, ...

Some of Korean bloggers reported screenshots of search result bucket test Google Korea. Especially it is very similiar with search results of local competitors such as Naver and Daum. It was more interesting because Google was changed new front-page layout for Korean different with other languages. Recently Google unveiled new search results user interface called Universal Search that unify and blend search results across their collection such as web search, news, blogs, images and videos, etc. It means Google divided details properties from mass index of web pages and it will be important to show proper collections by query. But, this ...

Who does search the keyword of "Web 2.0" in the world? Surprisingly it was Korean according to a result of Google Trends in 2006. Of course, South Korea and Seoul were also highly ranked in this period. But, I thought it was bias caused by the result of rare ordinary people. (Google is just under 2% market share in here- most of technical guys only have used Google. In result, Google Trends might fix this bias after issuing of this fact. Recently I reviewed search trends of "Web 2.0", more surprisingly it was Taiwan and India. In recent period in 2006~2007, ...