KoreaCrunch

The Olaworks, a company with automatic face recognition technology, announced on January 11th, “Olaworks attracted USD 4 million in joint equity investment from three organizations such as SLIC, Intel Capital and WSGR.” SLIC and Intel Capital each invested USD 1.99 million and WSGR invested USD 20 thousand.

Olaworks, founded in early 2006 by KAIST graduates, provides Olalog service which integrates automatic face recognition technology with web2.0 and mobile to automatically classify and share all sorts of digital photographs, video and text on mobile setting. Exclusive business partnership was recently signed with Yahoo, and social network service (SNS) is planned to start this March.

Skylake Incuvest (SLIC), venture capital recently founded by former Minister of Information and Technology Dae-je Chin, have led diverse business partnership and joint investment with global IT companies since last May to successfully launch Olaworks in global market and accelerate growth. These efforts have led to joint investment and also business partnership with Yahoo.

In Korea, some bloggers want to launch free unconference style meeting against expensive, invitation-only event such as web2summit. It’s very similar with Web2.2 the point is people. So it was new style event organized by volunteers.

Open Web2con advocated speaking of web 2.0 by the user, of the user and for the user. Some companies sponsored this meeting, so it was held in a meeting room of Microsoft Korea on Nov 18th. 2006. It contained two agenda such as 1) media 2.0 2) web 2.0 monetization.

Photo by ITViewpoint.com

For media 2.0, Mr. Myeong, Seungeun spoke a new role of traditional media companies in web 2.0 and blog journalism. He works at Maeil Kyungje, a korean economic newspaper. His focus of media 2.0 is the hybrid of media power between traditional and blog journalism. Mr. Junsung Ko gave an example of blog journalism, the system of blogger reporters of Media Daum that offers news aggregation of media companies such as Yahoo! News. The blog user of Daum can send their article to a section of Media Daum, so it was very successful and has great influence on every areas. Page views of some of articles were over 1 million. Authors became very popular. That’s power of combination between traditional and new media as like blog journalism.

Second agenda was web 2.0 monetization. Some of web 2.0 start-up companies discussed this agenda. Each people spoke their business models and success and failure of them. It included Mr. Jonghwa Kim, CEO of Wingbus and Mr. Youngwook Park, CEO of Allblog and Mr. Seoungryul Han, a developer of HanRSS. Many of people felt those were free and useful lectures and discussion in this time. It’s very positive signal to be able to expand user-centric discussions.

There was the Web 2.0 Summit that connects the leaders and technologists opening
the Web’s business opportunities. But, conference attendance was limited to maintain an intimate setting and foster dialogue among all participants. General attendee registration for the Web 2.0 Conference was by invitation only. So many people didn’t go to web2summit.

Fortunately some of korean people attended conference and let us know atmosphere and stories of conference such as Web2.0Korea.org, Openmaru and Mtgear.net in korean. After that, someone wanted to hear real voices from participators and discuss topics for korean business environments. So Web2Talk Seoul was suggested by Channy Yun.

Web2Talk Seoul was held in Daum Communications on Nov. 16th. Over 40 people were attended in this meeting. Dr. Sangu Cho, KT spoke the overview of web2con with photos and video clips. After his speech, there was panel discussion with Mr. Kangjun Lee, Softbank Ventures and Mr. Jaeseung Noh, Samsung Electornics.

They reached the conclusion that major interests of conference was the “search” and “video” and their monetization. Maybe this is originated by success of Google and YouTube. Of course, it’s almost same of korean business trends. Many of korean internet sites focused on video services by UCC(User-created Content) meaning of UGC.

The Aladdin established profit-sharing affiliate program for bloggers. It’s one of the largest online bookstore in korea. Thanks to Bloggers gives money to bloggers who write book review or link to book pages. For that, it offers Book API. It’s not new and striking in affiliate program, but remarkable to focus bloggers.

There is another example of broadband effects in Korea. Traditional radios have depended on letters, post cards by listeners who drive a car and work in office or out. In Korea, there were unique listeners such as teenage girls studied in night. As internet users were increased, it has lost powers the conventional media such as newspaper, TV and radio.

But, radio newly changed by internet trends. As you know, korean are good at streaming music by broadband. So internet radio services make own steaming players tuned radio. The KBS has KBS kong broadcasts 7 channels and MBC miniM does 4 channels including AM, FM and DMB.

It is very popular, so MBC mini was downloaded over 1 million times. These are very lightweight and easy to install in PC. Users listen to music from radio in PC and directly request music to disk jockey with message sending function on it. A DJ on studio directly can check user’s message and talk their messages. It’s scene of interactive radio by broadband networks. Another listeners are a Korean resident abroad. KBS announced there are 30 countries connected by KBS Kong software.

A DJ can communicate with listners not by paper letters or phone but by SMS, instant messaging by radio steaming softwares. It’s new culture in era of broadband.

Lycos owned by korean internet portal, Daum announced new email service with 3GB storage. This is the top of email stroage in the world. In future Lycos will up the limit to 5 GB of storage. With the new LYCOS Mail, users can now email photos, videos, music files and more in one message. Big storage will be useful to broadband users treated mutimedia files.

Lycos outsourced an email service to Outblaze till now. Last year, Daum started to develope the new email service and finished it with Lycos team well.

In fact, Daum has been most famous free email service provider in Korea since 1996 named Hanmail.net that has over 70% market share and over 54 million user accounts. Every korean users have one more hanmail accouts. (It’s fact!)

Although Lycos new mail is not based on Ajax, its interface is very simple and convinient too. Lycos Mail resembles the stable Hanmail system and is applied to new storage system similar with Google File System.

If Lycos can offer search and spam filtering as good as Gmail, it will be good choice. I work in Daum, but it’s my personal thought.

Web 2.0 Business Workshop Korea will be held in July 27th by Korea.internet.com. This conference focused on business examples and application on web services since first web 2.0 conference.

As followings are a list of session programs.

- Key success factors of Web2.0 Business Model (Prof. Junki Lee, Yonsei Univ.)
- Spotlight: Video 2.0 and business strategy Beedeo.com (Yongjun Hyeong, CEO of Einfra Networks)
- Business values of Web 2.0 economics (Kukhyun Kim, IBM Korea)
- Spotlight: Life 2.0 and business strategy Olaworks (Junghee Ryu, CEO of Olaworks)
- Google Business Eco-system (Dr. Jaesun Han, KAIST)
- Spotlight: Travel 2.0 and business strategy Wingbus (Jonghwa Kim, CEO of Wingbus)
- Insights for service planning for Web 2.0 (Jungeun Lee, Yahoo! Korea)
- Spotlight: Remarkable start-up in Web 2.0 in US (Suman Park, CEO of DoubleTrack)

The Web2.0 Hub Beta was released June 27th. It was originated Google SIG at KAIST managed by Dr. Jaesun Han. Some of KASIT students has studied Web 2.0 and Google. In result, they decided to make a hub and community site amang Web 2.0 geeks.

It contains a brief introduction of Web 2.0 for general people, web2pedia in korean that defines and gathers articles for each keyword such as “Ajax”, “RSS” and “Tag”. Also it provides web 2.0 issue tracker as like digg.com, news blog, forum and event scheduler. If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Han.