KoreaCrunch

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.

Hanmail Express revealed Ajax-based rich applications such as Outlook Express in Webappscon. Hanmail is Daum's web mail service launched in 1997 against Hotmail of MSN. Now most of Korean over 95% have its account and a number of total account is over 54 millions in 2007 and has over 70% market share even though Naver has invaded this market with its weapon of search power. Anyway rich interface is not new one because Google, Yahoo! and MSN already showed Ajax based mail services. But, it's first time implementation in Korea. The most important thing is user experiences in Ajax based web ...

As most of subscribers of this blog know my job in company, I'm web technical evangelist to offer Web APIs and support 3rd party developers and affiliates such as Yahoo! Developers Network and Google Code. I organized Daum Developers Night to hack APIs and make prototype using them such as widgets, plug-ins and mashups. There was a similar event, Open Hack Day. Accidentally the day is same with Google Developers Day in 10 cities of the world on May 31th. 2007. Some of Korean bloggers and reporters were invited to Mountain View and most people of Google Korea attended in Tokyo ...

The integration between desktop and web has been accelerated. For example, Joost and Democracy Player offer online-based content services. They are just media player, but people started to think service. In fact, Itune was successful model for this area although there has been very long competition to become content delivery platform between Real Player and Window Media Player. What's different Itune and Windows Media Player? The player platform is not a necessary and sufficient condition but just requirement. Now users want to watch all of media files in online, desktop and other person via peer-to-peer. Integrations of them is essential under ...

Daum released the beta of new web search service. Until now Daum has outsourced Google's serch engine for web search. But, mos of korean portal has various own database, so if an user query a keyword, it firstly shows search results internal database such as news, blog, image and Q&A in order. A result of web search is almost final section in screen and most of users cannot recognize its existence. Only Naver has own search robots crawling web sites and offered search service in Korea. Daum's new challenge seems that they want to get independent technologies for search engine. ...

Daum announced AdClix, the contextual advertisement system as similar with Google AdSense. It is the beta service for users of Daum Blog and independent bloggers with WordPress, Tattertools and so on. Although Daum made a strategic partnership with Google in this area, Daum did own one. It's very similar with Google AdSense's system, but it was known that Daum had own patent in different method in Korea. It prohibited to join bloggers using Google AdSense though many of power bloggers in Korea have used Google Adsense. The key point is how Daum's give sufficient benefit and offer suitable advertisements for ...

The Daum and Naver were co-hosted the Korea Mashup Contest 2007 that find out good services mashed by Open APIs. For unfamiliar developers about Open APIs, there was Mashup camp in Yonsei Univ., Seoul on Feb 25th and KAIST in Daejeon. on Mar. 1th. Before the noon, API developers of Daum and Naver directly instructed over 70 participators about transaction of XML-RPC, REST and parsing of RSS, JSON and XML. After lunch, there are small five project to practice mash-up coding using Daum and Naver's APIs. Most of participators enjoyed talking and coding with API developers and made a good results ...

The Daum.net, South Korea's second largest portal, is going to be going with Google when their contract expires with Yahoo (Overture) in January. Some are even making prediction of M&A between the two with rumor that Daum Communications could end its business ties with Overture in the advertisements business. Meanwhile, on 9th, Google spoke that Namu Communications, a 100% Daum invested subsidiary as their official Korean reseller of Google's Adwords. The Korean search market is over $600 million and Overture has over 90% market share with Naver.com. Google departed later. There are so small advertise providers contracted with Google such ...