KoreaCrunch

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 ...

After mash-up opportunity sponsored by Daum DNA and Naver OpenAPI, it will be increased raw materials for mashup food. Startup companies make their own OpenAPIs and share them to all developers. SpringNote APIs: http://dev.springnote.com/ You can add and edit your own pages in SpringNote. Me2day APIs: http://codian.springnote.com/pages/89009 You can post articles to Me2day. Lifepod APIs: http://www.lifepod.co.kr/api You can add your schedules and sharing them with each others It's an evidence to prove that many startup services think the open platform is very useful and important to gather user's data and distribute them. I hope more mash-up examples with brilliant ideas to mix them.

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 ...

Daum.net, the korean leading portal sites opened their web APIs and developer community named Daum DNA(Developers Network and Affiliates) on Oct. 28th, 2006. This is the second action following Naver's Open APIs in korean portal leaders and it means entering competition for "web as platform" in Korea. Daum's APIs includes eight services of search, blog, commerce, tour and auth APIs. The search APIs offers search results of Daum Cafe (korean famous forum services) and Blogs. Daum Blog APIs allow to write articles via XML-RPC and upload video clips. Daum made a developer community sites for evangelism of their web ...

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.

Yahoo! Answers released knowledge API today for developers to access Y!A database. The Yahoo's knowledge database has been growing in the world except korean market. Naver was first mover with typical mass in this market. Also it released Naver Knowledge API on July, 2006. But it's not public why it only offered to own knowledge sponsors. What's knowledge sponsors? The knowledge sponsor means bussiness partners to offer continually answers to questions from Naver. For example, if someone asks a general dental issue, one of dentists will give an answer to Naver and a business logo and URL link of answerer is ...

Naver Open API announced Korean Maps API. It's first thing to offer local map by service provider in Korea. (maybe in the world?) It resembles Google Maps API by Naver Maps API overview. You can catch an mouse event and add controls such as zoom in/out, save button and annotation etc. A source of map images was given by Sundo Soft, an exclusive ESRI's korean vendor. Naver customized it and included it to their open APIs. This map use not standard longitude/latitude but (korean own) Katel coordinate system. Maybe it will be hacked formula between global and katel coordinate. Anyway it helps ...

Naver, the korean largest search engine based portal started to offer their search results to RSS format. You can refer to Naver Open API sites. They offer search results of KnowledgeIN, blog, book, shopping and dictionaries including korean, japanese and english. It follows simple REST method via HTTP. You can see a sample result in http://openapi.naver.com/sample/kin.xml . Also some good functions are offered as like a list of real-time popular keywords and recommeded keywords, a discrimitation of adult keywords and errota, shotcut-redirection as like Google's feeling lucky. There are many implementation and examples in Naver API Forum.