Although iPhone was not released in Korea till now because of Korean WIPI regulations, some of iPhone applications have been shown up in Appstore.

Korean twitter, me2day’s application is very excellent and fantastic developed by ias.

Also Daum’s tvPot - video sharing service also was released too. You can see Korean top playing video from iPhone tvPot player. The tvPot is Korean #1 video service property right now.

Fortunetly Korean govenment decided to finish WIPI regulation from 1th, April 2009. Although KTF, one of telecommunications company in Korea has tried to launch iPhone with Apple, it must be delayed to April in next year.

Some of iPhone developers made small programs as like Korean subway and dictionary for Korean iPhone touch users. But, we must wait for official iPhone release in here. This situaltion is one of a deep disgrace as the largest broadband country in the world.

In May 2006, I made Korean Web 2.0 Logo type gathering Web 2.0 startup service in Korea from 2005 to 2006. After that, I updated some of web services in my blog, but most of them in 2007 and 2008 weren’t done my blank time.

I searched new web services except big portals and gathered them again. Over 70 sites were made from 2007 to 2008. Compared with Silicon Valley, it’s very small.

I’ll make a brief introduction for most of new services with above logos. You can see first logotype in May 2006 too.

I want to introduce some of English based web service made by brilliant Korean young startup. If new startup is appeared, I’ll do again with numbers.

FaceWorthy
FaceWorthy is a social discovery network that allows you to upload photos and gain recognition. Show your best through photos and get people to vote for you. If you collect lots of votes, you get to access special features, and may even earn money.

It is not designed for shy people but here for people who are passionate about expressing themselves and communicating with others. It is for people who have healthy desire to show who they are and get people’s recognition and understanding.

StoryBlender
StoryBlender is an online collaborative video production platform where people can work together to “blend” their media for rich, interactive storytelling. Story Blender CEO Hyoung Yong Joon is the original founder of Cyworld, which is South Korea’s first and most popular social networking community.

StoryBlend’s online editing tool lets users create videos by “blending” images, sound, text, and video clips. When users have created new video blends they can then share it with their friends and the StoryBlend community. (See Techcrunch 40 presentation.)

MusicShake
MusicShake is a Korea-based online music creation service developed and distributed by SilentMusicBand Corp that provides music composing solutions aimed at the general public without previous musical knowledge or expertise. The service lets users create personalized, professional quality music using various tools and pattern-combination methods.

They hope to meet the growing demand for customized ringtones and personalized music that mobile phone users and Internet users have for adding personalized creativity to their personal blogs, websites and social network pages. (See Techcrunch 40 presentation.)

Pagii
Pagii in one of social network sites where you meet new friends around the world. Users can make stylish and creative web pages about anything you like and upload and share your photo with friends, family and oter people and browse and search new friends and enjoy fun activities with a cute pet and talk and play with oter people in Pagii Forum.

It also offers “Friend Feed” is where users can check out their friends’ activities on Pagii. It is based on the most recent actions user’s friends take on the site, including photo uploading, page update, commenting, friending, status update, etc. It has normal social network functions.

PlayTalk
PlayTalk is another microblogging cum social network service inline with Twitter and Jaiku. However, instead of being limited to a mere 140 characters, PlayTalk gives you a more expansive 250—thus you need not limit your post to merely what you ate, you can also throw in a few details about the garnish.

Users can also choose to post photos in addition to text. The service works with mobile phones, iPhones, SMS and MMS. PlayTalk is available in English, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Messages may be tagged according to the content of the post e.g. usual, think, food, culture, sports and games. They may be kept private, for friends only, or available to the public. Posts are dated and time stamped. Networks contribute to the site’s interactive features; there are lounges for different countries, colleges, and high schools.

Papree
Papree is a simple tool to collect interesting pictures on the web. By using ‘Papree button’, users can collect any picture on the web with a single click that is really easy and quite fun to use.

There are gazillions of beautiful pictures out there, so start collecting all the pretty pictures you find. Paprize button is a kind of bookmarket that lets you collect any pictures on the web with a single click. Whenever you find a picture you like on the web, simply click Paprize button.

Sketchpan
Sketchpan is an open oline drawing community site where anybody can participate and share their pictures and animations made by drawing tools. It provides a canvaspan that users can draw, modify pictures with simple method and animationpan that make movie by order of drawing action.

If you share your drawing contents in public, someone can modify yours in togetherpan that lets you utilize collaborative artwork as a team. You can sell this artwork in shoppan too. It’s similar with Oekaki tool. The “pan” means drawing palette.

It’s almost one and a half years to stop blogging Koreacrunch.com. There was no special reason to do that and just wanted to focus on my job of open APIs evangelism for Daum’s 3rd party developers and writing my Korean blog with over 6,000 readers. I guess you may get informations from Web2.0 Asia and Technokimchi.com.

I decided to restart blogging with new prospects not to cover only Korean news that treats less important relatively. I regretted topics were limited in myself in this blog. There have been my own thoughts about global IT news, but I didn’t treated them. Also I has been interested in open source, open standards and open web too.

I’ll cover these topics related with Korean Internet culture although my English writing is very poor. If you’re my old readers in my blog, please encourage me.

Thanks.

Channy

With my lovely children in beautiful Jeju beach in this summer

Recently Google Korea firstly acquired TNC, the famous blog service developing company that has made Textcube (a.k.a Tattertools) similar with Wordpress case. It became buzz in a flash by many famous blogs such as Techcrunch, GigaOM, NY Times, VentureBeat, InformationWeek, The Inquisitr, Epicenter, p2pnet,  Portfolio, WebProNews, AppScout, Webware.com, Valleywag and Pulse 2.0.

They have developed Tattertools as an open source software under GPL and developed and sold Tistory.com to Daum - now Tistory became one of top 20 properties in Korea. Before this acquisition, TNC are preparing Textcube.com resembling Wordpress.com. Surely its success is based on philosophy of open and user-participation service model.

After announcement of acquisition, there are two prospects 1) recovering a lack of local search power by offering new blogging service, 2) giving synergy effects to blogger.com in dull compared with Wordpress and Sixapart’s excellent blogging functions.

But, many Korean people disappointed to read interview of Google Korea in ZDNet Korea. Ms. Jung of Google Korea said “The purpose of TNC acquisition is just for empowering search technique and there is no relationship with increasing blog contents and not to confirm whether the new blog business will be started or not”. They confessed its acquisition just absorbed the man power into Google.

Google has acquired many companies with rich cash. There are successful cases as like Keyhole for map service, Youtube for video contents, whereas some of them were disappeared or depressed as like Dodgeball, Jaiku and Zingku.

Three companies were a promising social network service with mobile capability, especially Jaiku was only competitor against Twitter. But, founders of Dodgeball were disappointed to Google and left their company and Jaiku and Zingku didn’t get registration any more after shopping by Google.

Measuremap.com was closed after “buying famous UI expert, Jeffry Veen” who recenlty left Google again. Feedburner also shows a downward trend that didn’t have offered own advertisement service (FAN) since May in this year. It is a matter of course how weird Blogspot.com is now.

There is a common point that Google is not successful to grow social communication and content-generating after buying services. According to Google’s mission to gathering all of informations for universal access, services based on social activities will be a sad lot. To so called “Information addict” such as Google, social messaging of gossip and small talk may not be treated as an information.

Short messages and blog comments are classified by garbage not to be indexed. It means social communication service may be excluded in the order of priority of Google. But, I knew Google has given efforts to build open platform for social network and communication such as Open Social. But, If Twitter or FriendFeed are acquired by Google, there will be high possibility that they become Google’s another dead ducks.

The Web is not only composed by “information”, which it has been made by human and “communication” called by the media power is one of important part of Web. I think it is a sole vulnerable point of Google. TNC was very hopeful startups for us. It depends on Google that their vague possibility becomes the success case that catches local big players such as Naver and Daum that have a great power of user-generated contents.

The Korea Fair Trade Commission(KFTC), South Korea’s anti-trust watchdog approved conditional approval for U.S. online auction site eBay Inc.’s bid to buy into very big online retailer Gmarket (http://www.gmarket.co.kr) The eBay’s Korean property, Internet Auction (http://www.auction.co.kr) also has been very big player in this area.

So Gmarket and Internet Auction eBay’s South Korean unit, when combined would control 87.2 percent of the local online retail market. You may wander this makes anti-trust issue for existence of big player with exclusive market share.

For your understanding, online shopping was divided into two categories of retail (B2C) and auction(C2C). Internet Auction was started from C2C and Gmarket was did from B2C as the Interpark’s branch. But, nowadays it’s hard to be inseparable with both because of existence of personal power sellers from auction market. In fact, Gmarket has invaded Internet Auction’s share.

The KFTC said in a statement that it will approve the deal under the condition that the companies ban themselves from raising sales commissions for the next three years and limit increases in ads and other fees to below the local inflation rate. Despite concerns over the impact on the country’s C2C market, the KFTC approved the deal as most Internet-based markets are easily accessible and new competitors may emerge at any time in online markets.

eBay is now authorized to buy a 36 percent stake in Gmarket from Interpark and it plans to further boost their ownership in the company through purchases in the stock market. Gmarket’s major stock owners are Interpark with 29.49% and its CEO, Mr. Ki hyung Lee with 7.48% and Yahoo! Korea 9.1%.

Gmarket generated $35.6 million in profit on $238.2 million in revenue last year, whereas Internet Auction did $10.3 million in profit on $182.4 million in revenue last year too. Internet Auction was already acquired by eBay in Feb. 2001 and it has been almost exclusive players in C2C market before rapid growth of Gmarket from 2002 to 2005.

The iPhone 3G is distributed in world-wide, but unfortunately the south Korea, one of famous mobile country is not included.

I just researched iPhone price plan in the world including, USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan and France with similar price plan. Canadian’s is very expensive rather than other countries. Especially Australian Orange offers pre-paid iPhone 3G(8G) in about 900 USD because only monthly contraction is illegal in this country.

Find information and comparisons on cell phones like Iphone reviews.

Also, you know there are many cell phone plans by various options of carriers and manufactures. You can see as following table for your choice.

You can refer iPhone 3G World Price Plan Comparison Chart by me. I hope to get iPhone 3G in south Korea soon.

I was at Future of Web Apps Conference in the last week, Miami Beach. It gave the chance to hear various technical workshops and latest web application technologies and examples from famous startups such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Pownce and WorePress. It was very good time for me.

Also I attended BarCamp Miami and presented “Why not Web 2.0 in Korea?” that explains no boom-up status of Web 2.0 in Korea and why you check out Korea continually.

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Some people already knows Naver and Cyworld, but there is no famous successful startups although Korea has the highest broadband network and most wired people. You can see my presentation in slideshare.net too.