Empas acquired by SK Communications (the following, SK Coms) in June 2006.
SK Coms’ corporate parent is ‘SK Telecom (the following, SKT)’ which is no.1 mobile telecommunications operator in Korea.
With it great leading power in mobile business area and endless cash flow, SKT have acquired Cyworld 2003 and egloos in 2006 and made them business group under SK Coms.
Late 2006, many people were looking forward to seeing new services launched by SK Coms next year, because they already have juicy personal database and contents with its own web service Cyworld, Egloos.(As you know Cyworld have become the biggest community service ever in Korea since 2004.)
“Cyworld had database. Now it has search engine technology to use its database. Daum and Naver should be careful.”
This was common ideas among people in Web service business area.
But it was not that impressive. Search and news services make Cyworld have more rich contents but not that rich.
Many people disappointed. So did I.
I’m envious of Cyworld’s market position because of my personal interests in personalized service.
SK Coms scarcely show its real potentials with Empas.
I heard that some technical problem raying behind merging to service but anyway neo-Cyworld in 2007 was so disappointing.
Yesterday I found interesting an event in Cyworld(Empas) – Search music with your feeling.
Actually Empas have launched BGM search with its open search concept in 2005 but not that successful. There was similar concept BGM search service Qbox slightly opened ‘earlier’ than Empas.
New featured music search this March have some different factors than that old one.
1. No missing BGM links.
Later Empas BGM search find some missing BGM links. Owner of Cyworld minihome usually change his or her BGM frequently but update of indexed information of Empas couldn’t follow that.
This time it seems that the search engine system successfully merged with Cyworld music database. There are no missing links in my search result.
2. Bring concept of ‘feelings’.
Cyworld have had ‘Today is..?’ feature in minihome. Users can express their feeling with certain icons.
This time ‘collaborative filtering’ used once again to find relationship between feeling and BGM. That algorithm already has been applied in music item shop to recommend BGM to users in Cyworld.
Since ‘feeling’ is really subjective thing, it’s not easy to make conclusion whether ‘search with feeling’ working precisely or not.
Conclusion
I think SK Coms has good tactics in there days.
There recent ‘Cyworld People’ and ‘music search with feeling’ services are well focused on their strengths – the people and personalized data.
Irrelevant to its success, I will watch carefully what’s going on this new music search service.
(Actually speaking I really love music.)
Minhee Cho 