Tag: Korea

Empas testing new music search service.

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.

User image
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.

User image


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.)

Challenge after understanding

Original Post : A Korean microblogging service sees two of its users getting married

Me2day, just like Twitter, seems to follow the right path. The only concern I have is, compared to Twitter, Me2day’s core users could be too small in numbers because the service is only offered in Korean. In fact, that’s the same kind of limitation that works against our company as well. Which is why we should have “globalize or die” mentality

As it is mentioned widely in certain marketing theories – Purple cow, Blue Ocean and etc. – ‘different market conditions’ can give great chance to business – the ‘differentiation’.

Moreover, some ‘cultural specialties’ protect some start-ups because English base star-up teams can’t make efficient strategies to Korean market. 

(Yeh, that’s right. They may don’t need Korean market. But don’t consider that kind of views in this article.)

But anyway, small IT business market size (or user pool) in Korea gives certain limitation of growth (or chasm) to start-up ventures – this is exactly what I concern about in these days.

Globalize or die strategy is very desirable thing to Korean IT start-up teams including my company, but I’m afraid that it’s really not easy to Koreans make and maintain successful web service targeted to global market.

I learned that from my full time job – global targeted community portal.

Conclusion

We have to understand SW(+OT) of us. We have to know about ourselves first.
Though with these inevitable things people or team dreaming about great company should keep challenging to our goal.

 

‘Good to Great’