Korean Startups
Korea has a great list of startups and some of them are making a name for themselves overseas – e.g. OhMyNews and ThinkFree.
- Enbee is a an end-to-end photo management service that’s similar to HP’s Snapfish.
- Tattertools is the leading blog tool of Korea. They recently launched a hosted blogging service (like Typepad) called Tistory as well.
- Video sharing: Pandora TV (recently announced a $6M investment by Sillicon Valley investors),
- Beedeo.com (founded by the original founder of Cyworld, but hasn’t yet taken off in Korea)
- Revu by Opinity is an Identity 2.0 (online reputation) service.
- Thinkfree is a leading Web Office service (has a US office) – n.b. I interviewed ThinkFree CEO TJ Kang for ZDNet (part 1 and part 2).
- Ohmynews.com is a well-known Citizen journalism site
- Wingbus provides a travel booking service along with travel-related blogs, syndicated from various sources.
- Han RSS is the #1 RSS reader in Korea, in terms of market share and features.
- Cyworld open market is a “social commerce” site where people create blogs with shopping APIs (here is Chang’s post about it)
Chang also said there are many online gaming services – “Korea is a hotbed of online games companies.” He thinks that online games (MMORPGs) might be the best example there of a) software as a service and b) online money-making business models.
If there is a possible market opportunity, Chang thinks it’s a Facebook-like college social networking site. But then, everyone uses Cyworld anyway!
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