Samsung (005930:KS) co-CEO Shin Jong-kyun has today hailed the company’s new Galaxy S4 phone as its fastest ever selling gadget. It’s expected to hit 10 million in sales next week, a mere three weeks after it first launched. JK Shin also told The Korea Times:

We are confident that we will pass more than 10 million sales of the S4 next week. It is selling much faster than the previous model S3.

He added that the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy S4 could ultimately reach 100 million units sold, a feat which would represent double the global sales of its predecessor, the Galaxy S3, which reached 50 million sales. Indeed, the S3 took 50 days to pass the 10 million sales mark.

The Galaxy S4 went on sale in South Korea on April 26, and promptly landed in the US, China, and India the next day ahead of a massive global roll-out backed up by major offline and online marketing. The big-screened S4 launched in Indonesia on May 3rd.

Samsung is the top smartphone brand in China, where it sold 30 million phones across various models in 2012.

(Source: Korea Times; via The Verge)

Jimmy Rim, CEO at K Cube Ventures

Born in Korea and graduated from KAIST, a well-known engineering college in Korea, JimmyRim is the CEO of K Cube Ventures, an early stage fund founded in April 2012. At 32, Jimmy is perhaps the youngest CEO at a venture capital firm in Korea.

He first started working at NHN in 2003, seeing the company grow from 800 to 2500 people by 2005. To gain more experience, Jimmy joined Boston Consulting Group for a year from 2005 to 2006. Following that, he had a five-year stint at Softbank Ventures where Jimmy made a name for himself in Korea venture capital world. At Softbank Ventures, Jimmy made around 15 investments that resulted in three IPOs, one M&A, and some companies raising funds with much higher valuations. One of the 15 companies he picked is SundayToz, the maker of Anipang, a mobile game that was hugely popular in Korea.

Perhaps the deal that got Jimmy connected with Kakao and eventual tech luminary Brian Kim was Lotiple. Lotiple (made up of the words: location, time, and people) was a startup that did real-time coupon service and Jimmy invested $1 million even before the product was out in the market. He told me:

They are like the best engineers in Korea, top tier talents, seven of them from KAIST. Three of them competed at ACM-ICPC, a global competition for hackers, they went there and became the finalists. […] I invested right after they incorporated the company.

Lotiple was founded in 2011 May and by 2011 October, Kakao bought the company, not for the service but for the talents. Brian was surprised to learn that Jimmy invested in a company that didn’t even have a product ready. For Jimmy, it was simple: he invests in people, the team. He shared:

Team is my first priority. A lot of people say that team is first but there aren’t a lot of people doing that. […] The conventional investors invest after the product launches and see the data and even ask for revenue and business model.

Brian was impressed, set up a new $10 million venture capital fund, pulled Jimmy over and made him the CEO of K Cube Ventures. Jimmy said:

How could I imagine anyone would make me the CEO of a venture capital? Even though I have a good track record I was relatively new with five to six years of experience. Brian Kim is unique too, how could he bet on me?

But it happened, which makes Jimmy the youngest CEO running a VC firm in Korea. K Cube Ventures now follows Jimmy’s invest-in-people philosophy. Having invested in 12 companies in ten months, nine companies were invested even before they had a product. It was the team that Jimmy is looking out for. Jimmy also says that K Cube Ventures’ portfolio companies bond together like a family. Every month, the companies will gather in one place to share knowledge, network, and test each other’s services.

It’s a huge value. Because each of the portfolio companies has different expertise to share. They feel bonded as a community and we don’t invest in competing services.

In general, Jimmy is positive about Korea’s tech scene. Back in 2007, he said that big companies like NHN and Daum wouldn’t even want to meet or get involved with startups. But in last couple of years, the momentum has changed and it is looking positive as more exits start to happen in Korea.

Mr. Kang Hyunbin, head of business office at Line Plus Corp

Popular mobile messaging chat app Line was created by NHN Japan, with Japanese and Korean team inspired by the tragic earthquake that happened in Japan in 2011. When SMS and calls were unreliable during the disaster, data messaging became the primary mode of communication.

As Line’s popularity grew, the app was spun-off in February this year into the Line Corp subsidiary. Besides facilitating chats between users, it has truly become a mobile platform incorporating different digital content including games and manga. Growing to 150 million users in less than two years hasn’t been easy. One of the reasons why Line has been able to grow so rapidly was because it has listened closely to its users’ needs. At NHN’s headquarters in Seoul, Korea, Kang Hyunbin, who is the head of business office at Line Plus Corp, told me:

I think users in Japan and the users in the world actually provide us the reason why we develop Line and what [way] to develop Line. Our users are kinda our co-founders.

Line characters and content

Hyunbin also believes that Line’s success hinges hugely on its rich content and user interface. For example Line users can express themselves with more than just words – there are the stickers that I would call an upgraded version of emoticons, and they have been hugely popular in Asia. Line has been extremely smart in developing different personalities for each of its sticker characters.

Starting with Cony, Brown, Moon, and James, these characters, who each represent different personalities, have been a huge hit in Asia. In Japan, Line’s kawaii characters are broadcast on TV in cartoon form and can also be found for sale as plush toys, T-shirts, and other merchandise. Take the pictured screenshot as an example. Expressing our sincere goodbyes to friends using stickers can be that fun.

Line also has games to entertain its users. One of its more popular games, Line Pop, is popular not just in Japan but also Thailand and Taiwan. So much so that it even has tutorial videos on tips and tricks to get more points.

Hyunbin told me that Line’s recently released manga content has been successful in Japan and the company has plans to bring it to other parts of the world.

Line outside of Japan

Line Japan focuses on the local Japanese market while the Korean headquarters focuses on international expansion. The ambitious chat application has been aggressively expanding to China, Vietnam, and Indonesia recently using both online and offline marketing tactics.

Chatting up China

Hyunbin says that Line’s China user base has grown rapidly despite early days. He explained further:

So far, we have established the basic infrastructure that we can do some more in the mainlaind China market. For example, Google Play doesn’t work in mainland China. So we have [to work with] a lot of third-party Android market. We have to modify our ‘apk’ files to suit into these third party markets […] and attract more users to download [Line].

Besides making adjustments to its Android distribution in China, Hyunbin says that Line’s cute stickers are getting many Chinese users on board. Line even introduced customized panda stickers to suit the local tastes and has also worked with local partners like Tmall and Mogujie to set up official accounts on Line.

Line’s plan in China is to target working women who are aged 20 to 30 in ‘tier one’ cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Hyunbin explains that the characteristics of these users are very fashion sensitive. So it is only natural to work with Chinese e-commerce sites with fashion products such as Tmall and Mogujie. Hyunbin also said that Line hasn’t started to do any large scale promotion in China as the company is still trying to understand the market better such as the media structure and user requirements.

The user-base number isn’t big in China but we have a growth trend plus our own effort, which we are going to plan in the future. I have confidence that we do have more aggressive numbers coming soon that we can reach in the future.

Tencent’s WeChat – called Weixin in China – is the clear market leader there.

Thailand, Indonesia, Spain, and more

Unlike China, Line dominates Thailand with more than 15 million users from the country. In Thailand, Line noticed a familiar trend: Users simply love their stickers. “Again, the one big phenomenon in the Thai market is that users can express themselves really well using Line’s stickers,” said Hyunbin.

Line acknowledges that Thailand is a big market for them. In the future, it is looking to introduce Line branded merchandise in Thailand and also more localized content including Thai-language content such as news, manga, and celebrity accounts. Hyunbin is also open to work with local Thai-based game developers who are able to build games with a regional vision.

Besides China and Thailand, Line has been very active in Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, The Philippines, and also the Spanish-speaking markets. Hyunbin explains that the popularity of Line in Spain has helped Line to organically grow in South American markets which mostly communicate in Spanish. In Spain, Line already has more than 12 million users.

Hyunbin highlighted that Indonesia is a key market for Line in Southeast Asia, stating the rapid growth in smartphone usage could signify that more people will be consuming mobile applications and content in the future. Based on Line’s internal data, it claims that it is the most popular chat application by user count.

The company declined to reveal user numbers for country-specific breakdowns, but said that out of 150 million users, 45 million of them are from Japan. So 70 percent of Line’s users are outside of Japan.

“We have no time to be worried about IPO.”

As Line grows into a giant mobile platform, there is more and more content on the mobile chat application. Hyunbin acknowledges that there could be a case where Line users (just like Facebook is experiencing now) may find the service complicated and overloaded with content. The team is careful with that and is constantly trying to simplify its features. On content selection, Line picks content to suit the local market, ensuring that they are relevant for its users. Hyunbin gave me a case in point:

For example in e-commerce there are global big players. But in each market, there are also local key players. In some ways, we [would like] to partner with the local companies to bring the best experience to users in specific markets.

When I asked when Line will go public, Hyunbin says that the company has no plans for that, saying that users are still their top priority. Jin-woo Lee, head of Line’s Southeast Asia team added:

A lot of people think that Line is quite big already. But if you take a look at the growth rate, in a year or two, we can be two or three times bigger than now. It all depends on expansion first. We need to create a bigger user-base then everything will be quite natural for an IPO. We have no time to be worried about IPO.

In Line’s first quarterly financial results that came out last week, the subsidiary revealed that it recorded $58 million in revenue in Q4.

Kakao, the maker of Korean mobile chat app, KakaoTalk, has launched KakaoHome a launcher for Android users. At first glance, it feels a little like “Facebook Home” type of application but it is not.

From what we understood so far, users can pull out KakaoHome from the left side of their Android home screen which displays notifications from KakaoTalk, KakaoStory, games and more.

Good news is that, by default, KakaoHome doesn’t invade your lock and home screen entirely. Facebook Home does that which is a little annoying. Though you can turn it off through settings.

Other than that, like any other Android launcher, KakaoHome helps users tidy their mobile apps, such as in alphabetical order, order of downloads, or in your own personalized orders. Users can also choose over 100 free design themes to decorate its Android devices’ wallpaper, app icons, widgets, and page slide effects.

Kakao’s Android Launcher is social. But it is only useful if you and your network of friends are on KakaoTalk. So launching KakaoHome in Korea is perhaps a good first move since most of its 90 million users originate there. But other than Korea, I can’t see KakaoHome thriving in other countries. Unless, of course, if KakaoTalk has proven to be successful abroad.

Kakao has been pretty aggressive pushing KakaoTalk in Indonesia and Vietnam but also faces competition from Line and WeChat who are also eyeing the same market.

(Also read: How KakaoTalk Grew From a Startup to a Giant Mobile Platform)

Chester Roh (pictured) started his journey as an entrepreneur at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), a well-known engineering school in Korea. Chester got interested in the internet and hacking and spent two years honing his hacking skills. (In fact, he was doing so much hacking that he was eventually caught and prosecuted, but thankfully it didn’t do much damage to his career).

Knowing that he was good at hacking and computer science, he joined Inzen (a security solutions company serving the government and large corporations) as a co-founder and CTO at age 21. What Inzen did was to analyze the packet data in real-time to detect and prevent malicious attacks. Chester was at his dream job at 21; a place where he could use his skills to do good. He stayed at the company for five years and eventually saw it go IPO in 2002 in Korea.

Xenters was Chester’s second company, but this time around he was a founder and leader. Xenters also dealt with cyber security and was started by a group of ex-Inzen members that included Chester. The difference between Inzen and Xenters was that the latter could catch smarter hackers who tried to break into the system slowly and randomly, making it hard to track and monitor their packet data. However, the business didn’t succeed as the team couldn’t find the proper customers for their solutions. It was shut down in 2005.

Chester then took a break from being an entrepreneur to work at SK Telecom, the largest telco in Korea. At SK Telecom, Chester got his first chance to build a product for consumers. He was put in charge of building an intelligent customized service, named “Adaptive Personalization System,” that responded to each user’s need and wants, somewhat similar to Google Now. The intelligent customization system that Chester designed wasn’t ready for the market and was eventually discontinued, but Chester got his first taste of building products for consumers, which turned out to be an important point of his journey leading to his success at Tatter & Company. He said:

I really wanted to change my career and that is the reason why I went to SK Telecom. Because [in all my career] I was a security engineer, a security expert. I wanted to change my career to the consumer side. I wanted to do something outside [of my norm.]

After his stint at SK Telecom, around 2005, Chester noticed that there was a blogging trend in Korea and was hoping to import a blogging platform to Korea to ride on the trend. He told me:

My initial thought would be to import a blogging software solution into Korea. So I was writing a letter to the biggest blogging software company in the US (back then), Six Apart, who runs Movable Type.

Six Apart didn’t reply, but one of Chester’s friends, knowing that he was looking for such a solution for the Korean market, sent him a link to Tatter & Company, a blogging platform built by a Korean engineer. Chester elaborated:

It was really beautiful blogging software…so I called him and told him that I was interested in his business and I wanted to work with him.

So in 2006, they co-founded the company with Chester taking the leading role. Tatter & Company builds Tattertools, which is an open source blogging platform similar to WordPress for the Korean market which allows third party developers to collaborate and integrate their ideas into it. Competition was fierce with Daum and Naver, who had 9 million and 13 million users at the time also in the blogging platform arena. But Chester didn’t fight based on numbers. It was quality that he was after:

I have a strong conviction. At the time in Korea, blogging wasn’t new. But the quality of the content wasn’t that good. With search, we need quality content and Tatter & Company is providing all this quality content. So our strategy is clear. We are not taking care of all bloggers but we are taking care of high quality content creators.

Starting in 2006, Tattertools provided services such as allowing bloggers to have their own domain name, their own blog design, and data. While all these sound very common today, remember that they were introduced in 2006. Plus, the rest of the blogging platform in Korea only allowed bloggers to register as a sub-domain and didn’t allow much customization. The strategy worked. From 1,000 users at the start, Tatter & Company is now seeing more than 10 million unique monthly visitors.

In 2008, Google came in to acquire Tatter & Company when it had more than 200,000 bloggers using its platform. Tatter & Company was also believed to be Google’s first acquisition in Korea. Chester reflected back and told me:

All of our engineers were excited when Google contacted us. And in 2007 and 2008, Google was like the king of the web. I felt our engineers were really looking forward to this next challenge in the company so we took that opportunity.

With money and experience under his belt, Chester is now an angel investor investing in local Korean startups. He has invested 15 companies so far with the usual ticket size ranging from $50,000 to $300,000. Some of the successful portfolio companies include Ticket Monster (acquired by LivingSocial) and Dialoid (acquired by Daum). His entrepreneurial spirit hasn’t died down either as he recently founded Ablar, a mobile technology company that aims to build different mobile products to serve the world.

With over 90 million users today, KakaoTalk’s success seems like an overnight fairytale. It isn’t. The company has had its fair share of struggles. Like any startup, Kakao’s road to success was paved with blood and sweat.

In December 2003, JB Lee graduated from Seoul National University. Upon graduation, he a company that does document solutions for web and mobile. While working on that, he got to know Brian Kim, an influential figure in Korea’s tech ecosystem. Brian founded Hangame, a giant gaming company, which eventually merged with search engine Naver to form NHN.

Together with Brian, the duo founded IWILAB in 2006 and started to work on several web 2.0 projects but with only limited success. Things began to change when the first smartphone was introduced in Korea in 2009 and eventually went mainstream. It was then that some of the team saw the opportunity to build a world-class smartphone application.

Unfortunately, not everyone was convinced. The team was torn between building products for PC and mobile, and only after much discussion did Brian and JB decide that going mobile was the way to go. Not everyone was happy about that choice, but JB says the decision was a pivotal moment for the company:

The atmosphere during the discussion was very miserable and depressing. Brian came out with the idea of mobile smartphone apps. There was a lot discussion and debate. But we came to the conclusion to focus on mobile.

Having made the decision to focus on mobile, the team didn’t know exactly what to work on. There were a number of ideas. So in the end, the team formed three groups to work on different projects.

KakaoTalk was born

One of the ideas was KakaoTalk, which was launched on March 2010. With zero ad spending, KakaoTalk grew very quickly and organically while the other two applications were unfortunately getting little traction. The team made the decision to shut down the other applications to focus on KakaoTalk and IWILAB’s corporate name was eventually also changed to Kakao.

By September 2010, six months after it was launched, KakaoTalk had already recorded one million users. Three months later, in December 2010, KakaoTalk hit five million users. The growth didn’t stop and in fact, it accelerated. Today, KakaoTalk is used by over 90 million people worldwide and is expanding aggressively in Vietnam and Indonesia. I was curious as to how a young company like Kakao Corp could manage this explosive growth so well. JB was quick to credit his team. He said:

We have very experienced engineers who have worked at big companies such as NHN before. Our CTO, Young Lee, who used to work for NHN, has a very strong engineering background. He has experience dealing with huge traffic loads. Brian and our CFO, Dean Song, who used to work at CJ internet, also help KakaoTalk manage its fast growth.

JB also explained that they wanted Kakao Corp’s culture to be open and horizontal. This is especially attractive to talents who want their voices and opinions to be heard. Kakao’s culture stood out among other Korean big corporations that usually have the traditional top down approach. JB also says that great talents attract each other and he is thankful that Kakao Corp had a strong group of founding team members who attracted more talent through their network and influence.

One and half years ago, Sirgoo Lee, a reporter and lawyer turned management veteran, joined Kakao Corp as co-CEO. Prior to joining Kakao Corp, Sirgoo had experience working at IBM and NHN. Plus, recently Kakao Corp has acquired four startups to grab the engineering talents it needs to scale its business worldwide.

Kakao’s smart funding

Like any other startup, Kakao Corp needed financial resources to keep it growing fast without worrying about revenue. Brian funded the company for the first three years. In January 2011, Kakao Corp received its first external funding of $5 million from 13 top-level tech influencers in Korea, including the founders of Nexon, Hangame, and NC Soft.

But Kakao didn’t need the money. Rather, JB explained that the move was made to form close relationships with key influencers in Korea. This ensured that the top executives at various tech companies in Korea had skin in Kakao. Kakao then raised $20 million from DCM, Cyberagent Ventures, and Maverick Ventures. Its latest financing round came from Tencent and WeMade, who invested more than $80 million in total with Tencent also taking a board seat.

Users define Kakao’s Future

With a whopping 90 million people chatting on KakaoTalk, the Korean startup has truly become a platform for hosting games and other digital content. Co-CEO Sirgoo Lee explained that it is only natural for KakaoTalk to expand into a platform. JB added:

Communication shouldn’t just be limited to emoticons, images, and text. Third-party developers could be part of Kakao’s platform.

He uses SundayToz’s hit mobile game Anipang as an example, saying that Anipang showed that this hypothesis was right. In 39 days after Anipang was launched, the game received over 10 million downloads through KakaoTalk. On Kakao’s future, Sirgoo says that the company will keep innovating to be at the forefront of the mobile messaging technology. He explained further:

We pride ourselves on being innovators, trying new things and being willing to learn from others. We look to our users and keep learning from feedback. We are willing to upgrade and change our service to maintain the leadership in innovation. You can copy features and design. But you can’t copy the spirit and philosophy of the company. We are dedicated to creating a healthy ecosystem for developers, rather than doing everything ourselves. The ecosystem is the innovation source for Kakao.

As a platform, Kakao’s journey has just begun and it’ll be exciting to see how the Korean company will manage to expand overseas while fending off competition from the likes of WeChat and Line.

Last Thursday, we had our second ever Tech in Asia Meetup in Singapore. This one featured Hyungseok Dino Ha, CEO and founder of Memebox Korea. To those who are not familiar with Memebox, it is basically the Birchbox of South Korea- a beauty sample subscription e-commerce service that is currently leading in terms of market share.

During the session, we were pleased to have Dino share with us his startup story, as well as providing insightful (and honest) answers to the questions posed by our audience during the Q&A segment.

Here are the highlights just in case you have missed the event. You can also watch the full video at the bottom of this post.

Humble beginnings

At the beginning, the three co-founders raised about $35,000 which Dino mentioned was not a huge amount of money, but just enough to get it running for about two to three months. They did not raise investment during the early stage because they simply did not have the luxury of time to prepare financial statements or reports for VCs. Thus, they decided that rather than wasting time preparing such reports, they’d focus on running the business.

In the first month, the Memebox team achieved $19,000 in revenue, followed by $54,000 in the second and $180,000 in the third. And so they accumulated sufficient funds to get the business going.

Hiring and motivating staff with few resources

In order to bootstrap, their first strategy was to hire interns from university and college at a salary of about $200 per month. Though it was really low, the interns still accepted the offer. Memebox retained their talent by keeping their promise on subsequent pay raises. As for the co-founders, they took home a salary of $700 each month.

Dino mentioned that in Korea, startups are a megatrend among intelligent people. Their main motivator is not the money, but the ambition of wanting to build the future. In fact, the first questions these talented individuals posed to the company was about the vision and culture, not about their salary and employee benefits.

Memebox marketing tactics

Dino emphasized that the co-founders’ DNA is in sales. For the first six months, they didn’t believe in hiring any engineers or designers, and instead outsourced everything cheaply. Thus in order not to lose focus, they invested only in hiring sales people at the start as an excellent sales team will drive sales.

Furthermore, they focused mainly on partnering with great brands, thinking that if they have good products on the site, subscribers will naturally start pouring in. No investments were made in Google Adwords, but instead, they engaged on social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to spread the word on Memebox.

Complimentary Memebox samples were also distributed to bloggers to review, and Memebox also entered into a revenue-share model partnership with a Korean television talk show called Get it Beauty.

Another interesting fact: the company also roped in the famous entertainer PSY to collaborate for a special Memebox called PSY Energy Factory without having to fork out a single cent.

Before seeing the video of the Singapore event, you might like to know our next Meetup is back in Jakarta on Thursday May 16th, featuring Lichi Wu from Millennial Media who’ll share tips on mobile app monetization. You may refer here for event and registration details. We certainly hope to see you there! Here’s the Singapore Meetup video in full:

Not forgetting, a huge thank you to our awesome Sponsors:

Corporate sponsors

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Startup sponsors

Korea’s dominant mobile messaging app, KakaoTalk, is enjoying remarkably high user growth. The KakaoTalk team clued us in to some interesting data that journals the app’s growth over the last two years. Using the data, we plotted the graph below which shows a hockey stick growth curve that many startups will be looking at with envious eyes. KakaoTalk currently has 89 million users and is closing in onto 90 million. On a related note, KakaoTalk’s competitor Line recently crossed the 150 million user mark while WeChat reportedly has over 300 million users in total with 40 million users outside of China.

While many chat apps have found it hard to monetize their services during the early days, KakaoTalk was the first to introduce games onto its platform. The results were excellent and other chat apps followed suit after seeing KakaoTalk’s success. At our Startup Asia Singapore conference last month, co-CEO Sirgoo Lee shared that Kakao Corp generated $45 million in revenue with $7 million in profits last year.

In our recent trip to Korea, we visited Kakao Corp’s office and also did an interview with co-founder JB Lee to find out more about KakaoTalk’s founding story. So stay tuned!

Perples is a Korean mobile technology startup that enables smartphones to display relevant content upon detecting inaudible sound signals. So far, the company provides soundtag SDKs for brands to make use of its technology to engage with customers.

When I spoke to the team at beLaunch conference, the company said that it is beta testing its sound tagging tech with Dunkin’ Donuts in Korea. Powered by Perples, Dunkin’ Donuts’ “Morning Startup” App is able to leverage sound tagging technology to improve its breakfast sales.

Here’s how: The app acts like an alarm clock, but once the alarm triggers, users can choose breakfast items they want from Dunkin’ Donuts and then the app will start to count down. Users are expected to arrive at a Dunkin Donuts store within three hours. Once at the store, the app will detect Dunkin Donuts’ inaudible sound signal to trigger a “mission complete” message and create a coupon that gives them a discount on the items they want.

Perples says that its clients are able to customize messages through its content management system. There’s no special hardware involved as long as there’s an iPod or any other music player that is able to broadcast the ultrasound within the store. For full case study, you can watch the video below to learn about Perples’ beta test with Dunkin Donuts:

Talking about O2O, Perples may have just found a way to drive foot traffic to stores. Even though this may be just one positive case study, it does offer quite some value for both customers and stores to give Perples a try at least.

South Korea’s biggest tech conference, beLAUNCH 2013, opened today in the Gangnam district of Seoul.

A couple of my workmates are there, meeting startups and networking. While they’re doing that, let’s check out all the competing startups at the event. All but one are Korea-based, but many are globally minded, which is very encouraging. We’ve dug up a link where we can find one. Here’s the list of all 20 contenders at the beLAUNCH Startup Battle:

ChattingCat

ChattingCat is a platform that connects English tutors or helpers with non-native learners of that language. When the connection is made, English learners get instant correction of their written English.

SinglePet

Sadly this is not a dating/hook-up app for your pets. We can’t find a link for this, but we’ve seen the SinglePet crew and been told that it enables pet owners, after buying the hardware, to monitor and communicate with their pets via the upcoming SinglePet smartphone app. The hardware can even feed pets by dispensing food pellets.

KNOWCK CloudVision

CloudVision provides cloud storage and streaming across devices, with an emphasis on home entertainment and smart TVs. The startup has some Android apps for this service too.

Corping

This product is a task management application for manual laborers and blue-collar workers.

Conyac

Conyac is a familiar name to us – and it’s actually a Japanese startup. Conyac is a crowdsourced translation service and a pretty established business that’s actually planning series A funding. It’s the winner of the beLAUNCH Tokyo edition.

Shakr

Shakr is a web-based video creation and editing app, making it easy to add lighting, cuts, music, sound effects, narration, and more. It got funding from 500 Startups back in December.

Lookpage

Lookpage is a “social co-op communicating platform” meant for work and collaboration.

Tripvi

Tripvi is a social travel site for both sharing photos and planning trips. It sorts out your travel photos automatically by location, and can turn your journey into a beautiful movie.

DGMIT

DGMIT’s B2 is a platform and engine that lets developers build upon a way to connect smartphones and other devices, like smart TVs or tablets.

A business profile for mobiles on Profeel.me. Click to enlarge.

Profeel.me

Profeel.me (pictured) is a mobile marketing center for small businesses and freelancers. The idea is that users can create and manage a home page with ease, and thereby post links or content (e.g. brochures, videos) and deliver these to customers/clients via Kakaotalk, SMS, or email.

Twinword

Twinword is compiling a database about word associations crowdsourced from online usage around the world. This makes it possible to analyze trends and different thought patterns at particular times or in certain places. The startup is able to apply all this to produce more pertinent search engine results and target ads more accurately.

Phonegle

Phonegle is a smartphone application that helps people see a caller’s information before he/she decides to answer the phone. Many such anti-spam call apps have been created, but have failed to stop spam calls because most of them are based on an outdated spam phone number database. Instead, Phonegle is a real-time database.

500vidoes

500videos allows you to create an explainer animation in minutes for free. Choose from hundreds of free explainer animation templates, then customize the content, images, voiceover, and look and feel. This could be super useful for other startups seeking to make a demo video. Here’s the startup’s video that’s presumably made using its own tech:

Wishket

Wishket is an online workplace for freelancers and companies.

JDLab

Here’s one for web and software developers, promising an Integrated Unified Markup Language (IUML) for coding in a simple interface with drag-and-drop elements.

Ideabove

Ideabove is a social music startup . At the beLaunch 2013 event, Ideabove unveils its new music service called Musicloud which is for meeting new, local friends based on users’ taste in music. Sounds like musical dating, which could be fun.

Martmoa

Claiming to be an intelligent grocery marketplace, Martmoa compares nearby prices for your virtual shopping basket so that you can get the best prices.

TGENS

This startup has made MessageSong, a mobile messaging application that converts a text message into a song automatically. I hope it’s not auto-tuned.

WePlanet

These guys make a personal smart journal service. The team has previously created the photo sharing app PocketShare.

LifeSemantics:

Fine Chart’s product is a translation service for medical records written in English, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and Korean.

That’s the lot. Based on the introductions, which ones are you most keen to see pitching?

“Mom, turn right for the candy – AND HURRY!”

We’ve seen Korean supermarket chain Emart (KRX:139480) do some innovative stuff before, like its shadowy QR codes. But this time Emart is trying something more substantive – using smartphones and LED lights to guide shoppers around their stores and lead them to discounts.

Dubbed ‘Emart Sale Navigation’, the idea is a combination of car-like GPS with a location-based discounts app. But rather than actually relying on GPS (which could be unreliable indoors), the Korean supermarket is using special LED lights on the ceiling to send information to lenses attached to shopping carts. Then, so long as you have the Emart app on your Android phone and it’s attached to the shopping cart on the special plastic arm shown in the pictures, you’ll be guided around the aisles by dedicated indoor maps. If you pass an area where there’s a discount coupon available, that’ll pop up on-screen:

It’s all pretty clever and actually simpler than it sounds. For consumers it’s pretty straightforward, as all you need to do is have the app on your phone and then attach it to your cart. Emart itself sorts out the lenses and the lights, so shoppers don’t need to worry about compatibility issues. It avoids other technologies like NFC and QR codes which tend to be either fragmented across devices or just too damn confusing for most people. So one single app in this project from Emart makes it all intelligible and fairly easy.

Back in February, we wrote that the Korean messaging app KakaoTalk had launched KakaoPage, a tool for individuals and brands to create and distribute content on the popular social app. But Sonia Im from Kakao clarified that that was actually just the content editor.

The actual KakaoPage marketplace was launched just two days ago with over 500 individual and corporate publishers who provide about 8,000 pieces of digital content. KakaoPage is only available on Android for now with the iOS version in progress. To clear the air, Sonia explained to me what KakaoPage is all about:

KakaoPage is an open market where any individual can upload and sell their own content. An aspiring author can write a novel and sell it directly on KakaoPage without having to seek out a publishing company. Likewise, big publishing companies or record labels can also distribute their content through KakaoPage.

For now, some of the more prominent publishers include Jong-shin Yoon, a popular singer-songwriter in Korea, Young-man Heo, a renowned manhwa (Korean cartoons, similar to Japanese manga) artist, Hong Cha, a well known hair stylist, and Yi-hyeon Chung, a popular novelist.

While most of the digital content is text-based, KakaoPage also has music and images to offer. For example, 2AM, a popular boy band in Korea, is offering their ‘One Summer Day’ album through KakaoPage, bundled with their photos and commentaries for KRW 5000 (US$4.40). For all content sold, the revenue is shared between Google Play (30 percent), Kakao (20 percent), and the publisher (50 percent).

On a related note, Line also recently launched Line Manga, an app that sells only manga; KakaoPage, in contrast, is open to a greater variety of digital content – and to anybody as a content producer. Line Manga currently only deals with manga publishers but I’m sure it will start to venture into other digital content if manga ends up selling like hot cakes.

E-commerce marketplace site Qoo10 revealed that in 2012, its Singapore operations transacted US$73 million in sales. In Singapore, Qoo10 has a total of more than 900,000 members and 53,000 sellers.

The online marketplace charges commission from about six to twelve percent commission on sellers and makes about three to six percent off each transaction after footing peripheral costs. Based on its margin, we can deduce that Qoo10 Singapore’s commission revenue is anywhere from two to four million. Qoo10 also generates revenue by offering premium listings.

Qoo10 is the rebranded version of Gmarket which originated from South Korea and has a total of 450 employees with 40 in Singapore. Besides Singapore, Qoo10 is also operating in Hong Kong, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and China. It is also celebrating its third anniversary on 23 April 2013.

#12:15: And now James is stepping on stage. He says the South Korea is the 3rd ranked in the world in terms of economic dynamism.

#12:17: PSY (of Gangnam Style) has given us encouragement. Although he’s not very good looking, but he overcame adversity. So it washed away the fear of a language barrier to access the global market.

#12:20: Internet penetration in South Korea is very high and advanced (over 104 percent). And almost 70 percent of the population is using smartphones. That’s huge!

#12:21: South Korea is also almost 50 percent using 4G LTE, that’s the highest in the world.

#12:23: James advises that startups who are working in the mobile space, should focus on Android first, get user feedback on their apps, and then move forward into iPhone.

#12:25: In 2012, there was a renaissance of Korean angel investors and accelerators. And also, foreign investors like CyberAgent Ventures are getting really active in the space.

#12:26: The current e-commerce market is also huge. It’s more than KRW 30 billion. All in all, it’s a really powerful and compelling market and I wish you luck in getting into the market.

Here’s James’ presentation just in case you wanted to see it.

#11:55: Sirgoo is a lawyer by training, in charge of all the “outside stuff” – legal, PR, marketing – at Kakao. They’re a very horizontal organization. Kakao was founded 6 years ago, and did a lot of web 2.0 services in the early days and “failed miserably”. In mid 2009, with smartphones ascendant, they came up with 3 different services – two of which have been left on the wayside after Kakao’s surge in popularity. Last year, in April, they received a total of 90 million in funding, including interest from China’s Tencent.

#12:00: Kakao’s success is “50% dumb luck”, and 50% “listening to our users”. 3 years of failure taught them that the hard way, he says. “We’ve slowly built a loyal following and brand image.” In hindsight, he wishes Kakao had focused on global expansion a bit more aggresively.

#12:03: On global plans: “We wont advertise agressively in China (and Tencent, likewise, won’t in Korea), but other markets we are in competition. South East Asia is a particular focus.

#12:06: “Games traditionally have a business model that really works online.” Early last year, they spoke to several game companies to discuss outsourcing the games platform to one of them. In 2012, they did about $45 million in revenue, and $7 million in profit. Games are a huge revenue driver. In 2-3 years, he expects this trend to continue. Kakao’s “gifting” platform, started 2 years ago with the ability to purchase Starbucks coffee coupons through the service, is now selling things like 200$ Swarovski necklaces, 1000$ jewelery sets.

#12:10: Kakao in Southeast Asia: Using K-pop celebrities like Big Bang to drive expansion in the region. Hitting 100,000 downloads a day today. Users aren’t “hugely different” from the Korean core, but focusing on getting more customized content for users in the region. Overseas revenue is expected to rise significantly in the long run. A game platform, currently live in Korea and Japan, will be replicated soon in southeast Asia.

Final word: “We’d like to IPO one day, but it’s too early to talk about exiting. We’d rather talk about growing and expanding right now.”

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

Shortly after Singapore-based LoveByte announced passing the 100,000 downloads mark, the Korean-made couples messaging app Between tells us that it has 200,000 downloads across Southeast Asia and over 2.9 million downloads globally. Co-founder, Edward Keonwoo Lee, said that Between’s growth in Southeast Asia has been a surprise package for them. He told me:

Southeast Asia growth was actually very organic. We weren’t able to do any serious marketing or business development in the area yet. But, since the numbers are growing so healthy, we are actually thinking about studying the market a bit further.

VCNC, the maker of Between, recently raised $2.8 million and is expanding fast in Japan which is currently its first priority on its market expansion to-do list. If the Between team were to really come down south for Southeast Asia, that might spell trouble for the folks at LoveByte. Or maybe not, depending on how fast and well LoveByte can localize, expand, and dominate each key country in Southeast Asia. It ain’t an easy region to conquer.

Also read: 11 Hot Mobile Messaging Apps from Asia

TV advertisements have proven to work very well for chat apps in Indonesia. China-based WeChat and Japan’s Line have been propelled to the country’s top spots on iOS and Android app stores thanks to their ads. And now Korea-based KakaoTalk is going to make its mark on the country’s TV sets by airing a TV ad campaign in a couple of days. Will the ads be significant in disrupting the chat ecosystem here? Yes, I think so.

Let’s first agree that TV ads do work to gain nationwide visibility and users in Indonesia. The country’s internet penetration is still at a relatively low 24 percent right now, which means that to engage with the other 76 percent of the nation (which amounts to around 190 million people) you need to use more traditional media, like TV. A study by BCG Perspectives shows that “most, if not all, households throughout the country own a television, even those at the bottom of the pyramid of demographic groups, and it remains the most important source of information for consumers. Indonesians trust television commercials.” Line’s and WeChat’s current rankings in Indonesia’s app sites are a testament to that.

But with Line and WeChat airing their own TV ads ahead of the Korean messaging app, how will KakaoTalk’s advertisement beat them? The answer lies with KakaoTalk’s choice of ad stars.

First of the two is Indonesian celebrity Sherina Munaf – who has the country’s second most-followed celebrity Twitter account with five million followers. She’s joined in the ad by Korean all-boy band BigBang, whose 11,000 concert tickets in Indonesia were sold out in a mere fifteen minutes. Those two stars will be able to attract quite a number of fans to try out KakaoTalk. While Line and WeChat are targeting Indonesian teens with Maudy Ayunda and singer Giselle, a great many teens – i.e.: girls – might fancy BigBang instead.

Also, let’s not forget how Korean fever in Indonesia which has inspired a few Indonesian Korean-style pop groups like SM*SH, Cherrybelle, and 7Icons, who have quite a large number of fan base themselves. The number of Korean TV drama series still being aired in the country prove the popularity of Korean pop culture as well. If KakaoTalk’s association with Korea proves to be successful, and Indonesian remember KakaoTalk when they think of Korea, then it will be a big boost.

Of course, Line is tough competition due to its social games or because a lot of friends are already there. Same goes for the full-featured WeChat, with things like voice chatrooms and video calling, especially when those more social features are now available on Indonesia’s popular smartphone Blackberry now.

At the time of writing, KakaoTalk is ranked outside the top 50 spots in both Google Play and iTunes in Indonesia, according to AppAnnie. Let’s see how those rankings will change in the coming weeks.

Now that the new Samsung Galaxy S4 is out, let’s take a quick look at what could be the world’s next best-selling smartphone – with some help from this Samsung infographic. According to the Guardian, the Galaxy S4 will eventually reach 327 mobile operators in 125 countries. Here are some feature highlights:

S Translator - Provides instant translation, using text or voice translation on applications including email, text message, and ChatON (Samsung’s answer to Line and KakaoTalk).

‘Smart Pause’ and ‘Smart Scroll’ - Basically it’s an eye control sensor so that a video stops if you look away, or the webpage will shift in sync with your eye movements.

Better photo features - Equipped with a 13 megapixel rear camera, the new Galaxy S4 allows you to add frames in photos, and blend photos (with some built-in design options). You can also record voice and sound within the picture.

Find the full Galaxy S4 specs here or check out the review by The Verge team which suggests that the eye-tracking feature is mostly a gimmick. Here are the specs in infographic form:

Source: Samsung Tomorrow

We are all familiar enough with the internet now to realize that it’s not a magical, virtual, hyper-human neuron network and is in fact just another medium – a means of communication that can be shut off, censored, and corrupted in just the same way as newspapers, radio, or TV – if not more so. It will not topple dictators; it will not deliver us from evil. The very gradual opening up of North Korea with visitors this month able to access unrestricted mobile internet for the first time ever – but not so for locals – will ultimately prove to be a very brief period of digital docility. For North Korea’s regime to go on with any level of control over its people and the nation’s propagandized creation myth, it will have to censor its fledgling internet as severely as any other medium. A fast-track to censorship could be buying a Great Firewall from neighboring China.

Historically as close “as lips and teeth”, China and North Korea have an affinity that lends itself to offering brotherly guidance. (Admittedly, that accord is mostly evident at the level of Communist comrades, not among younger Chinese who see themselves more in the image of South Korea’s young and wealthy consumers).

China can indeed teach North Korea a lot. Having gone through an astonishing opening up that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and brought over half a billion people online and onto social networks, China never left its internet totally unrestricted. In the early days of the internet there, when only tens of millions were online, it started to manage the web exactly the same way as newspapers – by creating a culture of self-censorship and media-level eradication of dissent so that the actual government censors don’t have to do much more than issue regular media directives. It’s all massively efficient.

The social web “battleground”

China’s Great Firewall initially blocked only smaller sites that contained ‘sensitive’ material or stirred up dissent, but by 2007 the web filtering system was advanced enough to take down the world’s largest social sites. YouTube looks like an inconvenience? Bam, it’s gone. Facebook could pollute our nation’s young. Click, it no longer exists [1]. China feels – as North Korea’s young ruler Kim Jong-un must surely agree – that a full, free-flowing web is not compatible with the way it wants to handle the spread of information, so the internet was brought under control – even real-time social media like Sina Weibo – as easily as was done with TV stations and all print media.

It is, to quote writer and researcher Rebecca MacKinnon, “networked authoritarianism” that leaves the internet open enough for casual entertainment and doing business – China’s netizens spend a dizzying $40,000 per second on domestic e-commerce sites – whilst also neutering dissent. Of course, it is also a fluid process, and there are examples of China’s web and social media enacting small degrees of change or greater transparency from authorities; MacKinnon quotes Chinese blogger Michael Anti in calling it a public opinion “battlefield” where small victories are sometimes won by the people.

It seems to be the best solution, so to speak. It’s exactly what North Korea will need to continue if it’s not going to open up to the extent of Myanmar. It’s far more likely for Kim Jong-un to go the Chinese route.

Exporting censorship

In the most recent Freedom on the Net 2012 study, China rose to become Asia’s worst new freedom offender. With North Korea not included on the list and Myanmar improving significantly, it was an inevitable tumble for China in the rankings. But can all that web filtering expertise be exported?

In theory, it’s a big market for Chinese tech companies but it’s one hampered by sanctions against nations like Iran and North Korea. While China’s Great Firewall was built, allegedly, by Western companies like Cisco and Siemens, its own major telecom firms have had time since that initial implementation to learn the mechanics. The controversial and much-scrutinized Huawei, according to the WSJ in 2011, “dominates Iran’s government-controlled mobile-phone industry” and thereby “plays a role in enabling Iran’s state security network.” The paper adds:

Huawei recently signed a contract to install equipment for a system at Iran’s largest mobile-phone operator that allows police to track people based on the locations of their cellphones, according to interviews with telecom employees both in Iran and abroad, and corporate bidding documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. It also has provided support for similar services at Iran’s second-largest mobile-phone provider. Huawei notes that nearly all countries require police access to cell networks, including the U.S.

Toughened sanctions since that time have reportedly reduced Huawei’s involvement in Iran, just as with many nations abiding by UN economic sanctions. While no evidence exists of such Chinese tech exports to North Korea, there’s the technological know-how for that to happen – if not from Huawei, then from other sources. Even a North Korea that, in one or two years from now, is engaged in reform, will still find itself under such UN-mandated restrictions, putting pressure on China not to build a Great Firewall for its neighbor.

Despite all that, I believe North Korea’s internet – which is now more open than China’s, so long as you’re a tourist who pays up for its over-priced mobile internet packages – will soon get into shape. That means it’ll be, like all media in the country – and as perfected by China – just another form of tightly gagged communication.

(Image credit: Photoshopped picture features drawing by greatbuildings.com)

It’s only about seven weeks until the globally-minded Korean startup conference beLAUNCH takes place in Seoul on May 1 and 2. But there’s still time for readers to nab tickets and startups to apply to pitch onstage. Good news for startups in India is that beLAUNCH is now taking applications from Indian startups who want to expand and increase their reach in Korea and East Asia.

Indian startups need to apply before March 20 on this page; then some will be chosen for an audition-pitch in Bangalore in late March, and then one will win a place in the 20 presenting startups at beLAUNCH 2013. It’s an exciting chance.

Discounts for Seoul and Beijing

As for tickets for the beLAUNCH conference in Seoul, TechinAsia readers can now get a 30 percent discount for the May event using the promo code beLAUNCHTIA on this page.

Aside from the startup pitching contest at beLAUNCH, there’ll be an array of keynote speakers and panelists, such as 500 Startups’ Christine Tsai, Evernote’s Phil Libin, and GREE’s John S. Kim. Throwing in some chaos will be a few startup media bloggers such as our own Willis Wee, and SGE’s Gwendolyn Regina T.

As noted by our friends at GWC, the beLAUNCH event on May 1 to 2 is a perfect complement to the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing on May 7 to 8. So if you’re flying into the region for one of those events, you might as well go to both. We even have a 25 percent discount for our readers for GMIC, so there’s even more incentive to come to Beijing as well.

Line app has not just got people talking – it’s got them spending as well.

Regular readers will know that Japanese smartphone owners are great for spending money on apps. Now we have new data from AppAnnie, released this evening, that shows how the app monetization situation is developing in Japan and around the world. The report paints an interesting picture of amazing smartphone growth in Japan and Asia, along with some huge successes for Japanese social apps and games. Some world-beating achievements, in fact.

Cashing in on social

First up, AppAnnie notes that the social app category is third in terms of revenues around the world; social apps accounted for 30 percent more downloads in January 2013 compared to the previous year. Japanese app buyers are now spending nearly as much as those in the US on their iPhones and iPads:

Line app and the messaging explosion

The hit messaging app Line, made by NHN Japan, was the top social app for iOS revenue in Jansuary 2013, pipping Whatsapp to the post. With over 100 million registered users (just under half being in Japan), Line is the most downloaded social app in Japan – plus it’s the top grossing app Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand.

Line is also crowned the top non-game app in terms of monthly revenue on both iTunes and Google Play in January. It is the only Asian creation on the iOS apps list that’s dominated by American apps. Apple’s Pages app is second; Pandora Radio is third.

KakaoTalk comes out fighting against Line in the chat app battle, proving itself to be the third-best app for revenue on Android.

GungHo for gaming

As for gaming developers, Japan was once again on top. GungHo Online, with its 14 games, was the outright top publisher by revenue on iOS anywhere in the world. Its Puzzles and Dragons title was a particular hit, helping to push GungHo’s market cap to US$3.3 billion – higher than that of Zynga, or compatriot gaming rival GREE. As GungHo’s own financials point out, it made $92 million in gaming sales in January 2013 alone – a figure that’s already 30 percent of its 2012 revenue total. GungHo also sells PC games and console games, but the company recently pointed out that it’s now making more from iOS and Android.

Indeed, the report points out that Puzzles and Dragons was the top monetizing game on both iOS and Android across the globe.

Seventh on the top iOS publisher’s list is NHN (which is spread over Korea and Japan), boosted by the huge success from Line app and its social gaming platform. That’s shown with games like Line Birzzle, which rocketed to the top of iOS and Android store rankings across Asia. Let’s look at the scene on the iTunes App Store:

Asian Android domination

Even more Asian developers rocked the Android platform. GungHo was top publisher in Google Play too, with NHN popping up in second place. In fact, all but one of the leading ten publishers by revenue on Android are from Asia – it’s pretty amazing. It also shows why gaming is the best way to bring in the cash:

Other famliar names on the list include the rival social gaming platforms DeNA and GREE. Plus there’s a remarkable performance from Korea’s SundayToz team to make it into the top ten with only one game – that’s Anipang, which has been a huge hit especially on KakaoTalk’s own social gaming platform.

Anipang pops up as fourth in terms of gaming revenue on Android, just below the similar Line Pop title.

Game on for Asian developers

Ultimately, it’s a remarkable performance for Japanese and South Korean developers on both iOS and Android – breaking into social whilst also building up huge expertise in casual mobile gaming.

Japan recently passed the US to become the top country for Google Play revenue, so developers in the region can prosper among their regional audience – and break out across the globe. Well, in terms of monetizing power, if not necessarily worldwide market reach.

From the left – Joshua Kevin (community manager for Indonesia), Jude Lee (global marketing manager), Yujin Sohn (global business development VP), Sean Kim (global business development), and Susie Lee (global business development)

Today, Korea-based messaging app KakaoTalk held a press conference event called “Media Play Day.” Besides the usual information load during events like these, the messaging company also held two mini competitions which awarded a Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini to each of the grand winners ¹. During that event, together with DailySocial we also talked with global business development VP of KakaoTalk Yujin Sohn about the company’s progress and plans in Indonesia.

Besides Japan and Vietnam, Indonesia is also targeted in KakaoTalk’s expansion plan. Between January and February, the company recorded a staggering 288 percent growth in users for Indonesia. KakaoTalk also partnered with two Indonesian companies, Pizza Hut Delivery and Groupon as the country’s first brand partners for its ‘Plus Friends’ feature. The company also embraced numerous Indonesian celebrities and artists like Saykoji and street artist Popo in designing local stickers.

Yujin explained to us that there are two reasons why they chose Indonesia as the second target market for expansion. First, from the macro-economic perspective, Indonesians are adopting smartphones in a big way. I think this is particularly true, especially when looking at the increasing number of affordable Android smartphones here. Second, Yujin explained, is the nature of Indonesians who are very chatty and social. Combine these two and Indonesia sure looks like a very nice market.

Grassroot users comes first

But there are other messaging apps which are also looking to tap into the market here, namely WeChat and Line. The latter app in particular, is quite aggressive in marketing its app through TV ads campaign and has the advantage of being the first mover here. The latest report from Arbitron Mobile said that Indonesia’s number one VoIP app is Line. So how does KakaoTalk plan to beat the competition here?

KakaoTalk representative Susie Lee said that they have big marketing plans for Indonesia, but one of the first things they plan to do is embrace the grass root users first by approaching local communities and developers. They are open to launching their own TV ads campaign in the future.

Regarding the app’s own strengths, Yujin believes that KakaoTalk’s exclusive features like unlimited group chat, its strong Korean taste (which is very popular here in Indonesia), and localized features can prove to be the difference. Furthermore, they are branding themselves as a fun entity. This is done through events like today’s semi-formal press conference and mini games. That might also be helpful to convince a few more users to start using KakaoTalk.

More local taste please!

Indonesia has a different infrastructure compared to South Korea such as internet speed and smartphone penetration – so how does KakaoTalk plan to approach this challenge? Yujin explained that besides making the chat app available on affordable packages by working with local telcos, the company has compressed its stickers and animations here so that it can cope well with the country’s internet speed. They are also planning to work with Indonesian developers soon to work on future KakaoTalk game titles.

Bad news for Indonesia’s Blackberry users, who are the majority of the smartphone market in the country, is that KakaoTalk won’t be updating its app with significant new features anytime soon – like free calls – due to the ageing hardware’s limitations. But the team is in talks with Blackberry regarding building for the new Blackberry 10 platform.

At the moment, KakaoTalk is cooperating with Indonesian telco XL Axiata to hold the first Anipang game competition outside Korea. The competition runs until March 3rd and it promises prizes in the form of gadgets. Starting this month, KakaoTalk has also partnered with XL Axiata for carrier billing.

You can check for further information regarding the Anipang competition here.

The interview with Yujin Sohn was conducted together with DailySocial.

Starting next week, foreign visitors going into North Korea will no longer be entering a digital void. The Korean-Egyptian joint venture company Koryolink has, after a year of negotiations, set up a mobile internet service that will launch on March 1st – but at a hefty price.

The new Koryolink service involves buying a USB-connected wifi hotspot and SIM card, which will give full and apparently uncensored web access to North Korean visitors (but not locals) after coughing up $300 for the hardware ¹. But that doesn’t include 3G data, which will cost $200 for 2GB (yes, two hundred dollars) or $525 for 10GB of data. It appears to be geared towards businesspeople rather than short-term visitors, however.

Interestingly, China’s Xinhua news agency, as spotted by NorthKoreaTech, suggests that North Korea’s mobile internet airwaves will be less restricted than China’s. An unnamed source at Koryolink told them:

You will be able to tweet, Skype and surf the internet from your own cellphones, iPads and other mobile devices as soon as you register at the Korean Communication Center.

Referring to the recent visit of Google chairman Eric Schmidt, the spokesperson added:

We have tried more than one year to negotiate with the Korean side, and got the approval recently. It has nothing to do with the Google trip.

Kim Jong-un’s smartphone

The news comes a week after reports emerged of North Korea’s immigration authorities actually allowing tourists to bring in mobile devices. Previously, video-recording and communication devices were held by authorities and then returned at the end of the trip.

Despite ongoing antagonism between Pyongyang and the west – especially the US – there are signs that North Korea might be opening up to technology. Earlier this month, new leader Kim Jong-un was spotted carrying a HTC smartphone.

Visitors to North Korea who opt for this pricey package might like to make use of Google Maps’ new and fairly detailed maps of the secretive nation, which were added earlier this year.

This being North Korea, it’s conceivable that the Koryolink deal could be cancelled at any time. The company is a joint-venture between Cairo-based Orascom Telecom and Pyongyang’s Korea Posts and Telecommunications Corporation.

(Sources: China.org, via NorthKoreaTech)

ABI Research has published a new report today that says Asia-Pacific’s 4G subscriber market is growing – but is not exactly huge. At Q4 2012, the researchers state that the region had 34.6 million on various LTE networks, up 60.9 percent on the previous quarter. By the end of the year, there’ll be an anticipated 72.1 million people on 4G in APAC.

Clearly that’s a small fraction of the total 3.45 billion mobile subscriptions across the whole Asia-Pacific area. Furthermore, I suspect that most of the current 34.6 million figure is in South Korea and Japan. Indeed, Korea’s biggest telco, SK Telecom, had seven million on its LTE service at the end of 2012 and aims to push that to 13 million by the end of 2013. Japan’s NTT Docomo recently said that it has surpassed 10 million on its fastest mobile data network. Just those two companies have half of the that 34.6 million stat.

Across the rest of the continent, there are few full-scale LTE networks rolled out. China is conducting limited trials now, and has been throughout last year in readiness for an anticipated 2014 launch nationwide; India has limited coverage in some cities; Indonesia is still grappling with the move from 2G to 3G. Until those three countries fully roll out 4G nationwide, it’s likely that Asia’s numbers will look unimpressive.

Admitedly, ABI Research is a lot more optimistic on these numbers than am I at the moment. Worldwide, the researchers expect there to be 785 million LTE subscribers by 2017, with North America and Asia Pacific contributing the biggest numbers.

Last April, the same team said that 63 percent of mobile telcos in Asia had rolled out 4G LTE services, or are now conducting trials or have firm plans.

The new Asia Pop channel has only four videos so far, but that will soon expand once it adds livestreams of special events. The first Hangout will kick off on March 8th with Korean pop star SHINee.

Also useful are the playlists within the new Asia Pop area – there are five so far – that give you a rundown of the most popular music of the past week.

Google tells us that the new channel will focus on Korean, Japanese, and Chinese pop music. Hopefully that might also expand to cover other nations with vibrant pop music scenes that have cross-border appeal – and perhaps some alternative music too. But that’s just our wishful thinking.

There are seven Hangouts planned for early March. This is the line-up so far:

March 8 – Shinee (K-Pop)

March 9 – Wang Lee Hom (C-Pop)

March 10 – Super Junior (K-Pop)

March 11 – Kyary Pamyu Pamyu (J-Pop)

March 12 – Flumpool (J-Pop)

March 13 – 2PM (K-Pop)

March 14 – Mayday (C-Pop)

Only five lucky fans, Google explains, will be allowed into each Hangout, so you better start thinking of a good question if you want to get in.

As you’ll likely know already, PSY’s Gangnam Style is the most-viewed YouTube video of all time, so it seems like a fitting time for the region’s pop music to get more attention from YouTube itself.

Just last week, YouTube announced the opening of Asia’s first YouTube Space in Tokyo to give content creators a professional space to craft their videos.

The Korean-made messaging app KakaoTalk has over 70 million users and a social gaming platform running in a couple of countries. But the app doesn’t stop there. KakaoTalk has launched Kakao Page as a media and content publishing platform for companies to distribute content.

At first glance it looks a bit like the customer-relation management (CRM) function that WeChat, the huge Chinese messaging app, rolled out last year. That involves the likes of Starbucks and other major brands, along with celebrities and media outlets (including us), reaching out to consumers and fans sort of like many do already on Sina Weibo or Twitter. But KakaoTalk’s new feature is more than that, and seems to be very much aimed at specific publishing and monetization.

The Kakao Page platform is available only in Korean for the moment, but it’s going further than WeChat’s CRM tools to effectively make the Korean startup a sort of media company. It’s aimed at content creators, and the published material will be paid for. As such, it will be more of a challenge to magazine subscriptions in Apple’s NewsStand or Google Play.

The interface for publishers. Click to enlarge.

Content producers can use either the new Kakao Pages web interface (pictured right) or the Kakao Partner app to create and organize their material for consumption on users’ smartphones. The idea is that people will be more likely to use – and pay for – this kind of media within a fun social app than go out of their way to app stores to buy subscriptions.

KakaoTalk’s other major platform is social gaming, done in conjunction with numerous app developers. So far it has rolled out in South Korea and Japan.

(Source: TheNextWeb)

Nexon’s (TYO:3659) Q4 2012 results are just in. In brief, the Korean gaming giant did okay. Last quarter saw Nexon hitting ¥30.94 billion (US$329.29 million) in consolidated revenue which was up 24 percent compared to the same quarter last year. Operating income increased by 25 percent from the same quarter last year to ¥9.8 billion ($104.1 million) .

[UPDATE: An editorial slip-up turned the above two yen numbers into millions when they should be billions. It's all now corrected. Apologies].

Operating income margin was at 31.6 percent as more mobile gaming gave Nexon higher margins. In October last year Nexon acquired Japanese mobile game developer Gloops for a whopping $469 million. It also acquired inBlue for an undisclosed amount.

There’s a net loss of $1 million as Nexon pointed to write-downs of some of its investments and also higher tax expenses due to new Korean tax regulations.

For Nexon’s fiscal year 2012, here are the highlights from its statement:

Nexon revenues by region from its latest financials.

• Total revenues were $1.2 billion for full-year 2012, an increase of 24 percent over the prior fiscal year.

• Operating income was $513 million, an increase of 25 percent over the previous year. Operating income margin was 44.1 percent, slightly higher than the 43.7 percent in 2011.

• Adjusted net income for the year was $297 million, up two percent over last year.

It’s apparent that Nexon is looking to march towards mobile gaming with its Gloops and inBlue acquisition. It has also recently partnered up with DeNA which will see more Nexon games over at the Mobage platform for both Japanese and global users. Nexon forecasted that for Q1 2013, revenue from mobile gaming is expected to increase from $2.39 million to $80 million, a whopping 33 times higher. Seungwoo Choi, President and CEO of Nexon said:

We enhanced our mobile business through the successful acquisitions of inBlue and Gloops, positioning Nexon as the leading third-party mobile game developer globally. Since acquiring these companies, both have outperformed our expectations and each is set to deliver a strong 2013 lineup for the domestic and international markets.

Importantly, through our recent alliance, DeNA is running strong marketing promotions for our games on the Mobage platform. We expect continued strength in our PC business over 2013 as we begin to realize the returns from the large publishing deals we signed in 2012.

For now, Nexon’s businesses are very much focused on China, Korea, and Japan. North America and Europe play a small role in its revenue. Al, there’s no sign of Southeast Asia operations anytime soon.

It’s all part of what social gaming expert Serkan Toto calls a “big shake up” at the massive Japanese web company, which is itself a subsidiary of Korean’s NHN (KRX:035420). It means that NHN Japan’s gaming business will be independent under the provisional “Hangame” moniker, while all the rest – such as Line, the Livedoor web portal, and the Naver Matome news aggregator – will be under Line Corp. A date hasn’t been set for the official restructuring.

There will also be a third business dedicated to Line’s international operations, which bears the tentative “Line Plus Corp” name. More than half of Line’s users are outside of Japan – with, for example, 12 million in Thailand alone – so it’s a key battleground to wrest young users away from Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger in markets such as Southeast Asia, Europe, and North America. Line app even has some star ambassadors and users, such as the rapper Snoop Dogg, or whatever his name is this week.

Control of the new Line Corp will be split between the Korean and Japanese bases, with 40 percent of it operated by NHN in Korea. That doesn’t sound very efficient. To use what might seem to be a bizarre comparison with the world of Formula 1, the official Honda and Toyota F1 teams struggled (and then quit the sport) in large part due to maintaining a very Japanese hierarchy across two nations. The social media world is every bit as cut-throat and fast-moving (and prone to crashes) as Formula 1, so there isn’t time for decisions to be tossed between two complex corporate structures.

Anyway, NHN Japan is clearly reshuffling to focus on Line, as well as to bolster its social gaming platform that’s so reliant on Line.

Another challenger to Line, especially in Southeast Asia, is the China-made WeChat app, which has 300 million users thanks to its large home user-base. The makers of WeChat, Tencent, also restructured recently so as to focus more on its superbly-named MIG – its ‘mobile internet group’.

(Source: Serkan Toto)

Korean-made messaging app KakaoTalk launched its Game Platform on Android in its home country last July – and today that social gaming system is rolling out on iOS and coming to Japan as well. It’s a major challenge to chief rival Line app, made by NHN Japan, as well as to other social gaming platforms from that country, such as GREE and DeNA’s Mobage.

For KakaoTalk users, it means that they now have six iOS apps by third-party developers that are tied to KakaoTalk’s social gaming network. As pointed out by Serkan Toto today, those titles are: Tap Tap Blitz, Puzzle Zoo Zoo, Sushi Panic (pictured above), Zoo Zoo Bubble, and Pocket Colony.

Mobile gamers in Japan will also have access to the KakaoTalk Game Platform in a bunch of supported Android games. Those include SundayToz’ Anipang, which was the first success story on the KakaoTalk platform as the messaging app’s users proved to be keen gamers who downloaded Anipang over two million times in a couple of weeks. That soon made it the second highest grossing game on Google Play in South Korea.

KakaoTalk is hoping to have 100 games on board by the end of the year.

Global ambitions

This push into Japan is supported by Yahoo Japan, which owns 50 percent of Kakao Japan, the messaging app’s subsidiary in that country.

In the huge battle for mobile messaging users, KakaoTalk has over 70 million users, up against Line’s crowd of 100 million. Line also incorporates social gaming, and has likewise spurred on some games to great popular success. It’s not quite so balanced in Japan, however. Serkan cites The Nikkei as saying that KakaoTalk has seven million users in Japan, while NHN’s Line has 41 million of its total user-base within Japan.

Interestingly, the Kakao company was founded by Beom-Soo Kim, the former CEO of Korea-based NHN Corporation, which later went on to spawn Line app from the NHN Japan subsidiary.

Both Line and KakaoTalk have global ambitions, with the two rivals looking to young and mobile-oriented Southeast Asian users at first. Countries like Taiwan and Indonesia have proved to be particularly strong battle grounds for the apps – though neither provide social gaming in those nations.

(Source: Serkan Toto)

VCNC, the Korean startup behind the couples messaging app, Between, has raised 3 billion KRW ($2.8 million) from Stonebridge Capital, KTB Network, Capstone Partners, and SoftBank Ventures Korea.

So far, the couples messaging app has been downloaded 2.35 million times and co-founder Edward Lee revealed that 900,000 of them are monthly active users. When asked about the user breakdown in terms of country, Korea tops the chart at 70 percent, followed by Japan (10 percent), China (8 percent), US (5 percent), and Malaysia (1 percent). Between is pretty popular in Korea – so much so that some Koreans are using it as a verb.

With Japan ranked number two, Lee says that VCNC will be incorporating a Japanese branch next month to push the app in the country. When asked about the biggest challenge for a Korean company expanding to the region, Lee told me:

I would say thinking local is the most difficult challenge. We don’t know our direct target and who likes our service and why. We know that couples are a universal thing, however, they seem to have differences. We are doing our best to provide a service that applies to many countries in a simple way that actually enhances couples’ relationships worldwide.

We also understand that out of Between’s 2.35 million downloads, very few come from Southeast Asia. Lee said that although users from Southeast Asia are increasing, there’s no immediate plans for expansion there. He elaborated:

We don’t know much about our users in that area like we do in Korea. After we do more research about the market and set a solid strategy, we’ll be ready for Southeast Asia. I also think that we’ll be able to leverage what we accomplished in Korea and Japan when the time comes.

Between has also tested ways to monetize the app. Its Event Box could potentially be either an advertising or commerce channel for brands. Besides advertising and commerce, Between today just launched its first premium feature stickers.

Meanwhile, Steve Sng, co-founder of the Singapore-based couples app LoveByte sees Between’s second round of financing as good news and less of a threat, explaining that this is evidence that the couples app market is actually viable. So far, LoveByte has a modest user base with more than 40,000 downloads, most of those originating from Singapore.

(Thanks to James Jung of BeSuccess for the heads up on this).

Yesterday I highlighted Gung Ho Entertainment’s (JASDAQ:3765) Princess Punt Sweets, a mobile game for iOS that has been doing well in the Japanese market. Gung Ho is of course most famous for its Puzzles & Dragons title, which has ruled the top grossing charts in Japan for about a year now.

But Puzzles & Dragons is apparently making some progress in South Korea as well, as Social Game Info points out that it is now the number three ranked app in the South Korea app store for iOS. As for Korea’s top grossing charts, P&D is currently 16th on iOS, and 24th on Android.

The English version of the game for iOS, which is targeting US markets, hasn’t seen the same success without any real traction to date since its launch back in November.

It’s pretty remarkable that P&D has reached the success that it has in Japan, and even in Korea, without leveraging either of the main game platforms like GREE or Mobage.

Puzzles & Dragons announced just a few weeks ago that it had reached the six million downloads milestone before December 31st. As Serkan Toto points out, that’s an impressive figure considering that there are only about 40 million smartphones in Japan.

KakaoTalk, South Korea’s number one messaging app, has released new stickers for the Vietnamese market this week. With Vietnamese New Year just around the corner, the stickers feature classic Tet images. The stickers will be especially welcome in a market where no other messaging apps – such as WeChat or Line – provide such Vietnamese specific imagery.

The move is part of KakaoTalk’s push into the mobile-oriented Vietnamese market. The messaging app market in Vietnam is still growing, and there is no clear dominant platform so this is a big opportunity for KakaoTalk. In South Korea, KakaoTalk has over 90 percent of the market and “KaTalk Me” is a common colloquialism. Koreans no longer say “Text Me”, as paying for SMS seems too passé.

Currently KakaoTalk’s Vietnamese userbase is over 150,000 people. KakaoTalk is relatively new compared to services like Whatsapp, Viber, and WeChat. But the startup has taken a shine to Vietnam, making it the third country outside of Korea that has a dedicated KakaoTalk team after Japan and Indonesia. Armed with Vietnamese-specific stickers for the lunar new year, the battle is on.

KakaoTalk’s worldwide user numbers today exceed 72 million.

Line will soon hit 100M users

Yesterday we pointed out that Chinese chat application WeChat (known as Weixin in Chinese) had surpassed the 300 million user mark. And just yesterday evening, apparently not wanting to be outdone, NHN Japan’s Line put a teaser site online saying that it would soon pass the 100 million user milestone.

Both feats are astounding, considering that these chat apps have only been around for a relatively short time. Given that we now have reasonably up to date figures for many of the major chat app players, let’s take a moment to compare their progress as we head into 2013:

Of course, WhatsApp is not included on this list. Its user numbers are tough to pinpoint, but word on the street is that they total between 200 and 300 million. It will be interesting to see if WhatsApp can continue as a paid service, with so many free up-and-comers. Many of these Asian players are expected to make a stronger push into Western markets this year, so I would expect the folks at WhatsApp are worried. I don’t use the application, but my colleague Willis also expressed some skepticism about WhatsApp recently.

There are other new players on the scene as well, including DeNA’s Comm which recently announced it had five million downloads as of this past December. GREE Messenger just burst onto the scene as well, although its offering is still sort of beta, and I expect a marketing blitz will come sometime soon, starting in Japan.

Readers may remember that I was very enthusiastic about Japanese finance application Zaim. And while I’m pretty happy with that app, I was curious to come across a Korean-made alternative called M-Story.

From Korean developer ParkPill, the iOS app boasts one interesting feature that caught my attention in particular, that being the ability to export all your data to a CSV file, which can then be used in your preferred spreadsheet program (Excel, Numbers, or Google Spreadsheets).

In comparison to Zaim, M-Story doesn’t require you to add too much information. It just asks you to specify what you bought and how much you paid for it. While M-Story has been around for a while, it recently added iCloud backup and Retina display support as well, both big pluses. There’s a lock feature to ensure your finances are kept private, which I suppose would come in handy to anyone who doesn’t implement iOS’s normal lock screen ¹.

Unlike Zaim, M-Story is a paid application for iPhone and iPad. But at just 99 cents, it still looks to be a bargain. I recommend you give it a try and let us know what you think. I’m looking forward to giving it a test run over the next few weeks.

The folks over at Japanese tech blog AppBank have created a short video demo which you can check out below. The interface here is in Japanese, but the app comes in English too.

The left picture is Icon Pop Quiz’s logo, the right picture is the avatar PSY’s using

Korean artist PSY, who just recently hit the one billion mark for his Gangnam Style video on YouTube, is using an Indonesian-made avatar for his Twitter account. The avatar comes from an Indonesian game app called Icon Pop Quiz.

Icon Pop Quiz’s gameplay is similar to the famous Logo Quiz Game, in which users have to guess the correct answers from the given pictures, but rather than guessing for brand names, the topic is famous shows and characters. The game was developed by Indonesian developer Alegrium, and the particular avatar that PSY uses was designed by the developer.

The Icon Pop Quiz game has been a hit in several countries. According to AppAnnie, the game hit the second spot in the games category and eighth in the overall category in Indonesia’s free iPhone app rankings six days ago. In Singapore, it was ranked ninth and 20th in the same categories. At the moment, Icon Pop Quiz is still ranked first in Word and Trivia categories in both countries.

The game is currently available for download both in Apple’s app store and Google Play.

[Source: Trenologi]

When we heard about the expansion of Czech startup BellaDati, a cloud-based business analytics company, into Korea, we were kind of surprised. After all, it’s not every day you hear about a European startup that’s taking the Asian market seriously and taking steps to establish a real foothold here. We got in touch with BellaDati CEO and sole owner Martin Trgiňa to find out more about the company, its plans for Korea, and its expansion into other parts of Asia.

Why is BellaDati’s first international office in Seoul, Korea?

We are originally from Prague, Czech Republic. There is a direct flight to Seoul ant it takes only 9 hours when you fly with Korean Airlines. Additionally, we see a huge potential for BellaDati in South Korea. However, BellaDati has been a global company from day one. Originally in June 2012, we had two partners in Korea, but later we realized with one of these partners that establishing a BellaDati Korea Office would be actually much more efficient. On the other hand, it’s all just about the timing since in parallel we are also [in the process of] establishing offices in San Francisco and new partners are joining us in Turkey. Furthermore, we introduced BellaDati in Singapore in November.

What does BellaDati mean and in what language is that? Tell us more about the company.

BellaDati is named after Isolla Bella island. It is a small island that is connected with the Italian island of Sicily during low tide. “Bella” means beautiful in italian and “I” stands for innovation: BellaDati (beautiful data). BellaDati connects to different data sources and turns business data into the visualized dashboards and reports in its own data warehouse. All you need is a web browser or mobile phone. Users can use it from the cloud or as an on-premise application.

The company was originally established in Prague, Czech Republic by Martin Trgina in 2006. In those days we were using the brand name TRGIMAN. We were delivering enterprise software integration services for Sun Microsystems, GE Money Bank, NewWorldResources, Prague Municipality etc. In 2008 we started developing BellaDati, an agile data analytics solution. Martin realized that companies need enterprise software that is both powerful inside and easy to use for business people [...] BellaDati enables business people and analysts share and create reports without coding. It means you can analyze and watch the performance, trends, bottlenecks of your business without contacting your IT department when you need new or different report view. At the end of 2011 we had our first large customers, including an energy drink producer from Germany and NewWorldResources – the biggest coal producer in Central Europe (18,000 employees). However we aim also towards much smaller customers and and dream of bringing BellaDati to every office.

An example of BellaDati’s banking analytics.

Are there plans to expand beyond Korea? Like Beijing, Tokyo, or Singapore?

Yes. This expansion has actually already begun. In November, BellaDati was introduced for bank data analysis at Finovate in Singapore. We have got our first pilot customers from Beijing. In 2013 we aim to find the right partners in Singapore and also establish a BellaDati office there. Through our Korean office we are also talking to potential partners in Japan. In general we are looking for cool sales, tech support, analytical-services-oriented entrepreneurs in APEC region. They are welcome to join BellaDati [...] as partners or directly under our brand as country managers. Beyond the APEC we are also setting up new office in US in January. In October, we introduced BellaDati in Santa Clara, CA at DEMO FALL 2012.

What are the company’s plans in Korea?

Our first pilot customers are coming from telco and broadcasting services. However companies from online gaming, market research and retail are also very interested in agile analytics regarding their sales, customers, marketing and other data. BellaDati’s Korea office will provide fully localized BellaDati applications and services around Korea. BellaDati is provided in the region as a cloud service, but also as an installed on-premise solution. Since BellaDati is a very affordable solution also for smaller companies, our offer is not just aimed at the big boys in Korea. Interested companies can visit our Korean web page.

Is the company profitable? How big is the team?

Yes. BellaDati has been profitable from day one. However, we reinvest most of the capital into further expansion. Our customers are large companies like a [previously-mentioned energy drink and coal producers], insurance companies, but also SME companies like Scribbler.com (UK) and loyalty student cards provider gtsalive.com from Switzerland. We focus on the quality of people in our team, not the quantity. We place huge expectations on our team members. Not everybody can survive. Right now we have 20 people and we are constantly hiring new business development people in Singapore and in US. Developers are located in Prague, Czech Republic. Customer success analysts, support and sales are now relocating to San Francisco, CA and are located in Korea office as well.

Noom Inc., a mobile health & fitness developer, has announced that it has secured $2.6 million in pre-series-A funding. The funding round was led by UK-based VC firm m8 Capital along with Qualcomm Ventures, Harbour Pacific Capital and former executives from Nexon.

With this new round of funding, New York-based Noom is looking to further expand its services into Asia. It will be opening a Noom Korea marketing office and also launching a Korean version of Noom.

Noom offers a series of wellness products including Noom Weight Loss Coach, its flagship app, which currently holds the number one spot for weight loss apps in the Google Play store. The app provides a customized weight loss program based on the users’ current weight and their goals for weight loss. Users can log daily diet information and keep track of their caloric intake. One interesting feature of the app is the forum discussion, which allows users to discuss and share weight-loss experiences. Topics on the forum include recipes, desk job exercises, drinking water challenges, food confessions, and more.

According to Noom, Noom Weight Loss Coach users have already dropped a whopping 19 million collective pounds. Now, the company is targeting Korea, and it has gained a total of over 15 million downloads across Noom Weight Loss Coach and other apps such as CardioTrainer and Calorific.

Regarding the funding round, Noom co-founder Saeju Jeong said:

We are very happy to have gained a valuable partner in m8 Capital as well as additional support from existing partners. With this support we will continue to expand internationally as well as to other mobile platforms.

Noom Weight Loss Coach is available free on Android. You can find out more about Noom Weight Loss Coach from the video below:

KakaoTalk now has a team of 280 people, an increase from a team of 14 just three years ago. Its 70 million users spend an average of 302 minutes on KakaoTalk, a huge increase compared to back in July, when it was just 175 minutes. This surge might have been caused by the chat app’s new hit gaming platform which was launched in July.

There are 27 million daily unique visitors in its apps, sending 4.2 billion messages every day. It is interesting to note that according to AppAnnie, KakaoTalk’s position in Japan’s iOS free app section has jumped 102 spots to number five recently. That’s Line’s territory, of course, so it will be very interesting to see how it fares there. Check out Kakao’s infographic below:

Click to see it a bit bigger.

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Over on the Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) blog today, the company is highlighting entrepreneurship in South Korea, as well as its involvement and support via its Google for Entrepreneurs initiative.

Google has partnered with Korean accelerator and incubator Kstartup to support Korean startups beginning in 2013, with help from AppCenter, and the Korean Communication Commission as well. It will be a three-month acceleration program in Gangnam (yes, that Gangnam), which Kstartup explains further on its website:

Through this partnership with Google and others, Kstartup will provide free workspace, technical, operational and business mentoring, as well as seed funding to startups we choose through a selective screening process. Whether an entrepreneur launches a startup in Korea or globally, we are confident that Google can provide the necessary resources needed to help scale the business locally or overseas.

Techcrunch cites Kstartup’s David Lee as saying that Google will provide "an undisclosed amount of funding as well.

In its blog post, the search giant also elaborated on its partnership with the Global K-Startup competition this past year, and listed the winning startups which it describes as follows:

• BrainGarden – vocabulary learning mobile application with social game feature
• Whatugot – social networking mobile application for collection and sharing favorites
• WATCHA – movie recommendation application with personal collection gallery features
• KnowRe – innovative adaptive learning solution focused on math education
• Alarmmon – mobile gaming alarm application with various character branding
• Classting – web/mobile application for classroom management and inter-class connection and collaboration

As we have noted before, Korea is a stronghold for Android in terms of smartphone OS market share, so it would make sense for Google to throw support of this kind behind the ecosystem. When we spoke with the folks at Tapjoy earlier this year, we saw that the company’s users on Android were more than quadruple those on iOS. That’s a strong indication of the platform’s popularity in the country.

Japan’s DeNA (TYO:2432) announced today that it will be teaming up with KT Corporation (NYSE:KT) in Korea to ‘mutually exchange mobile social games’ between the companies’ respective networks.

This means that KT will offer selected games from Daum Mobage, which is DeNA’s platform in Korea which it operates with the popular Daum web portal. It will also help out with billing integration for in-game purchases of Daum Mobage virtual currency through its Olleh Market.

Likewise, DeNA will offer selected KT titles on its Mobage platform in Japan, lending marketing and consultation support as well. The cross border partnership will likely serve both companies well.

Back in 2011, when the Daum Mobage partnership was initially signed, the partners set the goal of reaching 10 million user subscriptions by the end of 2012. I suspect they are falling short, since today’s announcement didn’t mention anything about that – but I’ve inquired with DeNA to confirm this point.

DeNA reported in its Q2 financials that Daum Mobage is providing over 30 titles, and that includes its hit game Rage of Bahamut which surpassed the one million user milestone in Korea earlier this month.

Korean pop star PSY’s smash-hit Gangnam Style video (sorry if I just got it stuck in your head) has more than 943 million views on Youtube, and that number is only climbing. PSY doesn’t represent the entirety of Korean culture, of course — not even close — but the success of PSY and artists like him in Youtube is part of why the Korean Ministry of Culture gave Google a special achievement award yesterday for helping to spread Korean culture.

Of course, K-Pop is just one aspect of Korean culture available on Youtube; the service also hosts Korean films and TV shows, too. But K-pop has been increasingly popular outside of Korea and its success on Youtube is probably a big part of why Google was given this award. According to Google, the number of Youtube users viewing K-pop music videos has risen rapidly over the past three years.

In a post on its Korea blog, Google responded to the award:

We are greatly honored to receive this meaningful award. But this award is not really about YouTube — we’re just the platform. This is a reflection of the incredible creativity and ingenuity of Korean content creators who have captured the imagination of the world.

That’s very modest of the company, but we shouldn’t underestimate the value of a platform like Youtube when it comes to spreading culture globally. After all, millions of people around the world are already on Youtube; what better way is there to quickly export your culture?

[via Google Korea Blog]

When we last heard from the folks at Tokyo-based Metaps three months back, the company informed us that its Android monetization platform had driven 10 million app downloads in the span of just one year. And today the company has an update on its progress, stating that the total amount of participating Android apps have been downloaded 30 million times.

Metaps attributes this success to a strong performance in the Asian region, particularly in Korea where the advertisement consumption growth rates for Metaps’ partner apps was up 2,024 percent for the period of September to October this fall. Readers may recall when we spoke to Tapjoy a couple of months back, they reported a Korean smartphone market that skewed very heavily in favor of Android. So it should come as no surprise that Metaps would find a welcoming market there.

That’s followed by strong growth among the company’s partner apps in China too, which have seen a 864 percent rise in advertisement consumption. Other standout regions in Asia for Metaps partners were Hong Kong, Vietnam (both up 181 percent), and Taiwan (up 161 percent).

All this follows funding rounds about a year ago which helped the company staff a Singapore subsidiary from which it could make this Asia push. According to today’s announcement, Metaps plans to continue business development on a global scale, with a focus on Asia and North America.

Metaps is just one of many Japanese mobile/internet companies that have used Singapore as a springboard to expanding business overseas. We have seen a veritable all-star cast set up shop in the garden city, including DeNA, GREE, Recruit, and KDDI’s ad unit Mediba.

After a day of testing the service to ensure call quality was good enough, Korea-based Kakao announced today that it has launched what it calls the world’s first HD voice free mobile group Call service. In English, what that means is this: Kakao Talk now features group voice chat with high quality audio for up to five participants, and it’s all still free. Users can even make group calls over 3G or LTE connections, and Kakao claims that even with the high quality audio, this won’t make a huge dent in users’ monthly data allotment.

Kakao Talk is a chat app that already has 66 million users worldwide, and distinguishes itself from competitors in part with the voice filters users can apply to their voices while using the app to chat. The new group call feature also allows for voice filters, and users who connect to a conversation can then disconnect and reconnect at their leisure, so long as at least one or two of the other parties have remained on the line. It is these two features (the voice filters and the ability to re-connect) that Kakao calls “world’s first,” and while that’s a bit nitpicky — some apps have similar features even if none have yet implemented all of them them into a group calling feature — it’s still pretty cool even if it isn’t quite as revolutionary as Kakao would have you believe.

The Kakao Talk app is available on both Android and iPhone, and the group call feature is already in place, so if you’re looking to chat with friends using weird voice filters, today is your lucky day. I haven’t gotten the chance to actually test the group calling feature yet, but perhaps we’ll use this instead of Skype the next time all the Tech in Asia editors are doing a group call!

Google’s Eric Schmidt and PSY at Google Korea

A new post over on the Youtube Trends blog points out that over the weekend PSY’s ‘Gangnam Style’ video became the new most-viewed video of all time. Currently the catchy Korean video has over 820 million views in total.

So who did PSY take down from the top spot? None other than my countryman Justin Bieber, and to be honest, I’m ok with that [1]. Bieber’s song ‘Baby’ now falls to second place on YouTube’s all-time charts with 805 million views.

Perhaps what’s most amazing about PSY’s accomplishment is that rate at which it was accomplished. As you can see in the chart provided by Youtube below, Bieber’s rise up the charts was more gradual, spread out over a couple of years.

But PSY’s hit has literally been rocket-like in trajectory, and after it first gained traction in South Korea it later spiked thanks to popularity in the US and around the world.

It will be interesting to see if this pace is sustained, and how long it will take for ‘Gangnam Style’ to reach one billion views. PSY’s channel overall has already broken the one billion views mark, although it still trails behind Bieber’s channel which has over 3 billion.

YouTube and the folks at Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) are clearly delighted that PSY has ridden their platform to fame. Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt even asked PSY to teach him the famous ‘horse dance’ from the video during a visit to Google Korea.

I’m a little out of touch with the music scene recently, but I hear the kids these days really like themselves some K-pop. And South Korea as a whole appears to be doing a pretty good job of packaging this cultural export for global consumption. Not surprisingly, smartphones are a part of this process as well.

Take for example the StarCall app from SK Planet (a subsidiary of SK Telecom), which since it originally launched in Korea has managed to accumulate 3 million users. The lets you receive real-time video calls from your favorite K-pop stars, or if you miss the call, you can view it later in your ‘callbox.’

The calls are mostly in Korean, but SK Planet’s agency will add translations after a call is stored in the callbox. The company is now aiming to push this application in markets across Southeast Asia – including Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand – as well as Australia, America, and Japan.

Featured K-pop artists in the app include Girls Generation (pictured above), Super Junior, and 2PM. There is also a StarCall SuperFan contest ongoing as well, which you can check out over on the Facebook page.

The app is available for both iOS and Android. If you’d like to learn more about how StarCall works, you can check out its (somewhat cheesy) promo video below. As for me, I think I have some Nickelback on a shelf here somewhere that I can put on [1].

KARA’s Gyuri plays Anipang, photo AllKpop.com

Kakao Corporation’s messaging app KakaoTalk has been at the fore of a wave of Asian chat apps burning up handsets across the region. This past summer it boldly stepped into the mobile games space by launching Kakao Game in Korea. And now it’s taking its game center even further as the company announced today that this feature will now be launched for the global market.

KakaoTalk isn’t the first of the major messaging apps to make the transition to mobile gaming, as rival Line from NHN Japan beat them to the punch back in July by just a few weeks. But Kakao Corporation’s announcement today proudly points out that it is the first company to successfully merge a messaging service and social games on mobile.

So how successful has Kakao Game been exactly? The company says that in its first three months, the service has seen 82 million game downloads and 23 million unique users. The hit game Anipang alone has 20 million subscribers and 12 million daily active users.

Perhaps the most staggering factoid from the company today is that their penetration among smartphone users in Korea is an astounding 77 percent [1].

Of course, the all important metric for the platform’s success is revenue. And for October alone, Kakao Game took in $35.3 million. For the first three months in total, revenue amounted to $51.6 million.

Earlier this week when we spoke to the company, we were told that Kakao had turned the corner in September and is now a profitable company. It will be interesting to see them continue to build their business on the KakaoTalk platform, and expand their operations into new regions.

Kakao games are dominating Google Play’s top grossing (left) and free (right) app charts. See more on App Annie.

Korea’s largest game show, G-STAR 2012, was held in Busan from November 8th to the 10th. WeMade Entertainment had a major presence at the show with an outstanding booth. It was also the main sponsor of the event.

WeMade began as an online PC game developer but has recently been putting a great deal of resources into mobile games as well. It exhibited 16 titles at G-STAR, and its total number of mobile games, including those currently in development, tops 40.

One of its games, Viking Island, won the Best Game Award at Korea Game Awards 2012 back on November 7th. It is the second mobile game to achieve such an honor.

When asked what was the number one reason for the game’s success, Viking Island’s head developer Jeong Jin Uk credited the importance of building and leveraging an in-game social network.

Viking Island is a farming game designed to give an advantage to those who help out with friends’ farms. Thanks to the inclusion of in-game blogging capabilities, players can advertise for more help. In less than two months, more than 300,000 blog posts were written, with comments on those posts reaching 1,800,000. In addition to the blogs, players can post short comments on each other’s farms, and over 60,000,000 of those have been made so far. Those numbers are pretty staggering!

WeMade is certainly a pioneer in the transition to mobile games, and we will be watching the company’s future endeavors very closely.

Viking Island head developer, Jeong Jin Uk

GREE Advertising CEO Tatsuhei Asanuma, AppDisco CFO BumRyung Yoo

We haven’t heard too much about GREE Advertising, the ad subsidiary of the Japanese gaming giant which was launched back in April. But this week it has announced a tie-up with South Korea’s AppDisco, the maker of the popular AdLatte application, which rewards users with redeemable points for watching ads and answering quizzes.

The partnership will see GREE Advertising become the exclusive advertising agent in Japan for AdLatte on both Android and iOS. AdLatte has been doing well in Japan thus far with over a million subscribers in Japan, in addition to the three million subscribers it has at home in Korea. Back in December of last year, it was briefly the top free iOS app in the Japan app store.

The announcement further states that the two companies hope to create “new promotional opportunities for developer and advertisers alike.”

Back in August GREE Advertising announced a partnership with French mobile affiliate network MobPartner to help bring new promotional tools and user acquisition services to developers on the GREE platform.

The GREE subsidiary is to later have offices overseas, notably in North America, Europe, and Asia, to help facilitate these kinds of global partnerships.

Korean game development studio Playnery has been growing quickly since it opened in October of last year. Already partnered up with Zynga to distribute its forthcoming first title Mother of Myth, now Playnery has secured $3.7 million in funding, led by Japan’s Softbank Ventures. Qualcomm and Stonebridge Capital also put some money into the round.

Playnery specializes, notes TheNextWeb, in 3D RPG gaming, whilst also making the titles social and playable in any recent web browser. The startup uses its own, self-developed 3D gaming engine. In this way, it’s pushing forward the current social gaming model of simplistic action that began with things like Farmville. The investment arm of Japanese telco Softbank is clearly impressed with this new vision for social and mobile gaming; SoftBank Ventures’ Seo Il-shik said today:

In the future we predict that the social and mobile market will break off from the casual gaming seen up until now, and achieve rapid growth with the diversification of genres such as MORPG, MMORPG, and FPS. When various user groups form and the market grows rapidly, we expect that Playnery will become a successful game developer through high quality games and global partnerships.

It’s not Softbank Ventures’ first foray into social gaming in the region, as it has also backed South Korea’s SundayToz, makers of the hit game Anipang.

Playnery’s first game, Mother of Myth, is due to launch next year, and is aiming for a global rollout in 12 languages, and will be playable on Zynga’s (NASDAQ:ZNGA) gaming platform, on Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), and as iOS and Android apps. Until then, there’s this interesting demo video of how the game will play:

(Video link for mobile readers)

[Source: TheNextWeb]

Korean games publisher Nexon (TYO:3659) has announced today that it’s bringing the hit game DOTA 2 to Japan and South Korea. The deal with Valve will bring the genre-bending DOTA 2 onto Nexon’s gaming platform soon, though there’s no set date for the launch.

Valve’s president, Gabe Newell, said in today’s announcement:

Nexon, a company with whom we have a long and strong relationship, was clearly the right choice as a publisher to successfully deliver Dota 2 into the Korean and Japanese market. Partnering with Nexon will allow us to deliver DOTA 2 to a massive audience of Asian gamers via a premium service.

Nexon currently has eight desktop-based games in its arsenal, including Sudden Attack, which is thought to be South Korea’s biggest first-person shooter right now.

In addition to the news, Nexon today revealed its 2012 Q3 financial results. Saying that its “current pipeline is the most promising slate of games we’ve had yet,” the company posted total revenues of ¥24.26 billion (US$302.8 million), which is “flat versus the third quarter of 2011.” But the operating income of ¥10.03 billion ($125.23 million) was a drop of 8 percent over the same period last year. Nexon said its revenue was “higher in China and lower in some other regions.”

Speaking of China, Valve chose a local partner in the form of Perfect World for the roll-out of DOTA 2 in the country.

In September of this year, Nexon, which is actually HQ’d in Japan, acquired the Japanese mobile social gaming company Gloops for close to half a billion dollars so as to boost its social gaming prowess.

It hardly needs to be said that Samsung’s (005930:KS) Galaxy S3 has been a success for the Korean electronics maker. It was just this past Monday when the company announced that its flagship smartphone had surpassed the lofty milestone of 30 million units sold.

And now research firm Strategy Analytics says that according to its estimates, the Galaxy S3 sold 18 million units in the third quarter of 2012, exceeding the 16.2 million iPhone 4S units shipped by Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) during the same period. That makes it, for the time being, the most popular smartphone on the planet in the galaxy!

Of course, Apple’s shiny new iPhone 5 was only released in September, so Samsung’s moment in the sun will likely be short lived. Strategy Analytics expects that the iPhone 5 will outship the Galaxy S3 in the fourth quarter, putting Apple right back on top.

[Source: Strategy Analytics]

App Annie has recently released some figures about the growth of Android and iOS in global markets, including Asia. The company points out that freemium apps on iOS have seen revenue increase by a factor of four on iOS over the last 24 months, and on Google Play by a factor of 3.5 over the past year.

Looking at the Korean market, the company points out that even though downloads remained relatively stable for both Android and iOS, revenue on Google Play shot up by a factor of 6.3 for the period of January to August of 2012.

In Asia’s other mature mobile market, Japan, we can see that Google Play freemium app revenues have shot up by a factor of 24 since last January. On iOS, it’s a similar story, with a distinct upwards trend for freemium apps.

Meanwhile in China, the Android market is still fragmented as Google Play still doesn’t support paid apps in the country. But for iOS apps, the story is the same — freemium revenues are up by a factor of 25 since January of 2011.

Asia is an interesting space to watch when it comes to making money on mobile. In comparison, freemium revenues are showing growth in the US (see iOS, Android), but not quite to the extent as the countries mentioned above. With Japan and Korea leading the way as two of the most developed mobile markets, and China gradually showing its potential, Asia will continue to provide many interesting case studies for mobile companies around the world to learn from.

[Source: App Annie]

NTT Docomo at CEATEC Japan 2012

As a result of cooperation between Japan’s NTT Docomo (NYSE:DCM) and Korea’s KT Corporation (NYSE:KT), Docomo customers with compatible smartphones from Japan will soon be able to use a pre-paid payment service called ‘Cashbee’ in South Korea.

Cashbee was created by Korea’s eB Card back in 2010 and has about 5 million users to date. The service is available at over 52,000 locations in the country, including LOTTE stores, and on subways and buses. The latter should prove useful for any Japanese tourists looking to make payments during public transit.

The two companies will work on preparing this and other cross-border NFC services between Korea and Japan. They also note that they plan to share the results of these intiatives with global associations and standarization bodies in order to help promote standardized NFC services worldwide. Docomo’s senior vice president Toshiki Nakayama further explained:

Going forward, we will partner with international operators and service providers to drive the development of mobile- payment businesses for increasingly enhanced mobile experiences on a global scale.

It’s promising to see such cooperation across borders here in Asia, in an effort to benefit consumers who frequently move about.

Back in 2011, we saw Docomo and KT Corporation come to an agreement to share content for Android smartphones, including an assortment of popular gaming titles.

Minh Le being interviewed

Right after his graduation, a young and passionate Minh ‘Gooseman’ Le joined Valve to continue his work on Counter-Strike related projects, after those had made him and his nickname legendary around the world. But after seeing his ideas being put on the shelf one too many times, Le decided it was time to leave and focus on his own projects instead. A couple of years later the first version of Tactical Intervention surfaced and rumors about Le’s newest project slowly started spreading. He continued to work on Tactical Intervention for the following years, programming his ideas in the Source engine on his own and occasionally showing it off to friends for feedback. The game has been in development for nine years now and might soon see the light of day.

I sat down with Le to look back at his journey and struggles as an indie game developer, balancing fan’s desires with his own vision, and how he remained motivated throughout the entire journey.

Going down the indie path

Developing Tactical Intervention has taken an impressive physical and financial toll on Le. Not only did he fund the the project initially, but even now Le spends nights at the Fix Korea office on a fold-out bed surrounded by fitness equipment.

At that time Minh had spent a little more than $1.5 million dollars of his own money on the project. “After I burned through that, I partnered with Fix Korea hoping to secure more funding,” Le says. He left his home in Canada and moved to Korea after meeting Fix Korea’s CEO Inho Choi, to whom he successfully pitched Tactical Intervention. “I really liked the game, but had no idea Minh was such a popular developer,” Choi admits.

Despite the hardship, Le seems to radiate more energy than ever. He explains:

Seeing the project come together and start to resemble the vision I had when I started it keeps me constantly motivated. Being able to play it with others is a big motivational tool as it lets me see what features are working. The fact that I’ve invested so much time and money in the project keeps me interested in finishing it too. I’ve accrued a huge debt over the last 7 years.

The personal struggle Le has faced, together with hard work of the small rag tag team of developers trying to turn his vision into the next FPS hit, gives the project a strong indie vibe. “I’d definitely say it’s an indie title,” Le concurs. “For the majority of the development we haven’t been properly funded. The initial four years were financed from my personal savings.”

Dogs and car chases

Looking up interviews with Le on Google brings forth several results and videos where he demonstrates Tactical Intervention’s features and mechanics. The featured car chase missions have gotten so much attention that it seems to have become the sole focus for many among the game’s online community. It’s something that brings Le both a feeling of happiness, and bit of a dilemma.

They now want more car-based missions. So I’m also looking into ways to make the non car chase missions more enjoyable. It’s like introducing two girls, one is super hot, and the other one is average looking. I want to make the average looking girl a bit more attractive.

Le and his team spent quite some time weighing the game community’s demand for content and their own design goals. “It’s going to be a fine balancing act I think,” Le agrees.

It’s important not to succumb too much to user demand as we may run the risk of diluting the game experience and straying away from the core mechanics which make it unique and enjoyable. Our publisher has been super great about working with us to keep the game fun and balanced at the cost of possibly making more money right off the bat.

I really wanted to improve the scenarios I thought were unsuccessful in Counter-Strike. As I felt that with a little bit of improvement game modes like the hostage scenario and the VIP escort could be significantly better.

This desire to do things better and challenge himself is the drive that currently still keeps Le completely dedicated to development of Tactical Intervention.

“It’s crucial to constantly test your game as early as possible,” he says.

Playtesting with a diverse group of players allows you to make corrections to the gameplay before you spend too much time polishing a feature that isn’t even good to begin with. Rapid prototyping allows developers to spot flaws in your game design early, thus saving precious development time. Unfortunately with the nature of TI’s development and various other factors we were limited in our testing environment which resulted in a sluggish development time.

The resulting data still kept the game from being officially released and has given Le a major list of bugs and fixes that he is still implementing and working on with his team.

Reinforcements have arrived

Ben Ben Kleber

Ben Kleber, currently responsible for level design and environment art at Fix Korea, joined Minh’s team in 2008.

I was 23, still in college, but they offered me the position of level designer for Tactical Intervention and I couldn’t refuse.

After a month of working on Tactical Intervention in Korea, Kleber continued working from home in Germany. On February 23 February 2012, he flew over again and has been working on TI full-time ever since.

Kleber’s proudest contribution is a map to be released in the game after the closed beta.

I’m just really looking forward to actually see people play it. That would make me very proud. The map is based on the Korean Gyeongbokgung palace I visited when I was here the last time. Everyone thinks it’s Japanese, but it’s Korean architecture.

Kleber’s most recent contribution, an airport-themed map for the game, is still under construction and is to be fully completed for testing soon. The next couple of months the entire team is remaining in crunch mode, gathering as much player feedback as possible and using every bit to fix any bug they find.

Tactical Intervention was planned to be released in spring of this year, but like many indie developers, Minh Le and his team have had their share of problems and the need to find funding to keep the project alive. “We’re shooting for a fall/winter release now,” Le says.

We spent the last few months restructuring the backend portion of our game, smoothing out our the server structure and lobby system. Ben [Kleber] and our second level designer have begun work on new levels and I’ve also had some time to work on a new level as well as some new graphics.

Tactical Intervention is now looking better than ever. As much as Le’s struggle to complete his vision strongly reflects that of a passionate indie developer, it is also keeping Tactical Intervention’s horde of dedicated fans base eagerly waiting for the game’s final release.

The Gangnam Style video by Psy has been viewed more than 359 million times and has inspired thousands of people across the world to remake the iconic dance by performing their own version of Gangnam Style.

Here’s a collection of the neatest Gangnam Style-inspired tribute/parody videos from around Asia to help kick start the weekend ahead of you:

1. Philippines

Here is a very well organized flash mob dance performed by around one thousand inmates of a Philippines jail. Yes, this is the same bunch of Cebu cellmates who hit global headlines back in 2010 with their Michael Jackson dance performances. I wonder if they get reduced sentences for these flash mob dances?

Plus, this video nicely showcases just how viral and influential the Gangnam Style song/dance is, as the prisoners’ video has been viewed close to 2.6 million times since it was uploaded just over one week ago.

2. Indonesia

This is a daring attempt by 1,000 Indonesians performing an illegal Gangnam Style flash mob at an Indonesian landmark called Bundaran HI. They did a pretty convincing job and even encouraged passers-by to join the mass dance. This video has been viewed around 1.9 million times so far.

3. Malaysia

Malaysians do not lose out when making their own Gangnam-themed music videos. This funny video is called “Orang Sabah Style.” Orang Sabah means Sahabans, and is made both to promote tourism on the Malaysian state of Sabah and to celebrate Malaysian Independence Day. Though the lyrics are in Mandarin Chinese, they provide English subtitles for more people to understand. The video has garnered around 3.6 million views so far.

4. Thailand

This is Thailand’s version of the Gangnam Style video – though it keeps the original’s Korean lyrics and just focuses on changing the visuals. Nonetheless, they’ve done a great job of keeping the humor of Psy’s video. Impressively, this video has close to 4.6 million views.

5. South Korea

This Korean-made video is called “Hongdae Style.” I don’t understand Korean but I think that is the only word changed from the original Gangnam Style lyrics. The cinematography of Hongdae Style closely resembles the original video. This one has an impressive 4.8 million views to date.

6. Singapore

Here’s a quirky video titled “Singaporean Style.” The music’s lyrics satirize aspects of life in the city state – but ultimately it’s about how they’re proud to be Singaporeans. This video has around 2.1 million views so far. Though we notice it is also getting quite a few dislikes, even from Singaporean commenters, perhaps because the performers have riskily changed the lyrics.

Bonus

This hilarious “Pyeonyang Style” video appears to be made by a Canadian, and is pretty hilarious. Although I’m not sure what Kim Jong Un would make of this particular Gangnam Style reboot. This video has 4.1 million views with lots of commenters joking that this video might instigate a nuclear war.

[Image source: HollywoodReporter.com]

Indonesian game publisher Qeon Interactive officially released its second online game called “Heva Online” recently in Indonesia. Korean gamers might be familiar with the game already as it is the same Heva Online title that was published three years ago by Korean game publisher Windysoft in South Korea.

Heva Online is dubbed by Qeon Interactive as today’s cutest 3D adventure MMORPG. To back that up the game publisher has chosen Indonesian all-girl pop group Cherrybelle as the game’s ambassadors. Andrian Pauline Husen, the director of marketing and sales at Qeon Interactive, believes that the collaboration with the cutesy Cherrybelle is the first of its kind in Indonesia. He hopes that this collaboration will bring a whole new dimension in the online game industry as well as the country’s music industry.

Heva Online has features such as a “clone battle” where the players’ pets can battle against each other, and a “burning mode” where players can transform themselves with tough superpowers. You can start playing the game for free starting tomorrow, October 6th.

The game looks really fun and engaging, definitely worth a try for online gamers out there. For more information, you can check it out here.

While traveling can be lots of fun, some aspects of it can be quite mundane. Buying guide books and looking up “popular restaurants” using Google – we all end up going to the same places. The rise of Airbnb is a clear sign that people are looking for more in their trips. And a startup from Japan plans to tackle this travel sharing market with a new product called Meetrip.

Meetrip is a smartphone app (pictured below) that connects local users (or guides) with travelers. After signing up using Facebook credentials, local guides can quickly and easily create their own tour plans. For example, a three-hour tour to explore an old town not known to tourists, or a long lunch hour to enjoy the best hot noodles in town. Travelers can find interesting tours and sign up for them. By communicating back and forth with the guide, together you can come up with a perfect tour just for you. The details of the tour including the price can be revised afterwards, leaving space for adjustments.

The idea of Meetrip came from co-founder Takashi Kiyama who is a frequent traveler. Of all the trips he has ever taken, he explains that the ones that he remembers the most are those where he met someone local and communicated with them. And that’s why Meetrip focuses on people rather than plans. The team founded the company in June 2011, and has been working on the product for four months. They released a prototype in Taipei, Taiwan, and conducted beta user interviews to enhance the user experience.

The motivation for locals to use Meetrip can be many things, including interacting with travelers from distant places, speaking/practicing foreign languages, or explaining a special place in your area to travelers. These are the initial reasons why locals begin using the app; but with time, Meetrip can become a significant source of income for them. For this reason, the team is focused on bringing their travel product to Asian countries first. Meetrip can be used in Tokyo and Taipei for now, but there are plans to expand to Seoul, Jakarta, and Bangkok within the next few months. The startup’s goal is to release Meetrip in more than 10 countries cities this year.

The company behind Meetrip is Duckdive. The other co-founder is Nobuhiro Ariyasu. As a university student, he founded and sold his first company to Net Age Group. His second startup was a C2C market place named Cyta.jp. The CTO of Duckdive is Shinya Kasatani, who while working as CTO for another company released a very popular iPhone app called Pocket Guitar. The paid app has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. They are all graduates of Keio university.

Image credit: Thinkdigit.com

With an estimated 28 million active iOS and Android devices, South Korea is one of the biggest and most attractive markets for app developers trying to gain a foothold in Asia. It also helps that the country is the unofficial home of the Android ecosystem, largely due to Samsung and LG, two of the biggest Android phone manufacturers in the world.

But if developers think that all they need to do is to simply localize their apps and release them on Google Play or the App Store to be successful in South Korea, they are in for a rude shock. But at the same time, it is not rocket science either. All developers have to do is to dig a little deep into the market and understand what makes apps tick in Korea.

So, lets try to scratch the surface and see what’s happening in South Korea.

South Korea is smartphone country with a data connection to match

• A recent study suggested that over 76 percent of the adult population (15-64 years) in South Korea use a smartphone. When you consider South Korea’s total population of roughly over 50 million, that’s incredible penetration!

• 28 million active iOS and Android devices

• Although South Korea is a big Android market, Apple has made huge inroads since 2011 with its iDevices, largely due to its desirability quotient and Apple’s seamless ecosystem.

• While the western world happily sips from modest 3G mobile connections, South Korea is still outpacing other nations with the adoption of 4G technologies, which provides speeds up to 40.32 mbps on the go. That’s around 10 times faster than 3G.

High data consumption on the go

Tesco virtual store at a subway station in Seoul, photo: 2d-code.co.uk

• With data speeds to match high smart device penetration, it is a no-holds barred data consumption jungle out there, with consumers replacing a lot of their normal home TV and video viewing habits with a mobile device.

• Entertainment (K-pop, movies, live TV), communication (VoiP, video chat), gaming (both hardcore and social casual), social and professional networking, and shopping lead mobile consumption habits in Korea.

• Education is another category which is rapidly making inroads when it comes to mobile delivery.

It is not just about Google Play

SK Telecom Android app store, photo: ubergizmo.com

• While Android handset growth in South Korea is phenomenal, it’s clear that the Google Play store has yet to establish itself as the dominant Android app store. Here, Google Play is not only competing with iOS, but faces stiff competition from regional app stores operated by local mobile operators.

• It’s not just mobile operators who are getting in on the action, even platform owners are creating their own app ecosystem, notably the KakaoTalk game platform, Com2Us Hub, Hangame from NHN — all are making the non-iOS ecosystem extremely fragmented and difficult to crack. However, each of these platforms has a huge audienc,e and success on one platform usually leads to a trickling effect on other platforms.

Paid vs Free vs Freemium models

• It has been observed that Android users monetize at a much higher rate in South Korea because telecom providers offer carrier billing. A fast and easy purchase option, it allows users without credit cards to purchase digital goods and boosts conversion and monetization rates in the South Korean Android market. Large studios have seen their conversion rates increase by over 7 percent compared to non carrier billing markets.

• Korean studios prefer the free-to-play model, monetizing via digital goods and advertisements rather than opting for a paid model. They believe they can modify their free titles faster and improve conversion rather than a one shot burst from paid downloads, which is more of a hit-or-miss model.

What does this mean for developers looking to crack South Korea?

• iOS and Android are the only platforms that matter.

• For Android products, look beyond Google Play to the various telco app stores and social platform ecosystems for distribution.

• If games is the category you are targeting, increase the lifetime value and monetization of your apps through a free-to-play model with a freemium model.

• If your app has a short lifetime value, then a paid model will work the best for you.

• If ad monetization is your model, then look for an ad network mediation, which allows you access to local ad networks. This will give you better fill and higher brand eCPMs.

• Look for local partnerships. Lot of developers in South Korea are looking to move out and can leverage your experience and help you in turn to distribute your app and also localize it for South Korea.

[Data Sources: AppAnnie reports, Flurry stats]

The recent 11-year jail term handed down to a merchant on Taobao, China’s biggest consumer-to-consumer online marketplace, has raised the alarm in the country among amateur shopkeepers about being caught in the act of a widespread activity: “grey importing.” Essentially: smuggling. Usually done by sourcing goods from overseas – especially Hong Kong with its lack of a sales tax – where prices are lower than under China’s hefty import taxes, it’s an open secret that this illegal practice is one of the secrets behind the success of much of China’s C2C and B2C e-commerce industry.

The imprisoned e-tailer, identified only as Ms Li (pictured right), is an air stewardess who, like many people in the country, is also an amateur shopkeeper on Alibaba-owned Taobao. She sold cosmetics, making use of her job to buy up – and smuggle in – hundreds of thousands of dollars in pricey make-up from South Korea. In addition to the jail term, she was fined 500,000 RMB (US$79,000). Her boyfriend was identified as an accomplice and will spend the next five years in jail. The courts found the duo guilty of dodging sales taxes to the tune of 1.13 million yuan ($178,000). Another man, a Mr. Zhu, was found to have assisted the pair by getting them further staff discounts at a Samsung-run duty free shop in Korea (he’s a Samsung China employee), and he’s facing seven years in the slammer [1].

Smuggling luxury

Sure, this kind of smuggling happens a lot in offline retailing too. The most notorious act of grey importing is seen with the human gadget mules who carry sacks full of iPhones and iPads over the walkable border from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, thereby evading China’s import taxes and allowing the smugglers to make a profit whilst still selling the gadgets for a tad less than the official price in mainland China. Or, when it comes to electronics especially, it’s all about getting access to the hottest gadgets as quickly as possible – rather than waiting the inevitable few months for the iPhone to get its local regulatory approval to be sold.

Chinese social media users reacted with shock to the hefty sentence. Some bemoaned the excessive import taxes in China that make luxury items as much as 30 percent cheaper in other countries. That tax rate might be cut soon for 730 selected items, but it remains to be seen if the move can stop the hemorrhaging of import tax revenue in China to a combination of monied Chinese buying luxury goods overseas, and grey importers smuggling in every item under the sun.

But for now, the courts have clearly set an example with the Ms Li case, and other online merchants must be worried about how their own grey importing might be detected, possibly landing them in prison too. Hopefully it might also cause a rethink of the sales tax.

As for the scale of the problem, Professor Lu Benfu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences has been telling local media this week that the smuggling problem amounts to an annual trade volume of RMB 10 billion ($1.58 billion). But with China’s B2C e-commerce market – to say nothing of the C2C sector – worth as much as 81.8 billion RMB (or $12.9 billion) this year, that could well be a conservative stat to apply to China’s addiction to smuggling luxury items.

[Image of Ms Li: 17utt; main image: Flickr user tweedlebopper]

China’s video-streaming sites rely on big-name TV serials to bring in lots of young users. So the rumor that the country’s third-biggest video site, Sohu TV, is negotiating to buy a major South Korean film studio is actually a lot more plausible than it appears at first glance. According to an industry source cited by several local tech blogs, Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU) is keen to acquire Korea’s CJ Entertainment (aka: CJ E&M), which is the largest entertainment company in the nation, and a subsidiary of the massive Korean chaebol CJ Group.

The Sohu TV site already has plenty of Korean drama series. Click to enlarge.

CJ E&M produces 60 to 70 percent of all South Korean films each year, and has rights to about 5,000 movies and TV series. All that would be a bounty for Sohu TV in the pricey battle for licensed content in which it’s up against the market leaders, the newly merged Youku and Tudou (NYSE:YOKU), and some smaller rivals like Baidu’s iQiyi site. In fact, inflated costs for such content pushed Sohu to form an alliance with two smaller rivals to prevent bidding wars for popular serials. Korean romantic drama series have been especially popular in China for several years.

In addition to the impressive CJ E&M library, the Korean firm is also a shareholder in DreamWorks, the studio co-founded by Steven Spielberg, and has regional rights to a good many DreamWorks films.

If this rumor proves correct, the deal will be announced later this month. It’s not clear how much such a major acquisition would cost. Filmbiz.asia suggests that the CJ E&M subsidiary brought in ₩1 trillion (US$887 million) in revenue in 2010, and is targeting ₩3.11 trillion ($2.76 billion) by 2015.

[Source: Marbridge Daily]

LG Smartphones, Photo: Yonhap

Korean news agency Yonhap news is reporting that South Korea’s smart phone user base is about to surpass the 30 million mark. The report cites industry sources [1] saying that the country’s local telecoms have reported a total of 29.97 million smartphone subscribers.

So far the market leader is SK Telecom (SEO:017670; NYSE:SKM) with 14.72 million users, followed by KT (NYSE:KT) and LG Uplus (KRX:032640) with 9.4 million and 5.78 million respectively. That’s pretty remarkable considering that the nation’s population just surpassed 50 million in June.

In terms of LTE adoption, SK Telecom recently passed 4 million subscribers, while KT and LG have about 1.4 and 3 million a piece.

For companies and startups looking at expanding your game or app to Asia, Korea is certainly a market to look at given its affinity for smartphones. When I spoke with Angry Birds’ maker Rovio a few days ago, they told me that their game has more total downloads in Korea than there are smartphone users in Japan.

Looking at the growth of mobile in the country as a whole (feature phones included) shows the total mobile subscriber base, as of 2011, to be about 52.5 million, with an astounding 108.5 subscribers per 100 inhabitants [2]. [Via The Next Web]

One Korean developer has been riding the wave of popularity of the chat app KakaoTalk in the country, which now has a Game Platform, pushing its Anipang game to the top of the Google Play free game chart this weekend.

Anipang is a cutesy, Bejeweled-like puzzler created by the South Korean startup developers SundayToZ. The studio started in social games in 2009, but only switched to mobile in March of this year with the launch of Aqua Story. SundayToZ’s biz dev VP, Angus Lau, tells us that Anipang is “approaching two million installs” already, despite only being launched on July 30th – the same day that the KakaoTalk Game Platform went live in Korea. Already the game has hit one million daily active users (DAU) and is the second-highest grossing game at present on the local version of Google Play. That’s thanks to a host of in-app purchase options. It also helps that Anipang is a familiar title from the company’s browser-based game of the same name on Cyworld.

SundayToZ is currently focusing on Android, but Angus tells us that it’ll branch out into iOS pretty soon, “[We’ll be] offering translated versions of Aqua Story in Asian languages including Japanese and both traditional and simplified Chinese.” Anipang will get to join in the expansion fun too:

Anipang, although only available in Korea now, [we] have plans to launch outside of Korea, in markets that have heavy KakaoTalk usage. We will also release iOS versions in the coming months for the two mobile titles as well as other titles towards the end of this year.

SundayToZ is backed by Softbank Ventures Korea and Walden International, and at the moment, Angus explains, “There are 28 members on the team, mostly made up of programmers and designers.”

It makes sense to be looking into iOS, as the KakaoTalk gaming app will soon launch on that platform after initially debuting only on Android. When we last talked to KakaoTalk we were told that the messaging app now has 24 million DAUs, and that 90 percent of smartphone users in Korea are now signed up with the app.

Anipang is still restricted to download in South Korea right now. It’s here in the Google Play store.

The firm says that on average a typical viewer watches 159 videos in June. But how does this global average compared to Asian nations? Among the countries measured, Japan had the highest rate of 242 videos per viewer. It was followed by Hong Kong which had a rate of 180 videos per user, and Singapore which had a rate of 157 videos per user in June (see chart below).

I should note that Korea was not included in comScore’s report. But given that the nation has the world’s fastest broadband speeds by far, I would not be surprised to see users there watching even more videos than Japan.

Disappointingly, ComScore’s data does not account for mobile devices (like many of their reports), so you can imagine that in countries with high mobile penetration (like Japan) that video is increasingly enjoyed by many on their handsets as well. And while these figures are hardly definitive, it is a good indication of how online video is being adopted in the region.

[Download image version of this chart]

Korean manufacturer LG Electronics (066570:KS) announced today that it has surpassed the milestone of 5 million LTE smartphones sold last month, with more than 1 million smartphones sold in July alone. LG Mobile’s CEO Dr. Jong-seok Park noted that this pace is going to sharply increase in the near future:

Sales of global LTE smartphones are expected to increase ten-fold this year from last year […] With that in mind, we are planning to introduce an even more impressive LTE line-up in the next several months second to none.

The company currently offers ten LTE smartphones across regions where LTE is available, including South Korea and Japan where LTE adoption is progressing quickly. As for LTE adoption in the rest of the world, you can see a map of countries where LTE is commercially available below [1]. It will be interesting to see the mobile innovations that come out of markets which have a head start on LTE adoption.

According to figures just released by Gartner, LG’s current share of the worldwide mobile market is 3.4 percent, which is down from 5.7 percent on the previous year [2].

Source: Wikipedia

Last month, the new Indonesian games publisher Olleh4u released the classic DarkEden in Indonesia. DarkEden is an online, horror-themed MMORPG which is set in the fictional eastern European country of Eslania. In it, players can choose to develop a character from one of three races available: Vampires, Slayers (humans), and Ousters (half-human, half-vampire).

I reached out to Olleh4u and found out that the company was quite recently started up as a game publisher, back in November 2011. It currently runs with only 18 staffers.

DarkEden, which is free to play, was made commercially available to Indonesian gamers on July 25th after about 40 roadshows around Jakarta. Olleh4U’s PR head, Nae R. Puspitasari, told me that DarkEden targets mostly male gamers between the ages of 20 and 30 based on Olleh4U’s analysis of their gamers data. With such extensive marketing on Olleh4U’s side and a well-known addiction to online MMORPGs among Indonesian gamers, it will be interesting to see how DarkEden will be commercially accepted in the market.

Olleh4U was founded by three experienced Korean developers, namely Dr. Dongil Han as president director, Sangbum Ha as the board of commissioners, and Dr. Yongseok Choi as director. Nae explains that the trio wish to bring their experienced game know-how to Indonesian’s game market. In fact, the Korean version of DarkEden has been around since 1997, and has more recently been resuscitated in several markets by various publishers. Nae also added:

[DarkEden] has been loved by Korean gamers for more than 10 years and it is also popular up until now. I think this game gives gamers an awesome experience and fear-level.

We’ve written about many fun iPhone cases in the past, most of them from Japan. But here’s an intriguing iPhone case from Korea that anthropomorphizes your handset in an clever way. Appitoz is a case that has arms and legs, and when you put your iPhone inside and download the free Appitoz app you can add a face to your case.

What’s clever about this is that the app reacts when you touch the screen, so the displayed face changes depending on how you touch, tickle, or poke at it. You can see a demonstration of this in the video below.

I admit it does look a little bit unusual when it’s plugged in and recharging, as the connector is plugged directly into Appitoz’s butt. Although if you can get over that, you should do have a lot of fun with this case.

Appitoz has been around for a few months already, but is the first I’ve ever seen of it, and I really like the idea a lot. It is sort of like Bandai’s Smartpet robot dog, which we featured a few months back.

If you’d like to try out Appitoz, you could try out just the app for free. But of course, if you want give your phone more human qualities, you can check out the Dealize Korea online store or pick it up on Amazon. [Via appbank]

internet-map.net

I’m a big fan of any visualization that gives me a better idea of what the Internet looks like and one Russian web developer has created a beautiful two-dimensional representation of the internet’s 350,000 biggest websites from all over the world. The creator of this map, Ruslan Enikeev, explains the visualization thusly:

Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. Users’ switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other.

As you might expect, websites from the English language dominate, but it’s interesting to look at some Asian regions, like China and Japan for example.

China (click to enlarge)

If we look at China (see right) you can see companies like Baidu and QQ.com are pretty huge, with portal sites like Sina and 163 standing out, as well as microblog service Weibo.com. Meanwhile Yahoo rules Japan, with fc2, Livedoor, Ameblo, and Mixi showing as big web destinations too. What about Korea? Naver, Google Korea, and Daum are all big players there.

Japan (click to enlarge)

Korea (click to enlarge)

Admittedly, the searches for countries like India and Indonesia don’t appear to give tidy ‘pockets’ like the countries mentioned above. While I don’t know why this is for sure, it could mean that those countries are more integrated with the rest of the internet.

In any case, it’s certainly a fun visualization, and I encourage you to check it out. Readers who like this will also want to check out a similar visualization of different world languages on Twitter.

[Via Pocket Lint]

Photo: Yahoo News Korea

When we last spoke to Kakao at Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai, they alluded to a ‘Game Center’ that was coming in a few weeks time. And just yesterday the Korean company’s game center went live, at least as a beta for Korean users. You can view it at kakao.com/game, and so far its for Android only, although an iPhone version is coming soon as well.

There are a number of games currently available, with titles from domestic developers like WeMade Entertainment and NextApps. Besides this gaming platform, the company also plans to monetize in other areas like advertising and media content, virtual items, and mobile commerce.

What’s interesting here is that this is the second messaging platform we have seen become the base for a game platform, the first one being NHN Japan’s Line application which recently expanded to be not just a game platform, but even more besides. We’ve made contact with Kakao today and are hoping to hear more details about its Game Center plans soon.

In other Kakao news, yesterday Daily Social pointed out that Indonesian carrier Telkomsel is now offering an unlimited-use package for four popular apps, including KakaoTalk. The others are Opera Mini, WhatsApp, and the afore-mentioned Line.

[Via campaignasia and Mark Ranson, image from Yahoo News Korea]

According to a report by Korea’s Yonhap News Agency, Neowiz Games (KOSDAQ:095660) is keen to move into China’s mobile gaming space. The company’s Chinese subsidiary has been operating since 2008, with a focus on PC games.

It’s estimated that the Chinese mobile gaming market will be comprised of about 192 million games by the end of 2012, and of course Neowiz is not unique in wanting a piece of that action.

Some of you may recognize Neowiz as the same game developer who published the official mobile game of the Olympics, which you can check out here. I tried playing their Facebook game a few weeks back, but I found it a little bit boring to be honest. But those who like Facebook’s many farming-style or city-building games may enjoy playing around with this one too as it lets you create your own Olympic village.

The company is one of the largest online gaming companies in Korea, and is the creator of the popular first-person shooter Crossfire, which is reportedly at the center of a recent trademark dispute. In China, Tencent has a contract to distribute the title, and the game has been hugely popular there.