Google Ties up with Kstartup to Support South Korean Entrepreneurs

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.