The award has recognized the company’s ability to ‘harness creativity and shape an impactful mobile ecosystem’ Kakao, the provider of KakaoTalk, Korea’s leading mobile messaging application and mobile social platform, has been named a 2015 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, making it the first Korean company to be recognized since 2001. Chosen from among 24 of the world’s leading technology organizations, the award recognizes the company’s ability to design transformative technological…

Korbit, Korea’s leading bitcoin exchange, wallet and merchant processor, has just closed a $3 million Series A funding round led by SoftBank Ventures Korea. Pantera Capital led the round from the US, with participation from BAM Ventures and previous investors Bitcoin Opportunity Corp., Tim Draper, Pietro Dova and initial investor Strong Ventures. Korbit launched their bitcoin exchange last year and have now added two new bitcoin services and aim to continue building the…

Mobile monetization and ad-tech firm Tapjoy has today announced that they have acquired Korean analytics and marketing automation firm 5Rocks.  5Rocks enables user segmentation, cohort analysis by app behaviour, purchase patterns, social activity, referral channel and more, and notifies developers when there are various anomalies detected in their data. Additionally, it had previously received US$2.3 million in funding from Japan’s Global Brain, after James Jung (CEO, beSUCCESS)  made an introduction at beLAUNCH 2013. “5Rocks is…

Originally posted by Business Korea Seedstars World (SSW) recently held its regional startup contest which was last year won by Flitto, who went on to win the Global final in Geneva last winter. This year’s Seoul winner,Krowd Pop, aims to follow up this monumental first success in similar style. KrowdPop is a K-Pop concert service provider that has utilized crowdsourcing to take the risk out of holding overseas pop concerts by asking…

Spoqa is a Seoul-based startup that operates Dodo Points, a tablet-based loyalty platform for local merchants. Since its launch in April 2012, 1,500 local merchants in Korea signed up and Spoqa has driven 2.5 million customers to its partner merchants. Today the company has announced that it has closed its second round of funding, putting its total funding raised to $3.9M US dollars. With this round, Spoqa aims to aggressively expand its…

Yesterday we published part 1 of this story here. Below is part 2. We learned about the basics of what Easiaid wants to achieve. Now let’s take a look at the team behind the vision. In Easiaid we see a team that has the experience and ability to execute, and that’s exciting! The team of four, a father, his son and two friends were determined to squash the Korean hierarchy normally found…

Easiaid is a Korean Start-up, obsessed with Media Mining, which seeks to track everything on TV shows in order to give Ad viewing power back to the customer. At a time when heritage advertising has lost its appeal and it efficacy, content producers are desperate to find new ways of monetizing content. The industry is wide open and innovation is leading future trends that could change the ways we consume branded content…

Kakao Corp., the company behind Korea’s biggest mobile messaging platform, aims to launch a wallet service in the next few months. This is the most recent addition to the Kakao platform, as the company continues to diversify its portfolio of services for users. It is hoped that Kakao Corp.’s namesake payment platform ‘Bank Wallet Kakao’ will help boost the ironically nascent mobile wallet industry in South Korea. Ironic, because Korea is praised…

Is Korea once again employing protectionist policies rather than embracing the opportunity presented by progress? Seoul is proud of being labelled one of the the most progressive tech-focused cities in the world. The capital has one of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world. Its residents are well-known for their rapid tech adoption. Additionally it’s administration has been pushing a move towards innovation and tech development. However,  Uber will likely be…

After a period of rampant speculations it has been reported that Line Corp.,which now boasts almost half a billion users, has filed confidentially for an initial offering in the U.S. It is expected that the company will seek a dual-listing in New York and Tokyo. This, according to a report our on Bloomberg. While the details have not been released publicly by Line, it is believed that Morgan Stanley (MS) is managing the listing…

This article was co-authored by Alan McGlade (Digital Entertainment Ventures) and Nathan Millard (beSUCCESS) and appeared on Forbes on July 18 2014. As little as five years ago Korea’s startup scene was undistinguished, but now the nation has taken an important step towards establishing itself as a key technology hub in the Asia Pacific region and an essential partner for global investors and tech businesses. Two young Korean startups have gained the…

“Touch Your Customers… Appropriately” Does the English in the above picture seem awkward to you? Let’s take a moment to look at it. There are no misspellings. The grammar is correct. But there is something definitely strange about telling a potential customer that your company “can touch anywhere”. Touch what exactly, and for what purpose? I guess we will have to use our imagination, but in this case first impressions will certainly…

Naldo today announced its Series A investment from Softbank Ventures Korea and Qualcomm Ventures. After an initial angel funding in 2013 this is the first major investment for Naldo. Funding will allow for faster scaling along sales, marketing and product-development. Currently Naldo’s service is available in and around the Seoul metropolitan area in South Korea. Naldo provides immediate delivery of any item that needs to get delivered within a maximum time-frame of…

Writepath Inc. has recently secured $500k from B-Dash Ventures and Pinehurst Advisors. The team intends to use the funds to further expand into Asian markets outside their base of Taiwan, with a focus on the huge opportunity in Korea. Founded in 2009 WritePath provides multi-lingual editing services and online translation solutions. Currently the company serves 22 countries and has three services in the market. One such, Top Admit, is now being touted…

As Korea continues to brand itself as a startup nation, increasingly foreigners are becoming interested in joining Korean startups or even starting up their own venture in Korea. But getting visas in Korea for entrepreneurial endeavours can be daunting and is often tied up with red tape, as the government grapples with the best way forward to open Korea to foreign workers in the tech and startup space. A few of the…

You need only check out professional eaters on YouTube or Psy’s latest video to see that eating is a national obsession in Korea. What’s more, metropolitan Seoul is active 24 hours a day and is home to around 26 million people. Taking this into account its not surprising that the market size for the restaurant sector is around $60Bn per year, with more than 500,000 restaurants open for business. The area of…

Imagine if department stores in busy urban shopping districts could lock-in customers travelling into the area, before they even arrived. Kimgisa, a navigation app developed by Korean startup locNall aims to be the No. 1 player in the navigation and location-based marketing industry in Asia and make that marketing dream a reality. The team has already started working with large clients like Incheon International Airport to deliver targeted marketing to airport visitors…

Hearing about employees giving up their highly-prized, stable, and well-paid corporate careers in Korea’s tech behemoths used to be incredibly rare. But the young team at ASDTech has done exactly that, choosing to give up salaries of well over $100k for the excitement and promise of entrepreneurship. Having founded ASDTech in 2013 after leaving LG Electronics, they developed their while-label cloud service, ‘Cloudike’, and have now secured their first major clients. Furthermore they have…

Global Brain, an early and growth stage investor from Tokyo has just announced its most recent investment in a Korean startup. The “GB-V Growth Fund Investment Limited Partnership” managed by Global Brain Corporation, has invested an undisclosed amount in Mbite Inc., from Seoul, Korea. Founded in 2011 MBite is a global provider of game illustrators’ matching platform “rainbow.dot”. The fresh finances will be used to bolster R&D capabilities and hire a global sales team….

The Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC), Asia’s largest mobile industry conference which is hosted annually in Beijing, is making a foray into Japan with GMIC Tokyo on July 11, 2014. GMIC Tokyo will bring together industry experts as well as up-and-coming innovators at Hikarie Hall in Tokyo’s hip Shibuya district. The theme of GMIC Tokyo 2014 is “Globalization of Mobile”. The organizer Great Wall Club’s (GWC) inaugural GMIC in Japan, GMIC Tokyo promises to be the biggest…