Kakao today announced that it partnered with Huace Group, China’s number one comprehensive film and TV media group, to bring five of its popular Daum Webtoon titles to the screens in China. Kakao and Huace group signed deals for four of its webtoons, with one additional title to follow imminently. Daum Webtoon is Kakao’s web comic platform which first introduced the concept and format of ‘webtoons’ in 2003. Since then, it has…

At today’s fourth game in the Google DeepMind Challenge Match, the best Go player of the last decade, Lee Sedol, came back from three consecutive losses to beat the Go-playing computer program, AlphaGo. Playing as white, Lee won when AlphaGo resigned after 180 moves. Reporters gave Lee Sedol a standing ovation as he entered the press conference. Lee commented, “I’ve never been congratulated so much just for winning a single game. I…

Leferi Beauty Channel, a popular beauty MCN in Asia has secured a US$822k (KRW 1b) investment from Union Investment Partners. Driving the investment deal was the global trend for video contents. In the Asian market, popular video content categories in the Asian market  include beauty and fashion as well as Korean products. Leferi Beauty Channel has partnered with Youtube Korea over the last 1 year and 4 months to deliver their Creator Academy…

Tribeluga, a pioneering cross-border innovation platform focusing on funding and nurturing Health, Education, and Environment (HEE) technologies across China, Korea and the US has held a press conference at the Lotte Hotel to announce their performance and plans for the future. Tribeluga was first registered as a Korean entity in 2014 and in the same year held the ‘Tribeluga Tech Conference Beijing’. The company participated in beGLOBAL Seoul 2015 and throughout last year…

Local supermarket delivery App, Supermenz has secured an investment deal with Korea’s leading startup accelerator ‘Primer’ and Sazze Partners of Silicon Valley’s. The value of the investment has not been disclosed. This is the second investment in three months following the early stage investment in October. Both investments have enabled Supermenz to establish a foothold on the local supermarket delivery service in Korea. The investment will allow Supermenz stick to their strategic operational plan…

Last January, there was a special event in Peru, South America. It was a fan meeting event of Nardy Santana (Latinasaram), an YouTube MCN star who creates various contents which are based on the Hallyu Wave (Korean ‘cultural wave’ fuelled by the Entertainment Industry), and more than 2000 fans came all the way to see Nardy. This happened just a year after Nardy had started her YouTube channel called Latina Saram. She…

The National Rehabilitation Center in Korea conducted a study to examine the impact of virtual reality-based exercises combined with standard occupational therapy on distal upper extremity function and the health-related quality of life for stroke survivors. Virtual reality-based treatments have become one of the fastest growing trends in healthcare, but none of the previous studies had provided detailed, quantitative information about the impact of technology on the effectiveness of the rehabilitation process….

Smatoos, the operator of BeNative Pro, an online business English and Chinese teaching service has secured a strategic investment from Miraeen, an educational content publisher and strategic investment company. BeNative Pro is a service teaching and providing an opportunity to practice the languages of English and Chinese and is delivered in China, Korea and Japan. The service is offered as part of employment training programs by large corporations, including Samsung, LG, SK…

Kakao have announced their strategic acquisition of Parking Square the developer and operator of ‘Park Here’, an app that allows searching and reservation of parking spots. The app allows its users to quickly search for vacant parking lots nearby and reserve the vacancy at a discounted rate. The app is appealing to both parking spot users and parking lot operators as it provides parkers a convenient way to access a parking spot…

Editor’s note: Originally written by Mike Kim, Senior Director Corporate Development at Baedal Minjok Facebook. YouTube. Skype. Hard to believe all 3 iconic companies actually got there start in Korea right? While these Silicon Valley heavyweights have roots in the Bay Area, the origin of their concepts actually hatched on the tiny peninsula of Korea first. Years before Facebook there was Cyworld. Before YouTube, Pandora TV – And long before Skype, a company called Dialpad was…

For the past 14 years, Eric Kim has been racking up a lot of global airline miles. Though his day job is a venture capitalist, Eric joked, “if being an airline passenger were a sport, I think I could enter the Olympics…I’ve learned to sleep in some weird positions.” During any given week, Eric might be in San Francisco, Seoul, New York, Shanghai, Singapore, or Vancouver. When asked if all the travel…

Creatrip, a platform where local tourism courses and information can be accesses has succeeded in attaining a US$172K (KRW 200m) investment from KAIST Venture Investment. The platform is aimed at foreign visitors that prefer to freely travel domestically after gathering and assessing the available local tourism information. After releasing the Chinese language based open beta version in February, the platform is being serviced in Taiwan and Hong Kong where a high proportion…

Cosmetic ecommerce startup B2Link in Korea has secured a US$4.3m (KRW 5b) investment from PEF; a joint organization formed by IBK Industry Bank and SK Securities. This new investment adds to the US$4.6m (KRW 5.3b) investment last year by KB Network, DSC Investment and DR Capital to bring the total investment to US$8.9m (KRW 10.3b). After co-founding Memebox, Lee Jae Ho founded B2Link to distribute Korean beauty and baby products to China and…

SK’s Social Impact Investment division, SK Happiness Organization have announced their commitment to make a US$860k (KRW 1b) social impact investment into Brave Pops Company. Brave Pops is an educational software developer which was formed in 2015 by five internet experts from Naver and Ticket Monster. Class 123, a teaching aid software developed by Brave Pops allows teachers to communicate feedback on a student’s attitude and behavior to the student and to…

Software development company JDLab will showcase ‘IUEditor for WordPress’ which allows users to create WordPress themes within the web editor at Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona. While WordPress provides free and paid themes for its users, it is difficult to build a fully customized professional website without a programmer. IUEditor’s WordPress theme project allows users to create, arrange and edit specialized widgets with essential WordPress theme functions such as Post, Comment…

Odd Concept, a startup specializing search engine for video content has US$860k (KRW 1b) from KB Investment. The company was founded in 2012 and has developed online technology for video content searches. The company has used the technology to link offline shopping businesses to create an unique O2O market. Kim Jung Tae from Odd Concept commented, “Till now, we have not actively promoted or marketed Odd Concept, but through this investment our…

Yellow Mobile, a Korean startup offering mobile services has secured a US$30m (KRW 36b) investment from Japanese internet and financial group SBI Holdings. The investment is a result of SBI Holding’s business alliance and strategic investment plans made last year. Yoshitaka, the Chairman of SBI Holding commented, “Yellow Mobile leads innovation within the mobile paradigm with its vision and potential for growth”. “Our support will allow Yellow Mobile to transition from the venture…

Kakao Corp., the provider of mobile messaging platform Kakao Talk and Korea’s successful on-demand service Kakao Taxi, announced that its CBO John Jung will be presenting at the 25th of Feb at the Mobile World Congress 2016, taking place in Barcelona Spain. John will be speaking at the ‘Personalization and the On-demand Economy” conference session, which will take place at Auditorium 3 in Hall 4 of Fira Grand via (the MWC venue), starting at 11…

About this time last year, experts and analysts all placed their official predictions for the cyber threat landscape in 2015. Now that a year has come and gone, it would be interesting to see if these so called analysts were correct. Today, we will review some of the most common web security trends that experts thought would be a major issue in 2015. As a reference, Symantec developed an excellent infographic that…

Riiid, an educational technology startup has secured a Series A investment of US$1.7m (KRW 2b) from DSC Investment, DS Asset Investment, and Shinhan Capital. This successful investment comes as recognition of the potential for Riiid’s ‘Adaptive Learning’ technology for delivering educational contents. Lee Han Byul, the team leader from DSC Investment commented, “Although ‘Adaptive Learning’ is a relatively new concept in Korea, it has already proved popular in USA, China and India…