Meet the Winners of Google’s Global K-Startup Competition 2012; A Peek into the Korean Ecosystem
Global K-Startup is a competition for Korean startups in partnership with Korea Communications Commission and Korea Internet & Security Agency. Out of 250 applicant teams, 30 were selected and are currently building their businesses. In October, 5 teams went to London and Silicon Valley to network with VCs, startups, and other SV-based participants. This program aims to help Korean startups go global.
The winners were:
1stPrize:
KnowRe is an education technology company that develops adaptive learning applications for the web, tablets, and mobile devices. KnowRe enhances the learning process by providing:
(i) students, parents, and teachers with accurate assessment of an individual’s strengths and weaknesses
(ii) personalized and effective adaptive curriculum, and
(iii) gamification and social features that encourage the pursuit of learning via an engaging and motivating user experience.
KnowRe believes that technology can serve to better the educational experience of every deserving student, regardless of geographic or socioeconomic boundaries.
2ndPrize:
“iClinic” series by MeditPLUS will give customers comprehensive health related information about illnesses and surgery via mobile machines and phones, and each unit can be synchronized with websites. Chances are patients will understand better and have more reasonable choices by using the “iClinic” series. What’s more, patients will be given high-quality treatment online, which is very convenient, whenever and wherever they need it. Also, medical staff will have a chance to foster reliable relationships, give good advice, and even advertise their medical services to them.
Watcha is a convenient and easy way to find amazing movies you’ll love. Watcha is a personalized & automated recommendation system for movies by Frograms’ algorithm. When you join Watcha, and rate just 10 movies, then you can get personalized recommendation automatically. Watcha provides movie recommendations and recommendations for other content categories (TV show, Books). For now Watcha provides only web service, but will launch an App (with streaming feature) in December 2012.
3rdPrize:
When one hears an alarm, he/she associates it with a loud and annoying sound so that it wakes him/her up and forces him/her to get up in the morning. What our alarm mobile application does is to make this otherwise unpleasant or mundane experience everyone has every morning a bit more pleasant and fun.
A key value of Alarm Mon – morning edition, a mobile application, is that we make people feel good, fun and amused with our unique gamification features. Not only are the characters themselves entertaining and engaging with their stories, but our users also feel good about waking up to the chosen sound and character of Alarm Mon at the set time. The game element of our Alarm Mon app is that users will win a stamp or some sort of recognition at the end of the alarm if they get up. Once the users have received certain number of stamps, they would then become eligible for certain awards that would allow users to “raise” their favorite alarm character into a full grown creature, similar to the Tamagotchi digital pet, or to receive discounts or coupons offered by brands or marketers.
Class Smart Community
- Easy to share writings, pictures, movies, materials, etc with classmatesthrough the CLASSTING class
- Smart Class Notice: Everyday class notices are delivered immediately andaccurately through the smartphone app and SMS
- Private counseling room: Counseling with the smartphone for students in thesmart generation
Know-how Feed through Mentoring System
- Request mentoring from the recommendation list to receive updates onknow-hows and news
Personal portfolio of school day memories
- A personal timeline from the first day of school can be made, with selective privacy settings (everyone/only mentoring/private)
Magiceco is a software platform that can easily control open hardware and smartphones with cloud and WYSIWYG web editor. It consists of embedded software to control open hardware, hybrid
launcher for smart phone, app store and automatic distribution execution and managing module, and web-based authoring tool.
4thPrize:
With Brain Garden, learning English vocabulary is fun and social:
-Learn new vocabulary and grow your “word garden”
-Challenge and help your friends
-Lean anytime anywhere
-Track your performance
Bdrive allows individual users to access the storage of their remote smart devices in simple ways, so that they can build personal cloud on their own; to share files easily with their traditional friends and SNS friends, so that they enjoy social cloud; to have mobile cloud for smart working anywhere with internet access. Bdrive’s business model is based on a set of three categories of products and services:
End User Software: Downloadable software instantly allows users to have personalized, social and mobile cloud with their PC,smart phones, and tablets by simple installation of the software.
Developer Software: SDK that allows developers to develop apps and services with various views and specialized functions including, for example, photo albums, multimedia players, or customized business applications.
Freemium Service: Free for home users with basic services and fee for business users with premium services. Also, for end users,special friends that offer some form of valuable content for fee will be considered.
MagicSearch
Magic Search is a search service for users to feel the true freedom of search with casual input errors, and that is totally different from the other services. It does not give any restrictions and advice when it comes to searching and users just needs to type the keyboard as usual.
In current searching modules, Korean language search do not guarantee consistency and integrity. For example, ‘Parisbaguete’ can be searched with ‘Pparisbaguette’ but ‘Cafebene’ cannot be searched with ‘Ccafebene’. The heat of problems lie in natural language variations including inversion, abbreviation, and deformations. And, the alias methods that most commercial portal sites adopt to deal with this problem lack of ability to deal with input error, as shown in the example cases. It also needs continuous and vast amount of human resources and time. Nevertheless, right search outputs are not yet guaranteed. In Magic Search, it does not need even a single line of alias data. This, itself, is a big advantage of Magic Search. If DB of any company is combined with Magic Search, the DB will become very sound with essential data. Magic Search finds unintended mistakes of users in a fast way during the process of comparing the user input and DB and then, suggests the answer most close to user’s original intention.
Teamtalk
This service is an application that provides mobile groupmeeting management services.Unlike other apps aiming to become a smaller version of Social Networking Service, TeamTalk is designed to focus on group meeting management services such as arranging appointments, attending meetings, surveying and managing members.Currently, every Korean joins 3.5 groups on an average. It is estimated that 12-million small and medium sized groups including churches and sports clubs exist. Relevant group messaging market reaches 380-billion Won.
5thPrize
Figtree Labs:
Whatugot will provide a familiar and interesting global service to the world. It enables users to, naturally not obligatory, collect, boast, consume, and find new interest. With a similar method in notifying the system, users can enjoy continuous communication with friends and reliable information.
Whatugot is an abbreviated form of What you got? It is a service for users to find their value with their own experiences. Due to its characteristic enabling ‘Collection+Boasting+Find new interest+Communication+Consumption’ it is possible to make various business models catering to shopping malls, social commerce etc.
Dodol is preparing for Dodol Cloud App service, which is provided, with several cloud apps for an Android phone and web in a package.The apps, which Dodol Cloud focuses on, are applications related to MDM (Mobile Device Management) and PIMS (Personal Information Management Service.) MDM is to manage cell phones such as remote screen lock and deleting data when people lose phones; and PIMS is to manage personal information such as phone call/msg logs, note, to-do list, schedule, etc. By developing simple utility cloud applications in these areas targeting the general population, we are planning to gain users aggressively.
Realfont provides the service that allows people to make their own fonts. We have already made the application for Korean, English, Japanese and Cursive English. The application is in Android market.
English : When people write down something on their notebook in English, they usually use cursive English or their own style of connected English. But cursive English cannot be a font because existing fonts are built up as outline vector or Bitmap font that is difficult to be connected. Realfont can make cursive English because we build up fonts as Vector although our Vector fonts need to betransited to outline vector font to use in Windows, Android, Mac. In addition, we developed the technology of cursive system to make more perfect line between each fonts.
Korean : Korean font was really hard to make because Korean has 11,172 characters. Realfont developed the system to make Korean fonts just by writing in 59 words on SmartPhone. Once the font is made, it can be modified in application to make the font fancier.
Japanese : Hiragana and Katakana can be made just by writing in 46 words. Sonant Japanese can be added after the font is made.
Music media service provides online singing evaluation/diagnosis service. Music media service aims to provide its service globally to keep up with K-pop sensation all over the world. Music media service gives mark of each evaluation items with comment and it is different from the traditional singing evaluation which is done orally. Music media service expects for its application to extend an applied music such as composition/lyrics writing starting from singing.
Into.it is a social ticket album. Users record and share what they are watching, listening to and reading as they collect tickets on their collections; decorate tickets using still-cuts, trailer video, quote and lyrics, which takes no longer than 20 seconds; record all the memory of deeply touching movies, books, music exhibitions and performances they experienced. Into.it gives rewards to heavy users by providing exclusive tickets, discounts and other personalized information of their favorite contents. We are building something distinctive to make user-generated recommendations more interesting.