Web 2.0 Asia

Tistory ("Tee-Story" : The site is only in Korean now), a hosted blogging service by Tattertools (profiled here), has gone into a closed beta.

The service is sponsored by Daum (#2 internet giant of Korea)


As you see, the dashboard is available in English, Chinese, and Japanese as well as in Korean.

Unlike other free blog service being offered by portals, this one gives the user a full control over their blogs. Users can edit their blog UI ("skin") freely. Tattertools (the blog tool powering this hosted service) is an open source platform, which means Tistory users can also import plug-ins (extensions) and blog skins created and shared by other users, a common practice in Firefox and other open source community.

Way to go, Tattertools !

Tatter and Company is best known for its blogging tool, Tattertools, the leading blog tool of Korea. FYI this very blog is running on Tattertools, and so are about 360K other blogs (according to the company).

Key products of Tatter and Company are Tattertools and Eolin (Pronounced "Yee-O-Lean"). Part 1 of this blog will cover Tattertools, while Eolin will be profiled in Part 2.

Eolin is not a front-end service, but is a backend data framework for distributing, syndicating, and monetizing UCC (user created content). Major features include sync to portals and search engines, anti-spam, media syndication and group blogging ("guilds"), commerce API to enable social commerce, etc.

Eolin is still pretty much in the cooking, but I've been introduced to its concept (which I am not allowed to disclose). Eolin is fantastic, but even without Eolin (that leaves only Tattertools blog tool), the Korean media is already endowing the coveted moniker of "Leading Web 2.0 company of Korea" (link in Korean) to this company.

Tattertools

Tattertools is an installed blog tool, comparable to Wordpress or Moveable Type. The company will also offer Tistory.com, a web-based hosted blogging service (like Typepad), starting from late May in partnership with Daum (a Korean web portal giant who also owns Lycos).

If you are an English speaking guy, you might say "What's up with the name?" The guys who initially named this blog tool apparently didn't know the English word "tatter" often carries negative connotation (as in "The poor boy was in tattered clothes") but anyhow the brand is now famous in Asian market. Besides, the word sounds the same as Korean phrase meaning "Big Ground (Plaza)".

So what's so special about Tattertools blog platform? Firstly, Tattertools provides ultimate freedom of customization. The "skin" (ie. the design of your blog's facade) is expressed as independent resource files, meaning you can copy/paste and edit your skin right on Dream Weaver. You can play with the looks of your blog at your will, without touching the functional aspects. As a result, there are many sites that do not look like blog sites at all but have in fact been built with Tattertools.

The dashboard (admin page) is dead easy to use and offers very efficient environment for entry composing and media file uploading (pictures, podcasts and videos, etc). You insert a media file clip, and the blog automatically generates flash viewer on your blog so the visitors can play back the media easily. Pinging blog entries to syndication site is one-click away (There's an AJAXy button on the dashboard.)

Another major advantage of Tattertools is its strong market presence in Asia. The tool is available in major Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) as well as in English. Tattertools blog has also seen its use in some major corporate sites such as Samsung Mobile and Ohmynews, suggesting its high scalability.

Tattertools offers mobile site as well: Adding "/m" at the end of any existing blog URL gives you a mobile blog page, with exactly the same content on the web, only optimized for mobile browser. Tattertools is an open source application (GPL). As of this writing, there are about 180 active members in development community and about 150 plug-ins.

The Company

Tatter and Company has 7 in-house engineers and is being headed up by Chester Roh, who was intelligent enough to not only make it to KAIST (nicknamed MIT of Korea), but also hack the server of a rival school (POSTECH). After spending short period of time behind the bars for this incident, Roh came of age and decided to use his talents for computer security (from hacker to security expert -- what a dramatic turn, sounding like "Catch Me If You Can" the movie). The security company he co-founded, Inzen, went public in 2002.

Tatter and Company has not taken any venture funding yet, and is now seeking an outside investment. Given that comparable US and Chinese companies have all succeeded in funding (Six Apart $12M for 3rd round; Automattic $1M 1st round; Blogchina $10M 2nd round; Toodou $8.5M 2nd round), I would expect Tatter and Company should be able to get some VC money if they can present their company right.

Conclusion

Is a blog company eligible for being a Web 2.0 venture? I believe so, the main reason being that blogs are the main tool for edge creation of content. As Mena Trott of Six Apart (which itself is largely undisputed as a Web 2.0 company) said in a recent interview, when it comes to the tool for caching 20 years of life records, nothing comes closer than blogs.

As I already said, Tatter and Company is a two-headed monster, with the second head being the Eolin. I can't wait to profile Eolin platform. But even only with Tattertools, this company is a winner and well worth a look for investors.

According to , via Beyond Web:
(Click on the picture to enlarge)

Enbee.com is an end-to-end photo management service that's by and large similar to HP's Snapfish. The name comes from E-NoteBook, but the abbreviation "ENB" sounded meaningless so they put additional "ee" and gave it a nice little bee icon.

But compared to Snapfish, Enbee.com provides a more holistic digital photo managing experience. For example, on Enbee, printing is less of an integral part of the service than it is on Snapfish.

First, user starts by transferring the raw files onto the online storage. The process can be aided by installing optional "EZ uploader" (an ActiveX control). Once uploaded, photos are automatically rearranged based on dates (extracted from EXIF data) or by user-defined categories. You can tag a specific date with keywords to make the later searching easier (e.g. "Excursion to Namsan").

Next, users hand-pick good pictures (digital cameras can produce many sloppy photos you know) and put them together into a Photo Clip. Photos on Enbee are managed by Phoco Clips, the way individual music files on iTunes are managed by Playlists.

Value Adding Services

Pictures in Photo Clips can be viewed (changing the order or size of the pictures is done in a smooth, Ajaxy way), printed, published in various formats (book, postcard, or newspaper), and sent to blog. Enbee offers its own blog, and also an upload API to 3rd party blogs (the one for Tattertools is on its way).

Printing currently is Enbee's prime revenue source: A nice example of Freemium business model. (I told you they are already profitable.) Enbee has its own virtual currency called (fittingly) Honey, which helps promoting the service with free Honey coupons.

Enbee is actually owned by a publicly traded company (which is another reason why Enbee isn't just a quick startup, but is a pretty stable, longshot company) specializing in digital publishing. As such, Enbee's book/newspaper publishing service is pretty artsy and high-quality. Enbee should be able to further leverage on its parent company's digital publishing capabilities to provide a more all-rounded book publishing service like Blurb.

Just as Slide and Photobucket help users integrate photos into their blogs / Myspace pages, Enbee also generates code snippets so the photo slides can be inserted to other web pages.


Web 2.0 Analysis

Despite being a well-thought, end-to-end photo management service, Enbee seems a little short on the Web 2.0-o-meter. Most notably missing feature is the Flickr-like folksonomy tagging. Also wanted is allowing direct upload of photos from a cameraphone.

But Enbee.com is a purely browser based service that doesn't require any download of program, which makes the service a Web 2.0 contender.

The CEO, Soo Man Park, is a well-known blogger (he blogs only in Korean) and he translated Dan Cederholm's Bulletproof Web. The first two characters of Park's name in Korean happens to sound the same as "Applause" : I think I can say just that for Enbee.com as well.

...Japanese is now the biggest language of the blogosphere?
(which might be due to the frequent postings from mobile phones)

The article also notes that Korea is largely underrepresented in the blogosphere, despite its "extremely vibrant blogging culture".

Cyworld should be best known for its mini hompy, but here in this blog I'm not reiterating on the concept of mini hompy since it's been written about on quite a few occasions already. For recent coverages on CyWorld minihompy, you can check out here, or . If you are not familar with Cyworld minihompy at all, you can start by consulting Wiki definition; Also, one of the earlier articles that got Cyworld better known to the world outside of Korea was perhaps this.

Here, I'd like to give a brief on Cyworld's other services that are probably lesser known outside of Korea. These services are arguably helping Cyworld evolve from a rather closed, walled garden type of service into a more open service that's truer to the spirits of Web 2.0.

1. Paper

The Paper, in essence, is CyWorld's blog and content syndication service. Paper gives you a blog authoring tool so you can publish your "Paper", i.e. a blog entry. The authoring can also be done from your own minihompy as well as from a typical weblog interface. When you publish your Paper entry, it gets updated and delivered to all subscribers via RSS. (Subscribing to a Paper is just one-click away.)

Content can also be syndicated to form a group page, called "PaperZine" (the term apparently comes from "Paper" + "Magazine".) Below is a sample PaperZine called "Leaders are Readers" -- each author writes book reviews on his/her blog or minihompy ("the edge"), not having to go to and log into a specific site ("the center"), and yet when syndicated out, those individual reviews together form a powerful archive of book reviews. Edge production meets collective intelligence.

The Paper service is especially powerful because it's seamlessly connected with mini hompies. With over 17 million users, minihompy service is churning out fresh content every minute, if not second. Paper is based on open platform (blog and RSS) and is a great way to utilize and syndicate the outpouring content from mini hompies.

2. Town

Cyworld Town is a minihompy-based service targetted for SOHOs and other e-commerce shops. Blogs, when properly used, can be a great vehicle for promoting and selling products. For example, products can be described in a much more friendly and people-centric manner. This is what the Cyworld Town is trying to capitalize on.

The fact that Cyworld named this service "Town" suggests they might have had local e-commerce market in mind. IMHO, Cyworld Town will become much more interesting if Cyworld adds more Web 2.0 features, such as tag based syndication (Edgeio) or smart indexing/aggregation (Vast), product recommendation by minihompy owners (like MyPickList.com), or mashup with map services like this (via Richard MacManus) so users can have something like Judy's book.

3. Club, Mini Ring, TeamPlay

Cyworld is a social networking service in its core and therefore supports various social networking features.

For starters, Cyworld offers the Club service, which helps minihompy users form groups. Club members can make use of various features of TeamPlay to effectively extend their online community into offline. TeamPlay offers features such as group scheduling and messaging, composing and sharing post-meeting notes, etc.

Mini Ring forms groups based on shared interests -- like 43things.com does. From the latest list of Mini Ring tags, I found this: "Those who don't divide Ramen into two pieces before cooking it." 

I didn't go into all the details here, but Cyworld is definitely becoming more Web 2.0-ish and is accordingly getting more interesting.

It's reported that folks at Cyworld are busy launching the service outside of Korea as well. US and Europe will see their versions of Cyworld pretty soon. In fact the guy who's been spearheading the Cyworld US development happens to be my college buddy so I'll perhaps twist his arms and get some interesting inside stories out of him -- Of course I know until all things become public he'll stay tight-lipped.

PS. As of this writing, I'm getting a news that CyWorld is launching an online auction service. Beware, Ebay!