3 Articles for 'me2day'
- 2008/12/22 Korea's Twitter gets acquired by Naver (6)
- 2008/03/24 A Korean microblogging service sees two of its users getting married (9)
- 2007/09/17 Can you imagine Vodafone launching a Twitter clone? (2)
Me2day is a good service with many cool features (including mobile posting feature that's arguably better than that of Twitter), but the greatest hurdle for them was Korea's market situation where users hardly venture out of the portals to try new web services. The Naver partnership makes sense in that regards - if the service is great but is not getting explored by the many, why not bring the service closer to them? There is no doubt Me2day will see a huge spike in traffic once it's made available to Naver users.
To fend off the age-old criticism that the company is too closed, Naver is making various efforts to cast an "open company" image, and the addition of Me2day, a company that's been a big proponent of open web technologies, will help such efforts.
The deal is valued at KRW 2.2 billion (around US$2 million), which, in my opinion, could have been much higher given Me2day's market reach. But the current economy makes the whole a buyer's market, and Me2day was not venture backed (They've been bootstrapping with only sporadic angel fundings.) It was a rare case of publicly announcing the acquisition amount, which will potentially work to Naver's advantage for future acquisitions. Anyhow, big congratulations to Suman and the rest of the Me2day team.
A Korean microblogging service sees two of its users getting married
Web 2.0 | 2008/03/24 23:45 | Web 2.0 Asia
A couple who met through Me2day, Korea's Twitter, are apparently getting married. Feel lonely? Start Me2day-ing.
Now, here's the fun part. Me2day's community is so closely knit that the CEO of the company himself is working on singing for the wedding. Me2day's CEO, Suman Park, is the person playing the piano in the video embedded below. Kewl.
I call the approach Me2day is taking as a "Delicous way" - i.e. Start with small, core audience; Build something great for them; Let them play with it, build a cult-like community; Have the community grow, slowly but surely.
Me2day, just like Twitter, seems to follow the right path. The only concern I have is, compared to Twitter, Me2day's core users could be too small in numbers because the service is only offered in Korean. In fact, that's the same kind of limitation that works against our company as well. Which is why we should have "globalize or die" mentality.
Well, I don't know if couples using our blog service are getting married anytime soon, but I guess I and my team will have to keep practicing on some musical skills on our spare times - you know, just in case. :)
Now, here's the fun part. Me2day's community is so closely knit that the CEO of the company himself is working on singing for the wedding. Me2day's CEO, Suman Park, is the person playing the piano in the video embedded below. Kewl.
I call the approach Me2day is taking as a "Delicous way" - i.e. Start with small, core audience; Build something great for them; Let them play with it, build a cult-like community; Have the community grow, slowly but surely.
Me2day, just like Twitter, seems to follow the right path. The only concern I have is, compared to Twitter, Me2day's core users could be too small in numbers because the service is only offered in Korean. In fact, that's the same kind of limitation that works against our company as well. Which is why we should have "globalize or die" mentality.
Well, I don't know if couples using our blog service are getting married anytime soon, but I guess I and my team will have to keep practicing on some musical skills on our spare times - you know, just in case. :)
Can you imagine Vodafone developing a Twitter clone, in-house? Probably not. But that's what SK Telecom, the number one wireless service provider in Korea (sort of Vodafone of Korea) seems to be doing, with its new Tossi service.
Tossi is essentially a microblogging service with a bit of social networking, which can be accessed from both web and mobile. So it's not so different from Twitter and Jaiku.
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In Korea, there's a well-known microblogging service called Me2Day. (I covered the service here). And it's commonly known that SK Telecom has been discussing business partnership with Me2Day. But for some reason SK Telecom decided to go its way and develop the service away. Someone at SKT must have said "Hey, a microblogging service? No sweat - we can build something like that in 2 weeks." That's just my speculation, but that's typicaly the way smart people at big companies think.
But the general opinion around the industry is SK Telecom should have just worked the partnership out with Me2Day instead of building its own service. That way, small companies can have an exit strategy and big companies can save time. That's why there are a lot of acquisitions happening in the Valley. Those guys in the Valley aren't exactly buying other smaller companies because they are generous, are they?
We know SK Telecom, like other big telcos, spent billions of dollars on securing the 3G bandwidth and they will do anything that will help them recuperate the investment. Well, if they want to recuperate billions of dollars, they should come up with a billion dollar plan - a plan that's a lot more fundamental and sophisticated than copying a several person company.
