The second beGLBOAL in Silicon Valley, September 12th, clearly demonstrated that Korean entrepreneurship has come a long way in the last 12 months. Here we take a look at two of the companies that showcased at the event which again gathered some of Silicon Valley's top investors and entreperneurs to discuss global entrepreneurship and investing. Ten carefully selected Korean startups also showcased, hopeing to attract the attention of US investors, partners and customers.
Keukey
Classmates turned business partners developed this unique application that utilizes pattern-recognition algorithms to recognize phone lingo and make non-dictionary-based corrections. Normally, corrections are done via built in dictionaries but Keukey eliminates that. With their solution you need not interupt your train of thought as you type, or have to go back with your cursor. Instead, just type corrections at the end and swipe them into place. This startup is planning to redesign how we interact with typos.
Keukey wants to get rid of all the small and irritating actions we face while typing, like deleting and repositioning the cursor. With Keukey, if a user notices a typo in the text while still writing, there is no need to move the cursor back over it. You can correct a typo by simply typing the right word in the present cursor position and swiping down. Instead of the backspace or the terrible cursor, just swipe your bad spelling skills away.
Auto-completion and prediction services are not fail-safe and most previous technologies focus on preventing typos. "We have a different solution: There are no backspaces and we don't have a language model, because typos are just miss-typed word," explained Sanghee Zo, one of teh founders. "keukey provides a reasonable way to correct typos. With keukey there are no interruptions to typing. Users keep typing until the end of the sentence, then correct typos later," he went on.
Though it has not launched yet, the application supports eleven languages and is looking forward to getting into the android market. Keukey is also planning to promote this solution to mobile service platform providers too which provide mainly text posting.
Vingle
Building an international playground for the adult who is a child at heart are the co-Founders of Vingle. Their first company, Viki, was acquired last year and they decided to create a new community platform for sharing and interacting with ALL kinds of contents, with passionate, like-minded people. Using a Vingle button you can share your favorite websites with the world. The set up of the website is like a community flipboard. When you click the Vingle button you are adding a card to a category for other people to view.
Vingle is an online avenue for creating positive expression for things people are passionate about. It solves the problem of social media and content fatigue. Vingle's greatest asset is the way it connects. Instead of connecting people to people, Vingle connects people to interests, and people through interests. It is a new way to interact around content that matches user interests. Not only this but Vingle's content ecosystem solves a problem for content creators and content consumers. Normally, content creators have problems creating an audience and consumers can't find content. However, through its 3,000+ interest communities, users get content tailored for their interest and publishers can access and pre-curated audience of 1000s immediately. currently Vingle has over 3,000 interest-based communities connecting over 2.3M monthly active users. The service boasts over 100M monthly page views.
Vingle is not only a novel answer to online communities, but its organic reach is perfect for monetization. Imagine a user who is browsing in the men's fashion community is there because he has a high interest in that contents. If Vingle provided a means of purchase, this would enhance his experience. Therefore, it has strong revenue potential in the form of highly targeted ad and sponsored content, e-commerce opportunities, and API partnerships
Vingle has grown quickly in the Korean market, and is now making a strong push to expand globally. With an initial foothold already in English markets (without any marketing efforts to date), Vingle is now actively seeking overseas investment to build out a US team.
