Acquisitions, Acquisitions: Daum And Kakao Acquires Dialoid and Sunnyloft. What’s Next?

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2013년 02월 19일 Sue J. Hur

Daum communications and Kakao will be making a series of startups acquisitions from now on. This is to increase their competitive edge in terms of mobile services.

Is the competition between getting even more fierce? These companies have been eyeing out the mobile integration platforms and made (and will be making) necessary steps via acquisition of major Korean startups. Recently, Daum acquired the speech recognition technology company, Dialoid, and Kakao acquired the SNS company, Sunnyloft (This directly competes with Naver's voice recognition technology such as `Link` and the SNS subgroup `Band`).

Let me explain to you what Dialoid is. Dialoid was established in Febraury 2012 and is made up of key figures in the voice search and recognition technology and has launched the Dialoid app that sends written messages from recognizing words and phrases that are delivered via human voice. Daum has been delivering voice recognition search services since 2010 with the help of the Korean Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) with the existing keyword database, they will be expanding the voice recognition services further with the use of Dialoid.

As for Sunnyloft - Sunnyloft was established by the CEO, Jung Joo-Hwan who has previous experience in major companies such as SK Communications and NexR and other key figures from the cloud, large-scale search management and mobile advertisement industries. Sunnyloft has launched the SNS app ‘Episode’ that is similar to Naver’s Band. It has features such as ‘Shout’ which sends bigger fonts in messages to get the attention in chats, and automatic alarm system that is activated once a friend visits a restaurant or a café nearby. It achieved 15,000+ downloads from 121 countries and the data gathered will be used to further improve the development of Kakao services.

To summarize, people like buying from people they trust. If you have a platform that they constantly turn to for helpful content and services, people are likely to turn loyal to that platform. However, Daum and Kakao are not the only players. So what are the implications of their acquisition to other major Korean and overseas companies? Google's acquisition has slowed down a bit last year, but it is expected to pick up the pace again this year.

All of this poses two major issues - read more in the articles to follow here.)

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