With Vine and Instagram dominating the image and video sharing market, is there enough room for another player? Korean startup AHIKU thinks their app Bb has a chance. But with a plethora of photo and video apps coming out of Asia, Ahiku is facing a tough battle to make a stand in the market. However, with a small team and low overheads combined with existing partnerships with companies such as KT, STP and CJ, Ahiku may be on the path to success.

Bb is an image app that transforms a captured series of photos into seamless video-like images, instantly. A series of still photos are captured on a mobile device and immediately converted into a motion image, which can be stored or shared on SNS. AHIKU are actively looking to market their product outside Korea after the launch of their service in July 2013 and the company is already enjoying profitability having monetized their patented video engine, by selling it to large Korean corporations. The target users for their app are young women, aged 19~29, as the app changes dull photos into gorgeous portraits, a hot feature among this target. A free version is available with more advanced functionality and filters available through a paid version.

Going global
AHIKU recently accompanied beSUCCESS to Singapore as one of ten Korean startups that won the chance through the ‘K-APP Global Hub Program’ to go to Singapore for an intensive week of seminars, business matching and networking. “We wanted to know about the overall atmosphere and culture of SE Asia in Singapore since it is known as the centre of the SE Asian market”, Naru Kim, CEO of Ahiku said. “We've been planning to enter into the Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam markets. These are markets that are seeing rapid adoption of smartphones and apps such as Instagram and Vine aren’t established there yet. Our experience in Singapore was a good chance to reconfirm the importance of dominating the market from the start. Also in order to understand the market, we realised that we must visit the country and meet our target in person”, she went on to say.

More about this article series
The KAPP article series will cover each of the 20 startups that took part in the KAPP Global Hub Program, which took Korean startups to two global startuphubs, and is followed with a series of targeted workshops to ensure that the relationships and experience gained during the overseas trips was fully leveraged. 10 startups went to Singapore to discover the South East Asian markets, build partner relationships and gain investment for global growth. The other 10 companies went to Israel to engage with, and learn from, experts in one of the World’s most prolific high-tech centres.

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