1415T2g1 South Korea/Project Teams/Team 5/Companies/TextAt
IS427: Technopreneurship Study Mission South korea
| About Us | Our Companies | Our Reflection |
| Date | Action |
|---|---|
| 06 Feb 2015 | Emailed CEO |
| 21 Feb 2015 | CEO Replied stating he is interested in knowing more |
Scatter Lab Inc.
| About Scatter Lab |
Scatter Lab Inc. was founded in 2011 by CEO Kim Jongyoun. The company's focus is to make sense of Chat Data from our messaging applications. Since it was founded, Scatter Lab had garnered investments from Korea Venture Investment Corp. Till date, the company had launched 2 mobile applications. Both of which is aimed at making sense of text data to improve romantic relationships.
Scatter Lab is gradually expanding towards Japan and have plans to expand to US and China in the future.
| Scatter Lab's products/services |
| TEXTAT - "Emotion analysis service based on mobile chatting data." | |
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TEXTAT was an university project during Jongyoun's last semester. After the project, he thought it could be an interesting business. So he called his high-school friends who were also developers and started working on TEXTAT.
After 2 years of struggling to develop the analysis model, TEXTAT was officially launched in 2013. It is a mobile application that makes use of Chat Data from KakaoTalk and Line. Users answer a few background questions and then upload a thread of messages into the TEXTAT system to find out if they can add “benefits” to their friend-status. The team behind this app analyzed 1.2 billion text messages (including stickers and emoticons) and are confident that their system can accurately predict the emotional patterns underlying the conversation. |
| User's push data into TEXTAT and it outputs graphs and reports on his/her current status with the target (guy/girl). Users can pay more for a more thorough report. |  |
| Ginger - "A.I. that understands your relationship" |  | |
| Ginger, recently launched in 2015, is the latest application Scatter Lab has to offer. If you have used Google Now or know what it is, Ginger is basically the relationship version of it. Except that it is yet another mobile application.
Ginger does real-time analysis using chat data from Between. Users log in with their Between ID and Ginger will start analysing your chat data. It starts recording metadata (e.g. keywords, location, topics, reply time, message length, etc.) and creates cards based on the metadata. At the end, Ginger pushes the cards to the users. | ||
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The card feature analyzes your texts, takes note of what the user's partner says and organise it as cards. This makes it easy for users to read and they'll be notified via push notification. |
| The Founders |
CEO Jongyoun, Kim
“There is no better time in Korea’s history than now to make an impact and be an entrepreneur.” - Jongyoun, Kim, CEO Scatter Lab Inc.
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Jongyoun graduated from Yonsei University in 2011 with an MBA and second major in Sociology. He had a particular interest for mathematical sociology. During College that he became interested in chat data. Long story short, he wanted to know how a particular girl felt about him and he felt that he could utilise the text data to pick up signals in a more scientific manner.
By the time this project of his manage to attract a government grant, he had to decide between a conglomerate job and the startup. The project garnered support within KakaoTalk and what was a pet project gradually grew towards the formation of Scatter Lab's first product, TEXTAT. Prior to founding Scatter Lab, Jongyoun's experience include:
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| Facebook |
| Other Founders | Role | Short description |
|---|---|---|
 |
CTO | He was a server developer from Daum Communications (now merged with Kakao) and have had experience working on big data server project such as mail and messenger. Hence, Jongyoun believed he was a good fit to the team. |
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Developer | High-school friend who does development |
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Developer | High-school friend who does development |
| Mission & Vision |
Mission : To understand what "love" is through the use of text analytics and the application of statistics, linguistics, psychology, and machine learning technology.
Vision : To make more people around the world happy
| Learning Points |
- Hobby-turned-Business : How does it develop from here? Will it eventually become a global service?
- There is a limit to how much you can develop on a hobby. How to continue making a business out of your hobby is what makes your product different.
- Learn to read the environment : What advice would you give given the current flux of startups in Korea?
- Making use full use of resource and opportunities given at the right time.
- Business perspective : Making use of otherwise difficult to understand data. What would you like to see chat data being used for other than “to understand love”?
- There are many ways to do text analysis. Algorithms developed are based on what kind of information you want to gather from the data. Also, development of such algorithms takes many rounds of testing before a successful launch of the application. Hence, it is important to know what the market wants.
References
TechinAsia: 19 of the hottest South Korean startups came to Tokyo looking for business partners – here’s our top five favorites
beSUCCESS: Korea’s Changing Landscape for Entrepreneurs
The Huffington Post: Gimme The Green Light! Sseomnam sseomnyeo katok analysis 'text at' Kim Jong-yun interview
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