1415T2g1 South Korea/Reflection/day5
South Korea
| Day 2 |
Contents
Day 5: Reflections
Seoul Topis
Autionary
Korbit
The journey in South Korea has been great and enriching. After listening to many people, I realize that it is not easy to start a company. However, I am even more driven right now to start my own company and will continue to refine my own idea. I will take the approach at which I will take a normal office work and prepare for my own company on my free time. This approach will allow me to learn from others and build my idea at the same time.
In our last day of company visit, we visited Seoul TOPIS, Auctionary and Korbit. From the visit to Seoul TOPIS, which controls Seoul transportation system, shared us about brief history and I have chance to see some of the advanced traffic monitoring and disaster alert systems. After that, we visited Auctionary and CEO of the company shared us about his personal finding with language translation industry pain point and wanted to do a platform that allows customers meet directly with freelance translators. He gave us important highlights with his first idea of the product failure with not proper market analysis in the current industry. He quickly learned from the mistake and change his company direction. I learnt from that meeting with CEO, having a concrete business idea and proper market analysis help to reduce the chance of failure when the product/service is launched. As the last visit of company visit, we visited to Korbit which is a leading Bitcoin exchange in Korea. Korbit offers the service of exchanging between Bitcoin and Korea Won (vice vasa). CEO of Korbit, Mr. Tony, shared us about the detailed concept of Bitcoin and how he has started this business. From the visit, I learnt that, it is important to come up quickly a minimum viable product so that it allows the company to go into the market to have better advantage. Also, knowing to identify exactly, which part of bottleneck or lacking that your company trying to solve to is equally important in starting a startup company.
Seoul Topis
At Seoul Topis, they introduced a lot of transport related technology. The thing that impressed me is the "ezlink" card for taxi. Although we can also use credit/nets card to pay for our taxi fee, it feels different by using the ezlink card. To me, it's amazing because if Singapore implemented this, I will be able to pay all travel related money just by a single card. They also have the secure taxi service which I felt that it's really helpful. That's because our parents will be able to know when we board the taxi and is able to fetch us at the door/void deck when we are reaching. In this way, they will be less worried for us especially when we return home late.
Another learning point is how they arrange their buses. They make use of colors such as blue bus are for city bus, green bus is to connect the subway. The bus number is also based on the area that they travel. By splitting Korea into parts, a bus 271 will start from area 2, going pass area 7 and ending at area 1. All this indicator are useful because we will be able to know which bus is going to which area. And this is done just by looking at the color and number without looking at the bus directory.
Auctionory
It is important to do market research. Auctionory failed their first product because they did not do a good market research. In order to determine if the translator is good, they implemented a function whereby their client will put up a sample paragraph and the interested translator will have to translate them. However, Auctionory failed to realised that the reason their client find them is because they are unable to read the source/target text. It also means that they are unable to understand either of the text hence unable to determine which translator is better.
I also learnt that we should start small. Just like the Facebook founder who started off in his room with his laptop. It don't need to be a 24hr work, instead we should earn some money through other means as we will not be able to earn much at the starting part of start-up. Although looking for a partner have disadvantage such as lack of trust, it is still good to have 1 so that we can discuss and share the workload.
Korbit
At the visit to Korbit, I learnt more about BitCoin. From him, I learnt that when someone must organized and record the transaction. Example if Charlie fulfilled all the requirements, then he will earn more BitCoin. The requirement is to have a digital fingerprint that start with 00000. Arbitrary number can be added to the initial number to become 00000 at the front. The lesser the number the better.
Since the goal is to have the longest BitCoin block, hackers will find it hard to hack. Because the number will be different thus unable to create a long chain.
The technology in Korea is so advanced. I was amazed at how Seoul TOPIS had such advanced technology that allows for Big Data Analytics. Just imagining the amount of data input to plot the map of traffic flow was mind-blowing. The system even allowed for predictive analysis to analyse the congestion levels when a particular road is blocked. In Singapore, even the prediction systems available for bus timings aren’t accurate at all.
The founder of Auctionary shared with us his failures and success stories. What I made out of it is the fact that a business idea needs to be thought out well. Market research is the most basic step that must be done thoroughly.
The inspiration I got from Korbit was the fact that the founder took 20 days to code from scratch and launched Korbit itself. Although he failed his first few startups, we can learn from the spirit of entrepreneurship and to pick ourselves up after failing.
