1415T2g1 South Korea/Project Teams/Team 7/Companies
South Korea
| About Us | Our Companies | Our Reflection |
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Contents
MangoPlate is a personalized restaurant discovery service located in South Korea and was launched in October 2013. The service was originally created to help foreigners in Korea find good food but it has found its way into the hearts of local tech-savvy foodies. In October 2014, MangoPlate secured an undisclosed investment amount from Softbank Ventures. A few months down in December 2014, MangoPlate also received a $600k investment from SparkLabs Global. The application is gaining popularity in South Korea and the founders are also looking at the possibility of expansion of the service into other countries.
About The Founders
MangoPlate was founded by Mr. Bernard Kim, Mr. Danny Ryu, Mr. Michael Roh, and Mr. Joon Oh. Prior to starting up MangoPlate, they worked in reputable companies like Naver, Samsung Electronics Co., Apple, and Kakao.
Vision & Mission
Vision: To become the market leader for restaurant recommendations
Mission: To provide users with trusted restaurant recommdations
The MangoPlate Application
A prototype was released in April 2013 and the application was officially launched in October 2013. The application is available on Google Play and iTunes store as well as on their website www.mangoplate.com.
Motivation
Interacting with expats led them to realize that finding restaurants with good food as a foreigner was a difficult task.
Also, the founders observed the need for a reliable platform which could distinguish genuine food reviews from commissioned reviews.
Hence, the founders decided to build an application to help foreigners find good restaurants recommended by genuine sources.
Unique Selling Point (USP)
There are many websites that recommended places to visit. However, the authenticity and reliability of these reviews and recommendations are questionable. Sometimes, bloggers will offer good reviews to promote restaurants in exchange for payment. Also, blogs are all over the internet and this makes finding suitable restaurants similar to finding a needle in a haystack. Hence, MangoPlate was created to simplify the review process, make recommendations more reliable and make searching for suitable restaurants much easier for end users.
MangoPlate markets itself with this slogan: “Discover Restaurants Through Trusted People”. MangoPlate's differentiating factor from other restaurant discovery applications is in its dedication to provide recommendations based on trusted reviews. With more than 200,000 restaurants in the database, the search algorithm takes into account each user’s food preferences and personal profile to recommend restaurants that best suit the user. The application also leverages on information from the user’s social networks to customize recommendations and this simulates the idea of personally asking trusted sources for recommendations. In addition, MangoPlate connects users with the same taste preferences to improve the recommendation algorithm. To maintain the accuracy of recommendations, MangoPlate has vowed not to support sponsored posts.
Collaborations
In an effort to expand their user base to tourists and foreigners living in South Korea, MangoPlate and Flitto (a crowd-sourcing translation platform) has partnered for a marketing campaign. From 15 Dec 2014, in exchange for exposure for on Mango Plate’s media platform, Flitto will provide Korean to English translations for restaurant information on Mango Plate’s restaurants which were previously offered only in Korean.
Learning Points
<to be updated>
References
http://annals.yonsei.ac.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=1371
http://www.slideshare.net/VentureSquare/mango-plate-sparklabs-vfinal
http://en.besuccess.com/2014/10/23/softbank-ventures-has-invested-to-connect-korean-foodies-to-the-restaurants-they-crave/
http://en.besuccess.com/2014/05/02/food-delivery-app-war-in-korea-heats-up-yogiyo-vs-baedari-minjok/
http://en.besuccess.com/2014/07/14/the-korean-food-delivery-marketing-industries-are-going-digital-present-huge-growth-opportunity-for-innovators/
http://www.techforkorea.com/2014/10/26/mango-plate-secures-investment/
https://www.techinasia.com/sparklabs-global-invests-600k-koreas-mangoplate/
http://blogs.wsj.com/korearealtime/2013/09/30/two-foodies-make-startup-leap-with-mangoplate-restaurant-app/
http://www.techforkorea.com/2015/01/02/flitto-and-mango-plate-collaborate-to-target-new-users/
