1314T2g1 South Korea/Participant Information/Teo Jie Ting/DuringTrip

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Jeremy's Reflection

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Jieting's Reflection

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Day 0 was spent doing last minute preparations and packing - there was no need for us (teams in-charge of the Japanese companies) to bring any blazers and formals anymore as the companies do not require us to be in it. To quote what nozomi-san said, we just have to "be ourselves". What a nice lady she is! :)

Met up with a group of friends for a light dinner at the airport before meeting the rest of the TSM family at the airport at 1000pm. Thank you to Alvin, Geoffrey and Ian for coming down specially to send us (Jeremy, Xiangrui & me) off for our TSM trip! Here's a group photo with them before we check-in.

Of course, the TSM family has to take a group photo together before we fly off for 10 days! :D

I was lucky to be one of the four to get a window seat on the airplane!

Here's the benefit of sitting by the window seat

Meals on board the airplane was nice. I had cheese omelette with tomatoes and sausages. I really loved the omelette!

We touched down at approximately 7.20am, and we are all ready for our first day of TSM trip!

Company Visit

Twinworld

Our first company visit for Korea - Twinworld. Twinworld is a company, incubated by Korea' Smart Content Centre (SCC), that collects how users associates words in mind and provide big data analysis on these associations. Currently, Twinworld has a few of it’s own API for third parties to use their system. We were very lucky to have Twinwrold's founder, Mr Kono KIm to share about Twinworld with us.

Some of the API shared by Mr Kim was really interesting. For example, Twinworld had an API (Topic Tagging API) which allows users to type out a sentence, or a few words, and the API would be able to gather the keywords and the suggest the possible relevant topic based on what the user inputted. One example would be when the user keys in the following words "chair, table, students, house”, the API would return a list of possible topics like school, which can be highly relevant or not.

I feel that this is a very interesting API service which would be useful in many industries, especially that of the e-commerce or the PR department of various companies. Companies that are involved in the e-commerce would be able to use the topic tagging API to help enhance the search function for users where after various search results done by the same users, the website would be able to predict the category of product which the particular user would be interested in. Also, similar to PR departments in the companies, companies would be able to make use of the topic tagging API to group the number of positive, neutral and negative comments / feedbacks and hence, improving their businesses.

After listening to Mr Kim’s sharing, I was rather curious about how the Topic Tagging API works. However, as it was a secret for Twinworld, they were unable to share much with us. As i’ve taken Data Mining, i believe that Mr Kim has done an association analysis on what the user input. As such, i feel that as Twinworld grows and continue to gain in more data, Twinworld’s Topic Tagging API would be able for return with a list of more relevant topic.

Mr Kim also mentions that the Topic Tagging API choose to ignore the function words (e.g. “The”, “or”, “and” etc) and focus on the context words in the user’s input instead. However, I feel that such an approach is tricky in some aspects which values some function words.

Let’s take a look at some sample: Input: this is not a pretty dress.

As the topic tagging API would ignore function words, the API may only capture “a pretty dress” as the keywords, which may result in a very different association compared to “this is not a pretty dress”. As such, i believe that if Twinworld is to expand the API, they can look into some textual analysis algorithms to improve the accuracy of the associations.

Lasso

We were very lucky to have the founder of Lasso to give us a surprise presentation! The founder of Lasso identifies a unique phenomena faced in Korea where users go into shopping malls to look for stuff they are interested to purchase. However, they would not make the purchase for the item at the shopping malls. Instead, users would go online to purchase these stuff. This phenomena is identified as the cross-over shopping. As there are no boundaries to offline shopping as compared to online shopping, users usually find it hard to be armed with sufficient knowledge about the price of the product. As such, Lasso developed an application which allow users to make reservation for a product they’re interested in. When the price of the product goes down, the application will notify the user and it can even advice the users when is the right time to make their purchase.

I feel that this is quite a useful application as humans are always more inclined to paying less for the product they want. As such, this application would be very useful in many countries, especially Singapore.

We had the honour to tour around Lasso’s office too and their office, though small, has a really awesome view. How i wish i could work in such an environment!

SCC

SCC is the incubating company behind the above two companies mentioned. SCC is a government funded incubator which offers support for smart content startups in Korea.

One interesting thing about SCC is that they do not have any entity in the startups they incubated. I feel that this is rather different from what we have in Singapore as there are different schemes for funding / support for startups. Also, SCC offers incubation program for 2 years, which seems to be rather different from what Singapore has. As my FYP has been offered incubation from IIE and external parties, SCC programs sound like a much better option as it would be a lesser load on the startup companies’ shoulders as extensive support (e.g. testing devices, servers, consultation etc) has been provided for free for 2 years. Hence, i feel that this may be a reason why Korea’s startup environment has been growing, where there are strong support for their operations from the government and their incubator.

KBS

After lunch, we proceed to KBS for our 4th visit for the day. The lady who hosted us was very nice and welcoming.

We toured around KBS and were being brought to different sets, the props room, news reporting department and even to a live recording! The lady had really gone through great effort to help us get approval for our tours and to bring us around (i heard that we were the one and only student group that were allowed to enter a live recording and many other places which have restricted access to only the staff).

While touring around, we were also giving explanations and descriptions about the recordings that KBS does. We were all shocked when they say that a recording for an hour long show would usually take up to 4-6hrs of recording. Wow!

Everyone had a chance to sit at the news anchor chair and experience the feeling of broadcasting news for the first time!

Conclusion

The first day of TSM was really an eye-opener as we visited companies from a variation of industries. Also, the bonds between everyone in the TSM family starts to get stronger as the time past by and I can’t wait for the second day to commence!

Company Visit

Idea Above

As today is the Labor Day, we had only one company visit - Idea Above. Firstly, we are really grateful for the team from Idea Above who took time out and meet us despite it being a public holiday in Korea. Thank you!

Before arriving in Singapore, we met the founder and two other interns during our pre-trip briefing. Idea Above is the company behind listr.fm. Listr.fm is a social music player application (somewhat like Spotify) which provide an easier way for sharing and recommending of music among friends. Not only that, there are commenting function implemented right in the application, which opens up another market for users who are in a band and need a way to discuss about the music to choose etc.

Ian, the founder, gave us a really thorough analysis about the market listr.fm is in and shared some of the difficulties faced during his journey in setting up listr.fm. I felt that listr.fm, though nothing new, has a really great potential as Ian and his team is looking at providing analysis on how music are being shared among people and hence, identifying the “ambassador” among the users. By doing so, listr.fm would be able to provide critical information to the label companies in terms of when there’s a new music release by a particular artists, which “ambassador” to push the music to so that they would be the one spreading it to their circle of friends. This would then be another form of marketing and outreach for the label companies asides from the traditional marketing means.

One interesting point that Ian brought up was that he strongly believes that there is no need for a revenue model as, “when there’s sufficient users, you will naturally have a revenue model”. This is quite a new point that i’ve came across and felt that it was a really true point. Like what my FYP mentor, Mr Robert Chew, always mention, we do not have to worry about how to get money, instead we should worry about how to get users first.

We were also given a tour around the office and the ambience of the office is really great!

Conclusion

After 2 days of company visit, i realised that the founders of the startup are always very passionate about their application and they believed strongly in it. I feel that this is a very important point, especially for the founding team, as they would be the one who set the tone in the company culture. Also, the founding team always know the market they’re targeting at like the back of their hands, which i believe may be lacking in my FYP team once in a while.

Ian also shared with us a story about one of his co-founder who had a strong passion for music and was a band player. One day he got paralysed and couldn’t move use his right hand anymore. However, he never gave up his passion and had been coding out listr.fm with only his left hand. This story really made me think hard about the obstacles and failures faced by my own team once in awhile. From the story shared by Ian, i really felt that one should stand firm on their own passion and not give up easily with the obstacles faced.

Company Visit

VCNC

VCNC is a startup company behind the application, between. Between is a mobile application aim at providing a private channel for couples to share their memories together. The idea is rather similar with a Singapore-based mobile application, LoveByte. However, one interesting feature that i foresee would be of great use for couples would be the shared calendar. With a shared calendar, couples are able to view each other’s schedule easily and hence making the planning of meet ups much more easier.

Although we did not have the founder to present to us, we had a really nice co-founder, Edward, who’s really nice and knows exactly how to answer questions and explaining the plans of VCNC and between clearly and firmly.