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