Jerene WONG Pei Ling Trip

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Day 1

All of us have been planning, preparing and really excited for this technopreneurship study mission. The start-up companies in South Korea and Tokyo have a lot to offer and we are looking forward to this enriching learning experience. After touching down at Incheon Airport, we made our way to our first destination, Twinword, located at G Square.

Twinword
This company has been around for around two years, founded by Kono. Kim. Basically, their business approach is to analyse big data collected and understand human computer interaction. The objective is to understand how people associate various words. For instance, key words such as student, chairs, board, people will associate to the theme school. The interesting thing is how they come up with such an algorithm to rank the various key words and associate it to things people tend to relate to.

Smart Content Center
This organisation is set up to support smart content-related companies of Korea with high potentials to become global entrepreneurs, funded by the government. In Korea, the government is very supportive of start-up companies. In comparison to the start-up scene in Singapore, in my opinion, there are a lot of restrictions and certain schemes would expect a certain percentage of equity which might discourage people to go ahead to go for it. Unlike in Korea, this Smart Content Center has an incubation program to provide free space and 50% of all the utility cost for a maximum duration of 2 years. In other words, it lightens the burden of start-up firms and help to collaborate with other related institution in the market.

Lasso
With the increasing trend in mobile market in Korea, the founder identified a gap from the browse product online to buy products offline stage. They simply produce web service to bridge the gap identified. I see a lot of potential in this market. Indeed, there is an increasing trend in mobile market and the e-commerce scene. As technology becomes more advanced, people have abandoned traditional way of doing things such as visiting a brick and mortar store to ask a sales person about a product.

As Twinword and Lasso are part of Smart Content Center, they are all located in the same building. Hence, they brought us around for an office tour. We got to see the 3D machines and understand how the models were made, which I find it pretty interesting. Knowing that 3D printing is one of the latest trends forecasted by Garter and did research on it a few months back, I finally get to see how it is being made and understand about it better. Visiting such start-up companies let me see a different perspective of companies in the aspects of company culture. We can say that it is very open to encourage people to give wild ideas openly.

KBS
Our team is very privileged to have the opportunity to visit the various studios in KBS and understand certain standard protocols of doing things. I find it really amazing and tedious for the staff to prepare for a television broadcast. It is so much tougher as what we expected it to be.

Overall, the first day of our study mission has been amazing. I am looking forward to day 2 and beyond to explore on the start-up scenes in the respective two countries.

Day 2

On our second day, which is also Labour day, we visited one company hosted by Freda and Si Hui. Previously, we met the CEO and two interns in Singapore on briefing day, which gave us an overview of the service they provided.

Ideabove Inc. This start-up company came up with Listr.fm, a global social music network to provide an easy way to share and recommend with friends. As we all know, over the past century, technology is becoming more advanced and people no longer purchase CDs, they just want to download songs off the web. Apart from that, studies have found that people are most satisfied with music discovery when they got personal recommendations from friends. Furthermore, people always tend to use several platforms and sites to search for songs and/or videos, which posed as a problem faced by people in the market. With that being said, this is where Listr.fm stepped in to resolve this market problem. I find it an interesting concept. Over the past one year, I have been using a similar platform, Spotify. However, this platform is targeted at songs instead of videos. For Listr.fm, they are targeting at the Southeast Asia Market first, before moving on to Western countries. However, I pondered over how they going to reach out to such diverse markets with users of different cultures, needs and wants. However, out of my curiosity, I asked one of the team members to find out more about their business strategy in this aspect. As of now, they do not have any different strategies in reaching out to the two diverse markets.

From the company visits thus far, I have realised that the entrepeneurs are very passionate of what they are doing and willing to take the risk. Most importantly, they need to identify a problem in the market, be clear who they are targeting and develop strategies accordingly to reach out to them.

After our company visit, we went to Sicheon for shopping and tour around the area. We head over to Ewha Women's University. The landscape really caught my attention. After an afternoon of shopping, we went to watch Jump show. One word to describe the show-Awesome as it is hilarious and very entertaining. It is very different from the usual play I watched in Singapore.