TNM CEO and VentureSquare founder Myung Seung-eun(@ringmedia) opened the event by asking whether search was dead. He said that the history of search was written by both Google and Yahoo, but now we have reached a point of excess content to search through. Pondering over whether it is possible to index and collate today’s massive amounts of data through yesterday’s means, Myung claimed that curation and content curation editors will become more necessary as time goes on in order to provide users with the best and most useful results.
This presentation was followed by one from Park Jeong-ah, a team manager at event host Daum Communications. She talked about some of the changes and future plans happening at Daum. Park said that Daum Communications want to focus on location-based services and searches linked with social networks. She said that ‘collective social search’ is one way to recognize how social networking content develops. Their strategy includes ‘friend-filtered social search similar to “Blekko” which collects Facebook “likes”. Park said that Daum has also developed sound and visual search for its mobile platforms.
The third presentation at VentureSquare’s OpenUp conference was by the CSO of Olaworks, Ryu Jung-hee. The title of the company’s presentation was ‘The Future Web is the Real World – Augmented Reality’. Augmented reality is the combination of computer generated data and the real world. Olaworks plans to use this over a mobile platform and announced that they have a new service coming out soon. Olaworks currently have several mobile apps on the market, Ola Face, Ola Object and Ola Graphics. All of which use augmented reality. Ryu said the future of searching is in “query by context”.
The fourth presentation was by the CEO of Buzzni, Nam Sang-hyeob. Buzzni is focused on searching via people’s opinions, or ‘opinion mining’. He stated that when searching via opinion, trust is important and because its search engine provides data by automatically compiling a range of opinions, users can rely on it. Buzzni currently has two apps which collects the opinions of users. The apps currently cover movies and restaurants which rank a number of characteristics such as service and popularity.
The fifth speaker was Park Wae-jin of Acriil. Acriil are talked about “Affective Computing and Searching”, an area which has not been explored in great depth. You can read this week’s article about Acriil and the technology they are developing here.
Resty was the sixth startup to present, with CEO Lim Jin-seok talking about the marketability and technical aspects of “vertical search”. Resty are a search service focused on travel hotels, otherwise known in Korea as pensions. Lim said that there needed to be a database for pensions in Korea rather than sites which only list pensions which have paid money to them.
WeScan CEO Lee Tae-ho was number seven on the list. WeScan, which was previously introduced (http://www.venturesquare.net/1503) on VentureSquare. WeScan’s presentation was “Recognition is the future of search.” and introduced their vision of how he thinks searching will change in the future. He talked about the various recognition technologies we have seen develop recently including voice technology such as Siri, which is a ‘context aware’ service. WeScan plans to integrate its technology with social networks and predict great development in the global market.
Up next was Enswers, who were recently been bought by operator KT. Team Manager Lee Ho-seong talked about “the new paradigm of video search”. He explained that searching for videos via title, text or tags is changing to using images and videos to search for videos. Enswers are currently running a closed beta of their new revolutionary service called Image2Play. The service sends queries from images displayed on any website accessed, and searches a database of millions of videos to match the image. Image2Play works as both a plug-in or separate code which can be input into a blog. Enswers is also developing a mobile platform for Image2Play.
CEO of Gpon, Choi Jeon-woo presented ninth on the topic of ‘Searching by friends recommendations? Social Search” People have more trust in recommendations from friends and people they know. That’s why through Gpon’s has developed a social search platform. Choi says that there are two types of people who use portals to search for content; those looking for information, and those looking for something entertaining. Gpon helps satisfy demand for both of these users with its social search engine and aggregator by allowing users to easily share things that they want to recommend to their friends.
CC Korea‘s presentation was titled ‘Making and Searching Together, Let’s CC’ and CEO Ah Ah-reum talk about creative commons media in Korea. She described how users can find out whether certain media has a creative commons license but how also how it can be rather irritating to find this information. It can also be hard to search for specifically CCL registered content. This is why CC Korea is developing a search engine so that internet users can easily access CCL content such as images, videos and music.
Finally, the last presentation was by Userstory Lab‘s CEO Jeon Yoon-ho, who spoke about a “real time social filter made by the public” called Tweetmix. Tweetmix uses Twitter as its base, computing and compiling the most popular tweets from around Korea. The platform seperates the most popular tweets by URLs, domains, users and provides real-time information on the current issues happening around the country.
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