Weekly VentureSquare Stories are summaries of some of the week’s top posts relating to the Korean startup and venture Industry.
SoftBank Ventures Invests in Mobile Survey Service ID Incu
CEO of SoftBank Ventures Korea, Moon Gyuhak revealed on the 20th of March that they would be investing 1.5 billion won along with Stone Bridge Capital into ID Incu, makers of the fast mobile survey service “OpenSurvey”.
In December last year after the service was released, the company had already collected the opinions of tens of thousands of users and is showing a rapid growth with requests from outlets like the SBS 8 o’clock news. Compared to other research services OpenSurvey is much cheaper — a mere one tenth of the price. In addition, companies are able to specify desired demographics such gender age, area etc. for more accurate results.
Head of Investments at SoftBank Venture Ui Hyeonjong said,
“After interviewing news outlets, conglomerates and other companies, it was easy to see that there is a very big demand for reliable survey services that are quick and cheap.I think that OpenSurvey is an innovative service which in the long to mid-term could change the way that decisions are made.”
CEO of ID Incu, Kelvin Kim talked about what will come out of the recent investment.
“OpenSurvey required the market to be monitored, but because even smaller
businesses or students writing reports who hesitated previously because
of high prices can easily use the service, we look forward to seeing more
growth. With this latest investment we plan to expand our data
collection channels and consider how better decisions can be made through
this.”
Sharing Time with Womb
Ejang from CO-Up/Share interviews those behind a new unique project named “Womb”.
Q.Tell us briefly about this project.
We plan to construct an online time sharing “womb” platform. This is taking the intangible concept of time and attaching value to it. Creating a system so that the concept of time becomes something more physical.
Q. How did the project start?
People donate their time and skills through volunteer work but only get a a psychological reward for doing such work. To help maintain and cultivate these type on contributions, we felt that there needed to be some more physical value attached to time. Being able to share and recognize time was the root of this project. It will be an online Time Bank designed so anyone can join easily, share their time and be matched with an activity.
Q. What problems do you intend to solve through this project?
The cooperative sharing of time becomes possible. Womb will be a very human network and an online marketplace for time where users can meet up with others, one on one, to share it together. Womb will help establish new relationships on various levels and through the introduction of the service will create trust in the community. It will create an active sharing economy between members and become a platform where members can also trust each other.
Q. What are some of the challenges that you face in the project?
When designing a web platform, communication between planners and web designers isn’t easy. We want to begin a beta service but how we can get people who are offline to move to the online world is the biggest problem to solve. Because of this, we think that it might take a bit longer than we initially thought but hope that we can release something within the next three months.
For more of an explanation on this unique and upcoming service aimed at helping communities check out the teaser web page here.
Korea’s Leading Startup OpenIR and Entrepreneur Conference
- Date: May 31st (Thursday)
- Venue: Plaza Hotel, Jung-gu, Seoul
- Host: Maekyung Media Group
- Support: KTOA, VentureSquare
- Sponsors: KT, SKT, LGU+
Featuring:
- IT companies other than mobile-based will be included
- Startups which are up to five years old can apply
- Introduction of a 60 second elevator pitch
- Top Seven Startups to take part in an Upcoming Camp Event