Google Googles Korea’s TNC
p2pnet news view | Products:- We’ve been Googled!” – says Chang-Won Kim joyously.
That’s not because he’s suddenly found his site, Web 2.0 Asia, has been indexed.
It’s because it’s been bought.
By Google.
Hi, my name is Chang,” he posted last year, going on:
“(Just for the record, my full name in Korean is Chang-Won Kim.) I’ve been writing this blog since early 2006, mostly as a personal project. The primary goal of this blog is to let people outside of Korea know what’s happening around the Korean IT/web industry, and other interesting web-related things happening in Korea. I was also in Japan for quite a while, on a long onsite project (hence the name of this blog, Web 2.0 Asia, instead of Web 2.0 Korea), but honestly I’m mostly based in Korea for now and therefore most of my stories pertain to the Korean market.”
But today, they say “All good things come in threes’,” he says, continuing
“Firstly, Sara and I had our first baby son, Issac, who is our biggest blessing [congratulations 
]. Secondly, Open Web Asia ’08, the premier web conference that I started as a personal project but has since been a great community effort of more than a dozen web professionals, is looking more and more like a hit conference with about 20 top-notch speakers. (Register away!)
“And, to borrow Steve Jobs’s patent line from his keynote, there’s “one last thing” – our company was acquired by Google.”
He explains »»»
TNC (full name Tatter and Company), Korea’s blog specialty company which I’ve been running as a CEO with my partner Chester (who is the original founder of the company), was acquired by Google Korea on 9/12/2008. For those who are not familiar with us, think of TNC as Korea’s Automattic – a company that develops a cool blogging platform that’s favorited by the nation’s A-list bloggers, and also works closely with the open source community.
Despite the danger of sounding too self-important, I would say our company was a fairly good acquisition target for Google. First, we had a killer product: Our previous work, Tistory blog service (now property of Daum as we sold the service to the Korea’s #2 portal), made to the top 10 Korean web destination in less than a year from launch, showing some 30,000% growth over the initial 8 months. While other blog services seem to be exploringthe idea of integrating social networks with blogs only lately, our new blog service Textcube (link in Korean) had already implemented the feature much earlier. Secondly, we have great engineering talents. Many of our software engineers hail from the nation’s leading comp sci programs, such as KAIST.
What’s in it for Google?
“We will commit ourselves to increasing Google’s market share in Korea,” says Chang, stating:
“Of course, Google isn’t entitled with God-given right to become #1 in every region it operates in, just because it’s Google. [That'll be news to Google. ]
“I think the Korean web industry needs a player that can, as a balancing force, provide more options to the users and help create a more open web,” he says. “Well, who can be that player? How about giving a chance to a company that sincerely strives to be ‘not evil’ despite its sheer bigness?”
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