The Korea startups which are trying to going into Silicon Valley are increasing.Why are they going into Silicon Valley directly? There are three reasons for which these startups are headed to Silicon Valley in USA, not to Teheran Valley in Korea.
The first reason is financial one.Finding venture capital is easier in
Silicon Valley than in Korea.The second reason is that there are
more opportunity in mobile service,in particular iphone,than they stayed in Korea.
A various SNSs such as Twitter,Facebook,Myspace.com in USA can also give
more business opprtunities to these startups.
◆Rush to USA.
Do you know ‘Paprica Lab’? Paprika Lab is
a developer and publisher of game and learning software.Founded by John
S. Kim, Paprika Lab claims to become the world’s best social
web game and mobile game aggregator.Their first outcome will be uncovered
by the end of this year.
‘Wetoku’ is doing
business out of Korea,focusing on Silicon Valley as well.Wetoku is a
new web service that open up a new arena of interview.They
call it interview 2.0.Wetoku makes doing an interview as easy as
filling out some basic info,creating an interview session, and sending the
created interview session’s URL to the target interviewee.Wetoku have a plan
to begin its initial service in USA within this yaer.
Qbox,social music service,launched its English service 4th June 2008.Qbox indexes the music on MySpace,YouTube and Bebo and empowers users to search,organize,and listen to the entire catalog of music available through a single point of access.Ian Kwon,a founder of Qbox,originally established Qbox.com(Korean Version) early 2006,but quit Korean Service to move out to Silicon Valley 2007.Qbox expects its English version 2.0 next month.
Spotengine is web and mobile startup company.Its main service is Stix.Spotengine was founded by two teenagers:Todd Oh,Korean high school student and Travis Cunningham, U.S. teenager.Spotengine is located at the California,USA,and get ready to launch its first mobile LBS service within 3Q.
SundayToz is a social games startup,and
they are just about to unveil an Role Playing Game(RPG) on
Facebook.The concept of their service is self made RPG,or so called
user generated RPG.Sundaytoz is also prepared to go into silicon Valley
on long term base.
◆Get a financial opportunity
As
like other venture companies,the startups mentioned above are short of money.Each
of them is full of idea,but doesn't have enough money.In Kroea,their
idea had not appealed to venture capitals and angel investors.Actually only
a few venture capitals which was willing to invest web 2.0
startups remained in Korea since 2001,internet bubble.
Korean
startups regard Silicon Valley as different situation.They hope to find out
venture capital or angel investors at Silicon Valley.Of course,it's not easy
to encounter investors,but Korean startups believe that Silicon Valley would give
more opportunities to them.
Mobile services and various web-based SNSs should be a good chance for them to expand their service territory to USA,Europe and so on.For example,Sundaytoz made their service as Facebook base in order to adapt their service for various platform.
