Webware

No price has been named, but Google has made a new purchase: the Korea-based blog platform TNC, co-founder Chang Kim wrote on his blog Thursday.

TNC, founded in 2004 by Kim and Chester Roh, has created a blog software product called Textcube. An earlier TNC platform, Tistory, was sold to Korean portal Daum.

Google already owns a blogging platform, Blogger, which it purchased in 2003. From a technological standpoint, it's not immediately clear why the company would want another one--although Kim likened his company to Blogger rival WordPress (and its parent company Automattic), the favorite of the open-source community, which could give a hint one way or the other. But more concretely, Kim wrote that this acquisition is in part to help Google get a bigger foothold in Korea.

"One piece of fact that my American friends have (a) really hard time perceiving is that Google is an underdog in this part of the globe," he said. "Korea is the world's sixth largest market in terms of Internet users, and yet Google has a market share that can only be described as 'minor' in Korea."

In spite of how wired Korea is, Kim added that there is indeed a place for 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 wrote.

News Corp.'s MySpace.com has launched the latest of its international editions, MySpace Korea. Like many of its other regionally focused portals, MySpace Korea includes popular music and video content and social-networking profiles. No surprise there.

MySpace Korea's homepage: a little bit more Web 2.0 than what we get here in the U.S.

But in Korea, MySpace faces an extra snag: The small Asian nation is famously tech-adept, with broadband penetration and mobile technology seemingly light-years ahead of the U.S. (and here, MySpace doesn't exactly have a reputation as a technology leader, though it remains the most popular social-networking site). Other social-networking sites, like the virtual world Cyworld, already have a lock on the youth market. So what is MySpace doing? It's deliberately courting Korea's high-tech and digital-creative crowds.

MySpace Korea, as a result, has a sleeker design than most of its global brethren, as well as a few features created locally: a "Minilog" platform, which sounds a bit like Twitter-esque microblogging, and design "skins" created by Korean artists.

The site's official launch party, on Tuesday night, will be held at a design museum near Seoul's Hongik university; later in the week, MySpace will be holding a conference for developers at which Travis Katz, general manager of MySpace's international effort, will be speaking. Co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe has also traveled to Seoul to spread the word about the site launch.

PARTY! If you're in Seoul, that is...

MySpace has more at stake with its Korean launch, too: The site hopes that by broadening its base in Korea, it can take advantage of the country's tech talent as it attempts to catch up where rival social networks like Facebook have jumped ahead in innovation. More specifically, MySpace aims to win over Korean programmers to contribute to its OpenSocial-compatible developer platform, which launched last month.

Later in the week, MySpace plans to launch another site in another crucial tech market: India--which happens to be one of the hot spots for Google's social-networking site, Orkut. Surrounding the debut of MySpace India will be a developer "hackathon" in Bangalore as well as a rock concert in Mumbai.

Unlike its Korean counterpart, the beta site for MySpace India appears to be primarily English-language.

A subtle wake-up call to North American Internet subscribers is now coming from the South Korean, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong-based versions of Google, and their iGoogle start pages. These broadband-rich markets are seeing a more complex version of Google's historically simple start page, with some flashy animations, and a color-coded system of dots to represent various Google services. Is this a sneak peak at the next generation of Google's GUI? Potentially.

We've seen some other flashy interfaces for Google over the years, with some of the more ambitious efforts remaining hidden in its experimental section. The latest public change has been Universal Search, which the company unveiled in mid-May. While this has improved the variety of results you get from searches, it's not nearly on the eye-candy level of the stuff that's coming out of the East.

Here's a video of the new UI, which features the quick-to-load colored dots, which trigger the animation when you mouse over them. Slick.

[via DownloadSquad via PC World]

At a conference today about South Korean tech companies, I got a demo of TalkBean, a marketplace that connects people who want to learn English with those who can teach it.

I'll get the snarky bit out of the way up front: The site needs to take its own lessons. Marketing slogans like, "TalkBean will do our best to provide you with diverse culture and profitable experiences," and error messages such as "You need to put number for this section," seem out of place on a site that's trying to help its customers play in the global job market for English speakers.

English taught here.

(Credit: TalkBean)

That said, the economics of such a matchmaking service are interesting. Eighty percent of all Koreans are "English Learners," the company says, while 6.8 million "Native English Speaker are unemployed in USA." Obviously only a small subset of those are qualified to teach English (I can see an amusing Saturday Night Live sketch emerging here), but why not hook up learners and teachers?

Working in TalkBean's favor is its technology. The site connects students to teachers via voice, video, and text chat, and there's a screen-sharing window for exercises (text or drawing) where tutors can mark up a student's work. There's a nice scheduling system. Also, TalkBean has an arrangement with Korea's government bank so learners can easily pay for their lessons online, even though the money is going to overseas contractors.

Working against TalkBean is a lack of guidance for teachers. There are no prebuilt lesson plans and there's no guidance for pricing. Tutors can charge between 5 cents and 10 dollars a minute (TalkBean collects a commission of 27 percent). What should you charge if you want to try this service out? Good question, although the pitch I heard said that some of the 500 teachers already online were making $300 a day when they worked, so do the math. Also, the beta site is painfully slow.

Skype, and other services such as Ether, also offer marketplaces for voice and video consulting. TalkBean's focus is good, though. While the site needs to mature quite a bit, it looks like a marketplace with a strong base of both buyers and sellers.