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| Kim Dong-ug, founder and CEO of WIV Labs |
By Bahk Eun-ji
Kim Dong-ug, founder and CEO of WIV Labs, launched a social question-and-answer (Q&A) service in March to make such exchanges on Twitter searchable on its website.
He said he came up with the idea for the service when he searched for information about the weather in Hong Kong on a September day a few years ago on the Korean web portal Daum.
"As soon as I typed the key words ‘Hong Kong,' ‘weather' and ‘September' on Daum, I saw the same question posted by someone on a social media community of Koreans living in Hong Kong," Kim said in a recent interview.
The replies to the question included, "It's still too hot," "It's humid here" and "It's raining a lot," which meant that had Kim wanted to visit Hong Kong at the time, he would had brought summer clothes and an umbrella.
"The result was not the good result I had expected, but they provided information that's useful for someone like me who was planning to visit Hong Kong at the time," Kim said.
Before seeing those results, he believed "good" search engine results meant information that was long and written by experts, such as information from theses and news articles.
"I typed the same key words on Google at that time, and the results included only information from professional sources, such as the average temperature, precipitation and so on in Hong Kong," the CEO said.
"It was not a conversation between people, so I started to set a standard of good results again."
His frustration prompted him to launch Qaster and resign from Daum, the nation's second-largest search engine, where he worked as a developer. WIV Labs has three more members, including chief technology manager Jang Chan-gyu, who also worked at Daum.
Kim said Qaster mines useful information from Twitter conversations and makes them searchable on its website. For example, one user is visiting Taipei for the first time and he or she wants to find adequate hotel accommodations in the city. The user simply types "hotels in Taipei" on Qaster and finds a list of Twitter conversations in which other Twitter users have asked the same question.
Currently, the service collects and shows informative Q&As from Twitter, but he plans to improve the content and organization or format of the content for the users.
"There is no other service or website that displays Twitter questions and answers on a topic that users can search," Kim said.
WIV Labs received a 500-million-won investment from K Cube Ventures, a venture capital and early-stage investment firm established by Kim Beom-su, chairman of Daum Kakao.
"We believe the members of WIV Labs' team have the ability to create high-quality global SNS (social networking service) searches and Q&A services, as they are top-tier search engine experts," said Rim Ji-hoon, CEO of K Cube Ventures.
*For more details about Qaster, visit: http://www.qaster.com/
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