Wunderkids’ Homecoming
1st Generation Internet Masters Go Bust in US
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
They had the talent to forever change the way South Koreans get information and entertainment on the Internet. However, the United States is proving to be a totally different challenge for Teheran Street’s original wiz kids, who find themselves humbled on the flight back home.
The first to cut a one-way ticket to Seoul was Lee Jae-woong, the founder of Daum (www.daum.net), the company’s No. 2 Internet portal and e-mail provider, who quietly returned in July after resigning as boss of Lycos (www.lycos.com), the struggling U.S. portal Daum acquired in 2004.
Now, Brian Kim, former NHN chief executive and founder of online game portal Hangame (www.hangame.com), is back home pondering what’s next.
After taking the job as chief executive of NHN USA in January of last year, Kim surprised everyone by resigning in September and founded an Internet startup called IWILAB, which promoted a blogging service called Buru (www.buru.com) to U.S. Internet users.
However, Kim is now telling reporters that IWILAB will solely concentrate on the Korean market for the time being, with Buru, now in its beta version, failing to generate any excitement.
In an interview with the Korea Economic Daily, Kim said the three American employees at Buru’s California office have been laid off, but added that he has no plans to shutdown the blogging services just yet.
``Money was tight, with the local currency continuing to fall against the U.S. dollar and the U.S. Internet market is now under a tough environment … for now we will be focusing on the Korean market,’’ Kim said.
``Buru hasn’t achieved the traffic we have hoped for, but we will keep our U.S. headquarters just as it is, so we can renew our challenge in the U.S. market when the time is right,’’ he said.
The 42-year-old Kim has achieved legendary status in the Korean Internet industry, founding Hangame, now the country’s most popular online gaming site, in 1998.
Three years later, he became the co-head of NHN, which was formed after Hangame was merged with Naver (www.naver.com), the country’s most popular portal site and search engine.
It remains to be seen whether the gaming guru could prove to have the same magic touch on blogs, and obviously, Buru wasn’t much of an inspiring start.
Kim’s post-NHN success will now depend on Wisia (www.wisia.com), a social networking site launched in June, which looks like a cross between Naver’s ``Knowledge’’ question-and-answer search service and SK Communications’ widely popular Cyworld (www.cyworld.com) ``mini homepages.’’
Kim is hardly the only Korean Internet entrepreneur struggling to figure out the U.S. market.
Former SK Communications chief executive Yoo Hyun-oh had a reputation for his Midas touch, leading the company’s acquiring of Cyworld in 2004, which propelled it as a major player in the Korean Internet industry.
Yoo’s impressive track record had SK Communications’ parent company SK Telecom, the mobile telephony giant, trust him to head its Internet business in the U.S.
However, with recent economic turmoil jeopardizing the company’s business future in the U.S., Yoo resigned as the chief executive of Cyworld USA in July and is currently studying at Stanford University.
Hyung Yong-jun, the original founder of Cyworld, is reportedly struggling to lure investments for Storyblender (www.storyblender.com), which helps Internet users produce and edit video clips and is operated through his U.S.-based Web startup.