Mobile text application gains traction

Aurumplanet CEO Kim Jinu speaks during an interview at a cafe near Sinchon Station in Seoul, Saturday. The company’s mobile text highlighting application Liner has more than 9,000 monthly active users across the world. / Korea Times photo by Lee Min-hyung

By Lee Min-hyung

Aurumplanet CEO Kim Jinu says the company’s web highlighting application Liner aims to become a text version of the visual scrapbook service Pinterest.

“Liner users across the world have highlighted more than 130,000 sentences since we launched the application in February this year,” Kim, 24, said in an interview last week in Seoul. “There are 9,000 monthly active users across the globe,” he said.

Kim plans to advance into the U.S. market to expand its business. He added that its performance in the United States will decide if Liner is successful or not.

“Earlier this year, the Liner beta service ranked second as soon as we released it on Product Hunt, a famous online community among Silicon Valley startups,” he said. “It has since earned a great response from users around the world, including the United Kingdom and China.”

He said Liner’s user-friendly service was the driving force for its global popularity. Liner helps its users not just highlight important text, but share the highlights with friends or other websites.

The company’s ultimate goal is to turn the application into a “highlighting tool,” helping to pin texts based on readers’ preference like the U.S.-based image-sharing social network Pinterest, he said.

Pinterest broke the 11 million visitor mark in less than two years after it launched in March 2010, making it the fastest-growing site in the U.S. to break the 10 million visitor mark, according to U.S.-based data analytics company comScore.

“If more users can access our service, we may also be able to collect and use the information as an analytic data tool,” he said.

Kim said Liner is not the first service the company has offered.

“In 2012, I started launching an online art gallery called Aino Gallery with my two college friends,” he said. “The online gallery was aimed at helping artists because they can freely share their work online without any space restriction.”

But he decided to stop investing in the gallery, as there wasn’t room for further growth.

“For the time being, we are not interested in making a lot of money, but the business model for the gallery was not what pushed us forward every day,” he said.

In October 2014, the company stopped investing in the gallery and turned to other business opportunities.

“As we majored in computer science, our interest was to run an entirely IT-oriented business,” he said. “Spending the money we made through the gallery business, we went to Silicon Valley for two months to figure out market needs in the world’s largest technology Mecca.”

He said this was when they met Cho Sung-moon, founding member of mobile game company Gamevil, who offered to help launch Liner on the U.S. market.

With Cho’s support, Aurumplanet was picked as one of Asia’s top 100 venture companies in 2014 by Red Herring, a U.S.-based technology business magazine.

“We are seeking to have a greater presence in the U.S. market now, and plan to localize our services with more language services,” he said. Currently, Liner is offering only an English service. “Localizing the service takes a lot of time and money, but we look forward to launching the services in the near future.”