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Google Shops for Blogging Tools in Korea
From left to right: Chester Roh, Chang Kim, and author Joyce Kim. Photo by Joyce Kim.
Google has acquired South Korea’s TNC, maker of the open-source blogging and publishing platform Textcube, co-CEO Chang Kim said on his personal blog today. I met with the TNC team back in March, when I was visiting Seoul. I liked the company so much that I talked about it on an episode of The GigaOM Show and wrote about Textcube on my own blog.
Everything I saw during the demo TNC gave made me want to move my own blog onto Textcube. I was impressed not only with how easy it was to add photos, videos and podcasts, but with the incredible drag-and-drop feature, which made it very easy to upload images in bulk, create slide shows, resize images and format text around the media object. TNC had also recently restructured its commenting system to resemble an email inbox, a format whose familiarity will undoubtedly prove more accessible to bloggers and readers alike. And its default analytics system offers Google Analytics-like information and results without the hassle of installing plug-ins.
Overall, TNC is a great product to bridge the gap between first-time bloggers, who want maximum simplicity, and professional bloggers, who want to customize every last detail. And as blogging becomes more prevalent, this mid-market may emerge as the biggest of the three.
The TNC team previously built a blogging community site called tistory, which is similar to Xanga and quickly became one of Korea’s top 10 web sites. Tistory was subsequently acquired by Daum, while the founders continued developing the open-source software platform as a software-as-service business that became TNC. Co-CEO Chang Kim is major evangelist and blogger in the Asian Web 2.0 scene, while founder Chester Roh is a famous former hacker and a graduate of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, whose alum have created a significant number of the top Korean tech companies and services.
Strategically, this acquisition is a good move by Google. By purchasing a Korean company with a well-known executive team, TNC will provide the search giant some much-needed PR within the Korean market. After all, in order for Google to succeed in the Korean market, they need to be seen as a “Korean” company.
And although Google already has Blogger, which is quite popular amongst more novice bloggers, Textcube offers functionality that rivals both Movable Type and WordPress. So is Google planning on rolling it out worldwide, aimed at that middle segment of the market of dedicated but not necessarily professional bloggers? If that’s the case, the big blogging companies would be well-advised to keep an eye on the trends in the Korean market.
(Disclosure: TNC rival Automattic is a company backed by True Ventures, where GigaOM founder Om Malik is a venture partner. Malik is also a personal friend of Automattic founder, Matt Mullenweg. True Ventures is also an investor in GigaOM’s parent company, Giga Omni Media)
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Google Buys Foothold In Korea With Acquisition Of Blog Platform TNC
Google has acquired TNC (Tatter and Company), a Korean blog platform company that compares itself to Automattic, the team behind WordPress. Although Google already owns its own blogging platform, Blogger, it is not particularly popular in Korea. (According to comScore, Blogger had 1.7 million unique Korean visitors in July). The acquisition is clearly a geographic expansion move for Google, but its Textcube blogging platform also has some social networking features which Google might want to export to Blogger or other products.
In his blog post on the acquisition, TNC founder Chang Kim shed some light on the company’s history, and why he thinks it was acquired:
“Despite the danger of sounding too self-important, I would say our company was a fairly good acquisition target for Google. First, we had a killer product: Our previous work, Tistory blog service (now property of Daum as we sold the service to the Korea’s #2 portal), made to the top 10 Korean web destination in less than a year from launch, showing some 30,000% growth over the initial 8 months. While other blog services seem to be exploring the idea of integrating social networks with blogs only lately, our new blog service Textcube (link in Korean) had already implemented the feature much earlier. Secondly, we have great engineering talents. Many of our software engineers hail from the nation’s leading comp sci programs, such as KAIST.”
Chang Kim speculates that this is one of Google’s first acquisitions in Korea (though he admits that not all acquisitions are disclosed by the search giant). He also writes that while the deal is in part related to his product and team, Google is likely trying to establish a stronger presence in the Korean market, where it hasn’t performed well. Kim explains that Koreans tend to prefer web portals - the one-stop-shop online centers like Yahoo - over searching for content.
On the M&A panel at TechCrunch50 earlier this week, Google’s head of corporate development, David Lawee, noted:
We’ve bought companies to boost market share in particularly geographies where we’re not that strong. . . . At Google we don’t really think of size of the deal so much as impact. A lot of the best deals have been smaller companies.
Textcube has some interesting social-networking features, including a built-in RSS reader and a plugin for real-time Web chat. All the major blogging platforms are trying to help blogs turn themselves into mini-social networks. Blogger is already moving in this direction with the recent addition of its “following” feature, but still needs to catch up to the social-networking features available on Typepad and Wordpress.
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