2016년 5월 31일 화요일

Korean PC Game Rooms & Kakao Talk

What do a piece of parking lot management software, a former Samsung employee and Kakao all have in common?

A lot.

That former Samsung employee of course being Kim Bomsu.  He of course - of course -  was responsible for getting a former Seoul National University Graduate School buddy who later became a coworker at Samsung SDS to adapt a piece of software originally developed to manage paid parking lots to instead help PC Room managers keep track of individual users and how much time they spent using a machine and how much they owed.  He then of course - of course - went on to market the hell out of that software (i.e. offering it for free, of course) to every other PC Room located on the Korean Peninsula until every PC Room on the peninsula had it installed and relied on it to an insane degree.

With that platform in place, Kim Bomsu and crew created Han Game, a gaming platform made up of simple, digitized card and board games, and embedded it in the PC Room management system.  In half a year, Han Game amassed 10 million users, and it's server fees were about to bankrupt the team, but then the CEO of a fledgling web portal approached Bomsu and offered ㅇㅇㅇ won to acquire Han Game.

That CEO was ㅇㅇㅇ, also an alumnus of Seoul National University and Samsung SDS, and Naver was the web portal who at the time was fighting the twin giants of Yahoo Korea and Daum.