My Founding Story of Cyworld.com

My Founding Story of Cyworld.com

1997. November, when I was on Ph.D course at Kaist (http://www.kaist.edu/as_global/as_gb_lopu/as_gb_lopu.html) , I started making the site ,peoplesquare, which was pre-name of cyworld.com now , with Mr Jung (Web Developer) whom I met when I was in military service those times,we didn’t have much money, I learned photoshop skill and designed the site myself. but it was so ugly. that I worked part time job(Participated in Research project in NCA (http://www.nca.or.kr/eindex.htm ) about Virtual organization : Virtual Company Strategy Utilizing ERP and PDM on CALS environment) for making money to hire a web designer for peoplesquare. At initial stage, we benchmarked the match.com for starting dating service. But We soon realized that match.com way couldn’t go well with Oriental culture. Because in America, especially on match.com culture, divorced women frankly registered they are divorced and have some children. In korea, in 1998 those kinds of culture we couldn’t imagine without pushing members to telling a lie. Online as anonymous users, they can tell they are rich and handsome. We counldn’t prevent those telling lies. So, that day, only anonymous dating service (don’t ask me who I am , but just enjoy~ ..) could exist. So I thought of the idea of Transformation of real society into online digital world. I thought that was possible because this society consists of Social network infra. We have parents as first social network nodes as soon as we come out into this world. What is second nodes? Yes, brothers and sisters. As we grow up , we makes lots of nodes(relatives, alumni, circle friends, pre coworker, present colleagues, friends of relatives and colleagues etc..) So, I really believed this real society as conceptually social network. My main studying fields was ‘Trust based Information Sharing’ when I was on Ph.D course. That concepts originates from lots of articles including Harvard business reviews about ERP,PDM,SCM philosophy. Yep, Trust based information sharing is core infra for IT process based solution or service. When we unite this concept and Social network , then we can regard SN(social network) as a trust based information sharing channel. Perfect channel. Yes! Fortunately ,sixdegrees.com was then a fast growing site ,so I got the news about them. They were servicing six degrees of separation of Millgrams’ model. Wow… Of course I benchmarked them, but I had the philosophy of trust based information sharing and Personal Resource planner.(Vs. Enterprise Resource Planner) I regarded people as a big information resource (people they know, profile sharing like automatic addressbook similar to kukubox.com or plaxo.com , Sharing calendar ,car, music, bicycle,photo, movie,foods, restaurants,hospital and law service experience etc. As for example of mini case of trust based information sharing is..Hospital service review or amazon’s book reviews but we see sometimes that can be a lie or ads. ) and then if we can share this valuable experience or feelings about commodity or service on the basis of Social network infra, I thought SN service could produce lots of value added service as dating service, career service etc. (Only few years ago , in USA friendster.com or linkedin.com way SN service boomed up and growing you know..and cyworld.com now earns big money from social network based service ,MiniHompy,but it’s so virtual yet.) And also, society consists of lots of groups like alumni, company, family etc. so We made Secret Club ,project club, alumni club functions etc. in the way of very real society transformation concept. (Later in 2000, iloveschool.com similar to classmates.com of America boomed up very fast , which was concentrating on alumni function of cyworld.com )
These days, Sharepoints of MS or http://www.grouper.com/ all based on these Personal Resource Planner concepts I think..

After we got some investments from Angel(?) , in 1999.10.26 we participated some Competitive Presentation for New BizConcept at Walker Hill Hotel. And we won the prize of Millennium Rookie for that concept of PRP and cyworld service. And one of contest judges who was a professor said he may want to install PRP concept into Harvard business review.

And some month later I had resign CEO position for some reason. And then cyworld.com was acquired 2 years ago, into SK telecommunications (http://www.sktelecom.com/eng/index.html ) at about 7 million dollars (I think it is very cheap though.comparing to big leaping revenues of cyworld.com after M&A.) After some additional big investment by SK into cyworld server infra and marketing and with the trend of a digital camera and phone camera effect, cyworld.com’s revenue quadrupled every year.

I think koean investing market is not so wide and active for some round of investments.
That’s why we should target to china and USA or Europe markets first for networked online business…

After some month later Adecco headhunter (http://www.adecco.com/ )…contacted me and said CEO of yahoo korea wants you, but then my resume was not so good comparing to new CTO resumes..and dropped by yahoo.com .(maybe Jerry Yang? ^^; )

And after that event, Neowiz.com CEO who was once my alumni at Kaist, introduced me to Michael who was then http://www.matchmaker.com/ board member. So, I started Oriental style dating service, http://www.saycupid.com/ ,where Michael, Neowiz and Yahoo CEO invested.

Saycupid started as quite paradigm shift way . Because , that time generally when we were singles, we felt as we had to have some lover , so we had to find someone . And that time, most marriage offline company requested resumes sorts official papers from customers for authentication of career, academic backgroud and not marital status. And offline marriage service was not so good ,not so bright image to general people, you know..

I wanted to change the meaning of Singles(exactly being alone without lover) very brighter directions. So, we got slogan , “Enjoy your single life, Single community” with singles, you can have various activities like inline skating, snowboarding, hiphop dancing , Latin dancing or all kinds of interest. As you enjoy your hobby with singles or friends, if you fortunately find someone you want to love ,great, but you don’t have to find someone because at least you are enjoying your single life in quite productive way..(social networking, various member’s club hosting party, Main central party, various hobby or interests exercise. With good peoples... )

We didn’t request some sorts of papers for authentication, but we made that process automatic and convenient for customers. We started networking digitally to lots of university office or governments office for that purpose.. saycupid for authentication process for customers identity(career,school, marital status,photo ) is quite well defined using concept of SPR (social process reengineering Vs. BPR ) All these kinds of stuff will be perfectly Virtual soon

I think, as government and school goes plugin based digital economy style service.(As Malone professor of MIT said..i like his articles about virtual organization or virtual economy concept )

SOCIAL NETWORKING, SOCIAL SOFTWARE AND THE FUTURE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

May 28, 2003

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http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2003/05/28.html#a251


SOCIAL NETWORKING, SOCIAL SOFTWARE AND THE FUTURE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT


I've been trading comments and e-mails with Gary Lawrence Murphy at Teledyn about the current craze over Social Software and Network Enablement, and how that plays into the current sorry state of Knowledge Management. A big problem with KM is that, like the six blind men feeling different parts of the elephant, the term has come to mean many different things to different people, and hence nothing at all:

Academics: KM is anything that allows us to do something better in business than we can do without it
Consultants: KM is an aspect of business process improvement

IT People: KM is any software that concerns itself at least vaguely with databases or content management systems
Librarians: KM is the new name for what special librarians have always done
HR People: KM is the process surrounding non-classroom learning curricula
In most organizations KM is epitomized by the corporate intranet, the extranet, community-of-practice tools, sales force automation tools, customer relationship management tools, data mining tools, decision support tools, databases purchased from outside vendors, and sometimes business research and analysis. In other words, it's certain specialized technologies and information processing roles, with a thin wrapper of 'knowledge creating' and 'knowledge-sharing' processes.

Most of the organizations that have implemented KM bemoan their people's inability to find stuff, the lack of demonstrable productivity improvement, the complexity of the technology, and the absence of significant reusable 'best practice' content.

Now along comes Social Networking and Social Software, also with its adherents from academia, consultancies, and IT. Beneath the torrent of hype and theory, it may reveal an important truth about KM, business, and how we learn: Social networks can provide the essential context needed to make knowledge sharing possible, valuable, efficient and effective .

What are 'social networks'? They are the circles in which we make a living and connect with other people. They transcend strict delineation between personal and business (there's often overlap between the two). They transcend organizational boundaries and hierarchies (we often trust and share more with people outside our companies, and outside our business units, than those inside, and often get better value from the exchange to boot). We are beginning to suspect that the essential yet elusive lesson of the PC is also the essential lesson for KM: It's all about portability and connectivity, not about processing power or content.

If we were to 'reinvent' KM as, say, Social Network Enablement , what would change?

Intranet as connector and link harvester: The intranet would become a people-to-people connector instead of a content repository. It would become a 'link harvester', scanning all traffic across it and dynamically identifying connections to people and their knowledge. New tools would be needed to allow such functionality.
Decentralized content, with blog as surrogate for the individual: Content would shift from centralized, shared databases to personally- or team-owned databases, journals and stories, where the owner(s) provide essential context. (See my post on The Weblog as Filing Cabinet ). Each individual's subscribable, personally-indexed Weblog would be a surrogate for the individual when s/he's not available personally.
Decentralized security, organizational boundaries blurred: Organizational boundaries become irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether the person you are sharing with is a work colleague, a supplier, customer, friend or advisor, an individual or a team, inside or outside the company. You share what you know with those you trust, the same way regardless. Security would be provided at the individual level, not managed by the enterprise. The same way employees know what hard-copy documents can be shared with whom, they set up subscription access to their blog categories correspondingly.
Greatly enhanced weblog functionality, emphasis on access: Today's blogs are not nearly enough to fully enable social networks. They need much more connectivity functionality. A user should be able to call up a visual of their own network, or the network of expertise corresponding to a particular subject. The tool that does this would operate much like a search engine except it would retrieve people (and links to people) instead of documents. It would also have to aggregate various means of access to those people: e-mail, voice-mail, video and whiteboard, meeting scheduling, IM, weblog subscriptions and commenting, and new means of access just being developed. And it would need some mechanism to create a 'biography' of the user by automatically summarizing the total content of their weblog.
Enhanced organizational change functionality: The exhaust from the increased connectivity could be browsed and canvassed to identify organizational change opportunities. Popularity indexes could pre-sage emerging business issues needing management attention, and could be used as a key part of the performance evaluation and reward process, and to identify de facto organizational thought leaders and potential strong recruits. It could incorporate Tipping Point functionality to propagate important ideas, Power Law analysis to identify and spell employees suffering from 'network overload' , and perhaps even new "Network Traffic Analyses" to identify communication logjams and disconnects. Intriguing, and perhaps a bit scary.
Four important unanswered questions:

What role can Social Network Enablement and social software play in enhancing individual and organizational learning?
How do you measure and reward contributions to a network (a) by full-time knowledge workers (people in the organization, like researchers and help desk staff whose sole value is contributing to the network) and (b) by network 'players' outside the organization?
How do organizations equip and foster networks without unduly controlling their actions and membership and therefore crushing them?
How do we capture summaries and abstracts of organizational conversations that occur in other than written form (voice-mail, teleconferences and meetings), so that the blog record of networks is complete?

SOCIAL NETWORKING ENABLEMENT IN ACTION: AN EXAMPLE

The diagram at the top of this post is repeated below, to save scrolling.

Suppose you are the person in the lower right corner of this chart, the CFO of Company Y, and you need to find out about a proposed change to the tax code for Research Tax Credits. Before Social Network Enablement (SNE), you would have typed the term into the intranet search engine, checked the public IRS website or some purchased tax service your company buys, or just picked up the phone and called Jan, your accountant who works for Company X. Alas, Jan just left on a three-week vacation.

Since you've implemented SNE, however, everything gets easier. You key the term into your Expertise Finder and up pops the picture below. As you expected, Jan appears (the person depicted at the bottom of the Company X oval) but that's just the start. This Expertise Network diagram shows only the experts and connections related specifically to the subject of Research Tax Credits. It tells you that the R&D department of your company has some information on tax credits on their team blog, which they've posted to the R&D Community of Practice intranet site. It also tells you that Jan has access to this intranet site, and that this intranet site subscribes to Jan's Tax Credit blog category. It also identifies two other people at the accounting firm that have expertise on this topic, since Jan is unavailable, and a customer of both your company and your accountant, who outsources his R&D to your company and qualifies for a 'flow-through' of the Research Tax Credit and hence is very knowledgeable about how these credits work. And a supplier who sells a Tax Credit Analyzer to your accountants, and a tax credit expert advisor to your accountants who, it turns out, went to high school with you and might cough up the knowledge you want for free, are also identified.

So you have lots of alternatives. In Jan's absence you can phone or e-mail or IM any of six other identified experts, or subscribe to their blogs, or buy the Tax Credit Analyzer yourself (knowing your accountants thought it good enough to buy), or tap into the R&D group's CoP tool or the accountants' extranet. Problem solved.



7:41:31 AM trackback [1] comment [16]

PersonalResourcePlanner(PRP) , Social network Analysis..and enfra.net

1. It’s not what you know , but who you know! Age of who you know is more important than what you know..Knowing contents on open web is no longer a competitive advantage. There was a stage when only internet enriched countries ,companies and persons got comparative advantage comparing to not using internet or search engine service.. But for now, web contents are no longer real time new information or knowledge , even if experts produced it . More over you can’t trust some contents even if the contents looks charming because you don’t know how to trust the writer. Really high quality information or knowledge is the real time contents and decision in the human brain even Stock information can not reveal inner real time information affecting the stock price. One of the reason is the really crucial information flows only in the parties and persons concerned . In this situation also, who you know and which party you belong is more important than what you know. In America also, when new president begins his duty, he gathers his university alumnies and assign core positions to them by work based trust. These kinds of social network is originally distribution channel of information and knowledge. As if efficient management of logistics is a competitive edge for commodity, efficient utilizing and participation to social network as a information logistics becomes very important in this information age. IBM, a few years ago, already started studying on social network . They interviewed many successful project managers worldwide and got the knowledge that 70% percent of those project managers regard the social network as a key success factor for their success of project as they get right person in right time through appropriate person. In situation of secret project, open recruiting or headhunting process will be limited, especially when time due is urgent . Moreover, finding informal expert (who is now studying very hard some title for hobby or future career but not yet formally recognized expert ) is really difficult. That’s why million dollars Activenet is quite popular to research focused Fortune 500 company . Activenet is intranet search engine based social network solution. One famous drugs company is saving more than 30 millions through using this solution. 2. Economic Value of “ Trust based Information Sharing “ I think we can’t overlook the concept of “trust based information sharing “ which was a philosophical background of ERP(enterprise resource planner) . We can remember the bestseller concept of “BPR” ,once Mccansey corporation or other famous consulting firms did a lot about it. Most big manufacturing company and service company have ERP incorporated. Recently many governments are making tax lowering activity for small companies to introduce ERP. SCM(I2’ supply chain management) and ERP . make Amazon.com and Dell possible to transact so many orders from all over the world without Inventory Loss. PDM makes it possible for Pentagons and remote European design company can do remote online work without Security loss. Many articles in HBR says “Trust is the very base idea in these series of great IT solutions. At least this concet of “Trust” and “ERP” are giving us some clause for understanding of Social Network applications. When we can regard a Enterprise as a Node on Network, ERP, SCM or PDM is a plugin for links among many enterprise. We often call these as extranet. ERP can be regarded as BPR based link between department and department. In this big software package, much sensitive and important information flow , so for bigger effect , trustship is needed between team members or organizations. For this trustship, traditional contract relation or clear incentive schemes or related culture are very important. That’s why much researches and reports are done for “trust” in information sharing. Toyota’ JIT systems also embed this kind of trustship between manufacturers and suppliers. In a research, 50 persons are meaningful number in big company in that this 50 persons consist of one information cluster for another 50 persons in average. Informal informations flow and are blocked from this cluster to that cluster and so on. There is worker recommendation as a general example of trust based information sharing. Because of trust in recommender, we don’t need the certificate for graduation or so. These mean cost saving and speed reinforcing. This information broker has various kinds of much semantic knowledge and tacit knowledge about the recommendee which information any headhunter or job site can not have. This kind of job recruiting process makes speed, accuracy and cost saving. But generally, we don’t have much people pool for this kind of activity. Business affliations, sales, buying and worker recommendations are examples of trust based information sharing. Recommendation from known contacts for tour guide when we are in holiday trip, attorney when we are in car accident….. it’s so natural that no awareness like air and water. Time consuming face to face contact to opponents for knowing each other is a sort of personal resource that can be used for social network based, appropriate knowledge/experience transfer and sharing. Historical information resource of one person is being produced from elapsed time, so no lead time for production, so there is speed and accuracy for information acquisition. There is some saying that where my real lover is even if there are some billions of boys or girls in this world. Probablisticly, the being is. But we can’t find. If we want some exact matching we have to live more and there should be no new birth of boys or girls. And what cost will it be to find the exact mine? All revenues of all kinds of dating service in the world would be just one substance of those costs. (match.com and matchmaker.com’s revenues was once over 3billion dollars.) What about recruiting fields? There can be perfect fit between my willingness for some job and company offering those kinds of job. But even if we search through so many job sites or so many headhunters or newspapers or so , we can’t be sure about it and the cost would be uncontrollable.. Theoretically, we can utilize social network power for solving these kinds of problems very efficiently. But problem is how and what it should be like or what is condition for those kinds of service? Professor Malone of MIT once in 1970s ,commented about Digital economy, who is once famous for virtual organization and outsourcing theory. I really liked him when I was in course of Ph.D .(But now I am not Ph.D J ) I thought him very far from me. But some VC who invested to skype tells me he knows the famous Malone because helistened to his lecture. Professor Malone is now just two degrees away. And I know by whom I am linked to him now. If I have good will to meet professor Malone ,then I can contact him from now on. Then, how did I know the VC who knows Malone? What is important here is team or company node is precious more than personal node. Between one founder of NHN Inc.(http://www.nhncorp.com/) and Founder of Skype (and Kazaa which was downloaded more than 300 millions times) , there was a node, CEO of Geo innteractive Inc. He introduced founder of NHN to founder of skype, and then Founder of NHN introduced me to founder of skype and VC who invested to skype. Before this introduction, Malone was 4 degrees away from me and I didn’t even know he was 4 degrees away from me. And even if I did know him ,I couldn’t have the chance to meet him by some sorts of trust relationship. But now Malone is just 2 degrees away! What is to be cautious here is not only connection map information is important but the strength and purpose of link also. When we just exchanged name cards, if my will to meet someone whom my contact knows, then the chance to meet someone depends on the strength of that will. And one member of skype was introduced to a girl whom I know in shanghai so that he can meet her when he arrives at shaghai. We should not overlook some variables here. Personal nodes,company nodes, region, sex and occupation. IBM, a few years ago, already started studying on social network . They interviewed many successful project managers worldwide and got the knowledge that 70% percent of those project managers regard the social network as a key success factor for their success of project as they get right person in right time through appropriate person. In situation of secret project, open recruiting or headhunting process will be limited, especially when time due is urgent . Moreover, finding informal expert (who is now studying very hard some title for hobby or future career but not yet formally recognized expert ) is really difficult. That’s why million dollars Activenet is quite popular to research focused Fortune 500 company . Activenet is intranet search engine based social network solution. One famous drugs company is saving more than 30 millions through using this solution. 3. Real world (social network) community is Next Generation Internet 4 or 5 year ago, people using internet was not so many as these times and it was somewhat peculiar to use internet , but now it is reversed. Seamless computing which Bill Gates is emphasizing ,and ubiquitous technology ,to which so much investment is occurring couldn’t’ be without internet being socially everywhere. That’s why social network analysis is now becoming a popular biz concept though once the concept and related technologies of social network were quite deeply established. Cyworld.com is success one of those phenomena. 30milion dollar digital items revenue a day owing to nagging effect among socially connected people. Sharing photos among face to face friends and sharing/spreading “mini-hompy”(digital home interior or exterior building paintings) with members of cyworld.com or presenting digital pretty items which can be used for decorating “mini-hompy” or having a chance to meet new friends through existing friends are all those representing the effect of social network . As we know, digital social network gets tipping points when real social network engage in those digital social network to meaningful level. As internet becomes everybody’s tools, various and meangingful number of people node can engage to one digital social network again. IM also , in its initial stage we didn’t have to be always online , but as many contacts get connected, and as many people get connected to each other to meaningful level , we have to be online almost always. Cyworld.com is now one of number one which is barrier to work in Samsung. Cyworld.com was once famous for its good quality of club community functions and peculiar function of people surfing map. But when it meets blog like mini-hompy on which contacts can share photo or others, mini-hompy is real killer app. for social network. Of course, the social network effect of closed form club community functions and degrees functions as real world when cyworld.com was initially launched in 1999. august, has been very important cultural basis for successful mini-hompy. 4. Personal Resource Planner is Coming~ As ERP is optimally sharing and spreading enterprise’s various resources, PRP(personal resource planner) is optimally sharing and spreading person’s various resources. One’s experience(movie appraisal, book or food review,hospital or lawyer review, reputation information about contacts) ,results of activities( photo,movie,knowledge, knowhow, works) , results of buyings(digital camera,computer,car, house) are all those representing personal resource. And versatility and numbers of those depends on person’s peculiar circumstances ,region, sex ,hobby , interested and occupation. PRP is a concept which cyworld.com had used for its service architecture. But cyworld.com is a somewhat casual service but not a indispensable one like cell phone.Comparing to ERP,Personal Resoure Planner Not yet. Intuit’s Quickens was once a sort of PRP software for helping to optimize personal expense. MS Money also attacked the Quicken only to fail. Outlook of MS Office can be one of PRP s/w. But it needs to be developed to be networked by many contacts and teams or organzation level. But now, world is fighting for those kinds of market. Skype,plaxo,kukubox, bluetie.com, groove.net’s virtual office ,Siemens’s openscape collaboration and total communication tool..etc. The power of those kinds of solutions or service will be super doubled by the expanding speed and occupying nodes (users) . Personal nodes and organizational nodes are all important in social network ,because team member can be regarded as trusting person as general contacts like alumni, friends ,family or so , even if the kind of trust is different. ( thesquare.com, stanford’s Nexus) 5. Enfra.net, one of PRP ,Needs Fast Investment. Enfra.net targets first , personal nodes who does economic activity and small companies. Some sorts of social networking service and RSS feed like communication service,hoodie mail will be one of method for personal node’s participation in enfra.net. For small company node we are preparing teamware or messaging and and basic collaboration tools. Later we’re gonna give enterprise level service . Nowadays,Wiki or team blog is being one of intranets. Skype and enfra.net also use wiki for collaboration even enfra.net making team has intranets. We need some, new kinds of messagin and collaboration tools instead of intranets or Outlook for ubiquitous and mobile infra. That’s why so many new collaboration tool related service is now booming worldwide.Founders of Lotus also recently got big investment from MS for groove.net (virtual office) . Siemens is now installing new 21st century’s communication and collaboration tools.Bluetie.com ,compared to Outlook is now making money in the speed of 1,000% revenue growing a year.