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MyYearBook is growing in US teen market, raises $13 million

joop Written on July 30, 2008 – 1:00 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor

myYearbook raised $13 (€8) million, and the social network gained remarkable growth in the teen market, exceptional given the established presence of Myspace.

A social website launched three years ago, myYearbook claims to be the third largest social network in the US. TechCrunch reports that the site is only a fraction of the size of Myspace or Facebook, and that the site may have more high school users than Facebook. According to Hitwise, the site enjoyed a 384% year-to-year growth.

myYearbook received its second funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners, US Venture Partners and First Round Capital. Norwest Venture Partners’ Sergio Monsalve will join the company’s board of directors. The total funding is currently $18.6 (€12) million. The site is going to use the cash to add extra features and marketing to reach out to new members.

The site monetizes with advertisements, but also offers a way for users to decorate their profiles. They might be able to gain income from these virutal possessions on their network, simulair to Korean based Cyworld. Will these teens move on to Facebook when they go to college, or remain true to their first social network?

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If you like the web, I bet you love South Korea too

joop Written on June 10, 2008 – 8:00 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor

That is, if you like to be connected to the Internet all day, while enjoying the fastest connections in the world! Enter the hyper connected society, with an astounding 90 percent of the country connected with 3G and a nation wide coverage of a South Korean version of Wimax.

How and why did South Korea become an overlord in Internet speed? In short; the South Korean government introduced a number of policy instruments to stimulate technological learning, aimed to strengthen international competitiveness of the economy. The government launched a five-year plan to create a ubiquitous networked world in 1995, meaning that the country developed a stunning 1.5 billion dollar wireless network to stimulate the use of the Internet.

Today, South Korea is the most connected country on earth, but the funny thing is that we hardly hear anything about Korea’s web scene. This made us curious about what websites are popular over there, and if Korea has a web 2.0 scene. To find that out, we reviewed the three visited websites in Korea and we interviewed Chang W. Kim, Korean web 2.0 enthusiast and initiator of the Open Web Asia ‘08 conference.

(more…)

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