Korean mobile messaging app Kakao Talk has introduced free voice calls to its WhatsApp-like service, allowing its worldwide iPhone and Android users to make calls on the service for nothing more than the cost of data.

While some messaging firms often struggling to provide a quality calling experience, Kakao Talk is confident that its service competes on a level footing with the industry leaders, and certainly our initial experiences have been impressive.

“Our mobile VoIP call quality is on par with services like Skype and Viber,” a company spokesperson told The Next Web.

Interestingly, the calling feature has been made open to the service’s 9.2 million international users but not those in Korea itself, leaving its 36 million home-based user base disappointed, for now.

Mobile messaging has become a global phenomenon with firms like WhatsApp stand accused of ‘stealing’ operator revenue as users opt to chat over apps rather than send an SMS. Those accusations are likely to ratchet up as services like Kakao Talk joins rival Line and others in offering free calling, putting operator’s voice revenue under pressure too.

For now, operators in Korea can rest easy as Kakao Talk isn’t introducing the feature there. Given that the company says it has an impressive 98 percent attachment rate to smartphones, which are owned by more than 50 percent of mobile users, any move could see a significant loss in earnings.

Kakao Talk is placing great emphasis on moving into overseas markets as it looks to scale up its service. In particular the Middle East and Southeast Asia are key growth regions, and that explains why it recently launched an app for BlackBerry, a platform that app makers are abandoning rather than joining.

The service sees an impressive 21 million log-ins daily (close to half of its total), the spokesperson said, and the firm has continued its impressive growth this year. We last looked at the company in January, when it revealed that it was processing 1 billion messages per day, and that figure has since risen by a third to hit 1.3 billion.

Kakao Talk’s monetisation strategy is focused on connecting users with brands and relevant content. The company signs up companies which then provide services or offers to users that choose to follow them, Kakao Talk bags a portion of the revenue or transaction involved.

Strictly opt-in, entertainment brand have been a particularly successful vertical for the service. The company has a roster of more than 100 brands in Korea, and it is actively extending its marketing push into overseas areas.

A number of Korea’s K-Pop stars have a presence on the app, through which they provide music and multiple media exclusively to fans. While that side of the business has seen success in region’s like Southeast Asia — in line with K-Pop’s rise worldwide — Kakao Talk is aiming to recruit more businesses to the service, with a particular focus on lifestyle services.

Gaming is next on the horizon and Kakao Talk reveals that it is preparing to release its ‘Game Center’ service with the second quarter of 2012, having already signed up a number of developers from Korea.

A Windows Phone app is also in the works and its “imminent” arrival will boost support beyond Android, iOS and BlackBerry.

➤ Kakao Talk | App Store | Google Play | BlackBerry

Berlin-based Internet startup incubator Team Europe is expanding to Asia with the establishment of a “market-watch” office in Seoul, South Korea.

It will be headed by German-Korean Ludolf Ebner-Chung, a former McKinsey consultant, with Team Europe partner Markus Fuhrmann overseeing the venture.

The idea is for Team Europe to use the new office as a launchpad to expand its activities across multiple Asian regions. So why Korea first?

Furhmann asserts that Korea has a huge Internet and smartphone environment, and that there are big opportunities for Team Europe to build successful Internet companies in the region. “It feels like Berlin a few years ago,” he says.

Fuhrmann already started several companies in China before joining Lukasz Gadowski, Kolja Hebenstreit and Steffen Höllinger at Team Europe as a partner in 2009. The firm’s portfolio includes companies like Delivery Hero, HitFox, Mister Spex and Madvertise.

Question is: do they need to change their name now?

International-focused TV and video site Viki has made a significant move into the music space, after it announced deals with a number of record labels and agencies, most notably Warner Music, SEED Music Group of Taiwan and Korea’s LOEN.

The expansion has brought thousands of music videos from hundreds of artists to the video site, Viki says, building on its existing selection of TV shows and videos that cater for worldwide audiences.

The new selection features an eclectic bunch of artists, ranging from international pop and rock stars to K-Pop figures and rappers, including Green Day, Simple Plan Drunken Tiger and Brown Eyed Girls.

Given the international scope, the company will turn to its active community of fans to ‘crowdsource’ translations of the lyrics — as it does with its videos — to break the language barrier for other users, which currently number 20 million monthly visitors.

The first music content will be available in the US, Canada, Europe and several significant countries across Asia, where its Singapore-based CEO Razmig Hovaghimian is domiciled.

A phased rollout will see the music selection brought to other countries and regions worldwide.

Currently, North America is responsible for 40 percent of the service’s traffic, while Europe accounts for around 15 percent and Southeast Asia — a particular hotspot for Korea content, as is France, curiously – makes up 30 percent of its active users.

The rest of its userbase is spread across other markets, such as The Middle East and Latin America.The move is a natural one Hovaghimian told The Next Web, particularly for its video content from Korea, where a number of popstars are successful actors and feature in many of Viki’s back catalogue of video content already.

For the music labels, partnering with Viki provides an opportunity to extend their reach and monetisation into these global markets, with the subtitling a particularly effective method to increase the connection with fans in emerging markets where English isn’t widely spoken.

Stephen Bryan of Warner Music Group paid tribute to the Viki platform and the opportunity it will present the label and its artists:

Viki will help both global superstars and local talent to forge deeper connections with audiences that don’t speak their language. At the same time, it offers fans a new way to champion their favourite acts and contribute to their success.

Earlier this week, we looked at how the K-Pop industry is using the Internet, and in particular social media, to grow its worldwide audience, and the addition of Viki will help LOEN expand its online footprint.

Won-Su Shin, CEO of the Korean label, spoke of the new of reach that Viki will provide:

Through the alliance with Viki, we’ve established a foothold for spreading K-Pop throughout the world. We anticipate that many users can now share their favourite music more conveniently and that global competitiveness of Korean music will be strengthened.

The news is particularly significant for Asia and other emerging markets where Spotify, Pandora, Deezer and others are yet to open their services.

The initial pool of artists does not address this void instantly but, with Warner Music in particular on board, the move is a significant step and it again shows that Viki is focused on exploring untapped international markets.

Viki’s most recent round of funding — its second to date — saw it raise $20 million last year. Its backers include Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures and Neoteny Labs, which provided a collective $4.3 million in series A funding in 2010.

The company has strong links with the Korea. Its two other co-founders — CTO Changseong Ho and CPO Jiwon Moon — are Korean and it has an office in capital city Seoul, in addition to its locations in San Francisco and Singapore.

Viki has passed 1 billion videos views and its strong international focus has seen its users translate its global collection of content into close to 200 million words of subtitles, across 150 different languages.

The company will continue its international push, Hovaghimian says, as it looks to add more global material, with India TV shows and drama likely to be among the new music and video content coming soon.

The CEO reveals that the company uses a dual approach of brokering big names deals and sourcing content locally on the ground. He is particularly proud of the community of dedicated fans and translators that the company has built, and the appeal that this international reach gives to content producers.

“We’re not built like YouTube with thousands of engineers,” he explains, “but we do use social and our community to reach out across the world.”

For an example of Viki’s multilingual approach, here’s ‘Welcome to My Life’ by Simple Plan — part of the new music catalogue — which is available with subtitles in nine different languages; each of which has been translated by Viki’s community.

Have you heard of K-Pop?

Two years ago the answer would almost certainly be no, unless you were living in Korea and other parts of Asia, but today the Korean music genre is increasingly followed the world over, thanks TO its online reach, which just got extended further still.

The Korean pop (K-Pop) industry has taken two significant steps towards growing its already impressive online footprint after industry-wide content pages were established on both Facebook and Google+. These moves will help bringing stars, music, news and multimedia to millions of existing and potential new fans across the planet.

Social networks and the Internet are opening the world like never before and K-Pop, a genre of pop music from South Korea, is fast becoming an example of the international opportunity that the Web can offer.

A K-Pop Hub has been launched on Google+ to give users of the social network an easy and convenient way to keep up with their favourite stars while, in partnership with Facebook, a dedicated (and official) K-Pop Page is now active on the 900 million member strong social network.

Korean entertainment firm SM Entertainment launched the Facebook Page that will featuree content from the firm’s artists star, including photos, videos and other multimedia. Updates will be posted in Korean and English, as Asia One reports, making it relevant for overseas followers of K-Pop, as well as those at home.

The launch of the Google+ K-Pop hub, and Google’s promotion of the social network in South Korea, had been delayed until the search giant got clearance to launch its mobile app. The app is a crucial addition to Google+’s marketing and reach, given the how smartphone-crazy Korea is – having just passed 50 percent ownership.

The hub includes an initial four groups – Beast, SISTAR, After School and INFINITE – but Google is confident it will add more soon. Users that circle the hub can receive all updates from the members bands, with content available in English, Japanese and Korean.

As we explained back in February, music stars are playing a key role bringing Internet users from across Asia on to the Google+ service, with Japanese super girl band AKB48 the most notable example to date.

While K-Pop’s move to tap into Google+ has been a long time coming, the additional presence on Facebook will further extend the industry’s impressive digital footprint and global influence.

Already there is a dedicated K-Pop YouTube page, thanks to an agreement with Google last November, which gives the artists and recording labels greater visibility on the world’s most popular video site, which sees 800 million unique visitors each month.

Groups like Girls Generation — managed by SM Entertainment — are leading the charge worldwide. Their video for ‘Gee’, for example, has racked up more than 75 million views since it was posted in 2009.

Despite the Korean lyrics, the video has been watched right across the world — primarily in Australia, the Middle East and North America — as YouTube’s own stats below show. The main demographic is young women (13-24 years old) and men aged 35-44, which is typical for girl groups from Korea.

Global consumption is a common theme for much of the K-Pop collective on YouTube, and it demonstrates how the Web and YouTube are helping to take the music genre global, and beyond simply just the Korea diaspora overseas.

SM Entertainment’s official YouTube channel has more than 500,000 subscribers and, just a day after it launched, the Facebook Page has already accumulated more than 29,000 fans – a number that will surely grow rapidly.

It isn’t just online initiatives, as offline activities are breaking new ground too. Further proof of K-Pop’s popularity in the US — and the influence of the Internet — came when YouTube organised a concert neat its Mountain View HQ, which took place on Monday. The gig was set up in partnership with top Korean entertainment broadcaster MBC, and included a series A-list popular stars, such as Girls Generation.

Demand was such that free tickets to the show sold out within an hour of being released. Those that couldn’t make it could catch the gig broadcast live on YouTube Presents, becoming the K-Pop event to be showcased there. Given the success, other K-Pop-related broadcasts could well follow soon.

Twitter is a slightly different proposition, partly because it is not as popular as Google and Facebook in Korea, but also because it doesn’t lend itself to promoting multimedia quite so effectively.

The K-Pop stars themselves are leading the microblogging efforts, and a number of them have accrued massive follower numbers on the service. 2PM star Nichkhun, for example, engages his 1.2 million followers daily in a mixture of languages to accommodate them.

With YouTube, Google+ and Facebook under its belt, Korea’s pop industry has three of the most significant content services on the Web within its digital locker, and looks set to only continue to grow its presence the world over through them, and other Web-based initiatives.

For those that are curious about what all the fuss is about, here’s the ‘Gee’ video from Girls Generation.

The Samsung Galaxy S III was unveiled in London at the beginning of this month but, just two weeks later, the long-awaited device is reported to have racked up 9 million pre-orders from mobile operators across the world, according to Reuters.

The report cites the Korea Economic Daily which quotes an unnamed Samsung executive as providing the impressive figure which, if correct, shows that the pre-launch hype is translating into orders worldwide.

What’s all the more notable is that this number comes without any US input. The American version of the phone is yet to be unavailable, which will support LTE but is tipped to be powered by a dual-core Qualcomm S4 processor rather than the quad-core Exynos 4412 that features in Korea and other global markets.

It remains to be seen if such a change would impact on the device’s prospects in the US, but the 9 million pre-order figure puts it close to being half way as successful as its predecessor — the Galaxy S II — which clocked up an impressive 20 million shipments in 10 months.

The Korea news site also reports that Samsung’s Korean production line is working full steam to meet demand, and is currently churning out 5 million Galaxy S III units per month – as the device looks set to rewrite the firm’s record books.

Last October, combined sales of Galaxy S and Galaxy S II smartphones topped 30 million units worldwide, with both devices breaking company sales records after launch. The Galaxy S II generated more than 10 million sales, making it the quickest selling device in the company’s history, while the Samsung Galaxy S was just short of 20 million sales after launching in 2010.

The success of the Galaxy S range has helped propel Samsung ahead of its smartphone rivals, and the company is now shipping more devices than any other mobile maker, smartphones and feature phones included.

Recent research from IDC reported that Samsung shipments rose 267 percent year-on-year, as the Korean manufacturer shipped 42.2 million devices in Q1 2012, accounting for 29.1 percent of the industry-wide figure. Apple ranked second with 35.1 million units and a 24.2 percent share.

It’s been less than a week since Evernote unveiled its dedicated Chinese service, but already downloads of standalone Yinxiang Biji app are “off the charts”, according to Troy Malone, the company’s general manager in Asia Pacific.

Ordinarily, Evernote was adding around 4,500 new users per day to its 1.1 million user base in China but, following the launch, downloads there have rocketed. Based on the first week, Malone says that daily new user numbers in China have been greater than its two biggest markets — Japan and the US — combined.

“The US and Japan have traditionally been by far our largest user registrations, but China just eclipsed both of those. It’s like we unlocked a whole new Earth that we didn’t even know existed,” Malone told The Next Web.

At this early stage Evernote is, understandably, not revealing raw user numbers, however Malone is confident that the new service will see it attract new users at higher rates than before, even as the initial burst of interest quietens as the launch effect wears off.

Evernote will continue to offer its US-based service in China, while giving users the option of a more localised experience through Yinxiang Biji, but the company had to make the move in order to realise its potential, according to Malone.

“It got to the stage where we just couldn’t ignore it any longer,” he says, and the new service will provide a faster and more customised service, with the team working with local developers to build bespoke features for Chinese users.

Any move to China brings up security issues, of course, and Evernote CEO Phil Libin recently admitted that the company would likely be unable to stop authorities making legal requests for user data.

Indeed, the blog post announcing the new service contains an important warning for prospective Yinxiang Biji users:

The laws and practices controlling data stored on servers in China are evolving rapidly and Yinxiang Biji will comply with Chinese regulations applicable to the service. This means users of Yinxiang Biji should be aware that Chinese authorities may have the right to access their data according to current regulations.

China is the latest market that Evernote is focusing on but it already has a number of notable successes across Asia, thanks to a policy of scaling early in markets where it sees user growth.

The company has 6 million registered users in Japan, which is serviced by an office of 8. Elsewhere, it has a team of two in South Korea and has just hired a pan-Asia marketing executive who is primarily tasked with helping to build the service across the Greater China region.

Despite a late start, smartphones have now passed 50 percent penetration among South Korea’s mobile phone owners, according to new data released by the Korea Communications Commission, which praised the associated benefits.

The comission’s findings revealed the industry-wide statistics, which are reported by The Chosunilbo:

According to the three mobile service providers KT, SK Telecom and LG Uplus on Monday, the number of smartphone users stands at 26.72 million, 50.8 percent of all 52.55 million mobile subscribers.

The progress is particularly impressive considering that the country was a relative late bloomer, and the first app-centric smartphone did not go on sale there until 2009.

The growth of devices was heralded by KCC director Seok Je-Beom, who spoke of the positive effects that always-on Internet, apps and other features have provided Korean smartphone owners, as AFP reports:

The wide popularity of smartphones has transformed not only our daily lives but also society in general. It adds innovations to how work gets done in companies as well as creating new markets.

Korea is notably home to industry giant Samsung. Thanks to its Android-based devices, the company is the smartphone market’s biggest player, accounting for 42 percent of all shipments in the first quarter of 2012, according to IDC.

However arch rival Apple, which has been threatened by possible legal action from Samsung in Korea, has also performed well on its rival’s home turf.

The iPhone passed sales of 20 million units last October, before the iPhone 4S was launched. The iPad has also been a success and is outpacing the competition, and passed 1 million official sales in February, but that’s not included countless devices that were purchased overseas and brought back to the country.

Apple recently expanded its returns policy in Korea, where customers receive no-questions-asked brand new replacements for devices that develop a ‘fault’ within a month of purchase. Previously it had been active for the iPhone, but it now covers all products sold in the country.

Asian games developer and publisher CMUNE has made a significant announcement after revealing that it has raised “record” funding from Atomico, the international VC fund established by Skype founder Niklas Zennström.

Speaking at the GMIC event in China today, the 3D social games specialist did not disclose the level of funding, except to confirm that it is its highest level of investment yet.

The company told The Next Web that the money will be used to expand and grow its development team in Beijing, China. More specifically, the funding will help increase its global reach, using a local games/publisher approach, and bring its titles to more platforms, with iOS and Android the key focuses.

Kelly Poon, Atomico’s lead in China, said of the deal:

We’re delighted to be investing in a China-based company that targets a global market. CMUNE’s innovation in bringing 3D games to social platforms is remarkable, and it is already leading the way with UberStrike in the popular first person shooter genre. The company has done a brilliant job at overcoming both technical and design challenges to bring console-quality games to the web.

Ludovic Bodin, CEO of CMUNE, paid tribute to Zennström’s global experience and the benefits that his involvement will bring the game developer:

Niklas is one of the few modern tech entrepreneurs who has built a global company with success in both the East & West. Having co-founded Skype and previously made major investments in pioneering gaming companies such as Rovio, he understands freemium as a business model.

CMUNE was founded in Korea in 2007 but its design and development team is based in Beijing and its sales and commercial office is in San Francisco.

The funding will see it continue to develop its range of 3D social games, which includes its flagship title UberStrike, a Facebook-based game with 5 million registered users and 1 million monthly gamers.

CMUNE offers its titles outside of Facebook — including GameStop-owed Kongregate and the Mac App Store — and the company says it will launch for iOS and Android “soon.”

The deal to add titles to Kongregate was inked yesterday and company is currently hiring in Beijing, as it seeks to grow its development operations.

Atomico has more than 50 investments in tech companies across four continents worldwide, with Angry Birds maker Rovio its most notable firm. The firm recently turned its attention to Brazil, where it made its first investment in local startups there.

As Apple announced last week, its third-generation device will also go on sale in an additional ten countries across the world today: Asian city-state Brunei, Croatia, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, St Maarten, Uruguay and Venezuela.

The device is available to pre-order but the appeal of queuing outside an Apple Store, or authorized reseller, has proved popular, albeit with less of the hype that we saw in Japan, Australia, Singapore during the first launch in March.

Today’s launch has been most popular in Korea — where the iPad is out-performing Korean rival Samsung’s tablets, having passed one million unit sales — and Apple fans braved the rain in some parts of the country to wait.

Prospective owners in Korea could also buy the device at retail outlets of operators KT Telecom and SK Telecom.

Student Lim Jun-Hong was the first in the country to get his hands on the tablet, having slept on the pavement overnight to earn the privilege, as the AFP reports.

Queues in Malaysia started modestly but have built up in the morning as would-be new iPad owners weighed up the appeal of getting the device in their hands on launch day, over waiting on a pre-order; delivery of which takes 5-7 days.

A number of Apple enthusiasts began queuing in the early hours across Malaysia, with the queue at 1u MacCity in capital city Kuala Lumpur said to have attracted 10 people before 7:00 am.

06:43 10th guy arrived for the launching of the new iPad at MacCity 1Utama.

— Ivan Gan (@ivangan) April 19, 2012

Food, water and free t-shirts were given out at the MacCity reseller outlet, to help stoke up the atmosphere and mood, and hours later the queue had grown. By 9:30 am, 30 people were reportedly awaiting the launch at the reseller shop, which is one of many participating in the launch.

Tax allowances in Malaysia mean that the new iPad available for less than in other countries. For example, the tablet device is said to cost an additional $40 in neighbouring Brunei, although that difference is just $10 cheaper than in the US.

New iPad price in Malaysia is still cheaper than Brunei around $40+

— Frederick Tan (@ftcy) April 19, 2012

As is the case in a number of countries, users in Korea awill be unable to enjoy the 4G-LTE functionality of the device for now, as it is not compatible with any networks there; while LTE is yet to come to Malaysia.

The next wave of launches will see Apple’s new iPad come to Colombia, Estonia, India, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, South Africa and Thailand next Friday, April 27, as Apple takes the device to 50 markets worldwide.

Images via @bobofgold, the AFP, @nashman and @ivangan respectively

Growing up watching movies like The Terminator, I always thought it would be amazing if humans too could have a visual system that could analyze we are looking at in real-time what. As it turns out, the future is actually not as far away as you may think, and I’m not talking about Google’s smart glasses.

Augmented Reality (AR) is the combination of computer generated data and the real world and, in recent years, many developers around the globe have been experimenting with the technology. One Korean startup, in particular, is making significant progress with AR.

Olaworks, which was founded in 2006, focuses on the development of computer vision and graphic technologies. The company’s technology works on cameras on devices, such as smartphones or tablets to accomplish a variety of functions, and include augmented reality and image recognition.

While Olaworks has a few apps to its name already, its main focus is the creation of technology which can be sold or licensed to other companies. Olaworks currently holds more than 60 patents and its technologies are used on various platforms around the world.

Most recently the company showcased its services at the Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona, Spain, where the image below was taken.

The company’s facial analysis technology has received a lot of attention and it incorporates a number of features including, recognition of similarities between faces, gender recognition and detection of facial features. A number of other features that Olaworks has developed — such as smile and blink detection — have the potential to be extremely useful for the digital cameras and devices of the future.

So far, however, the most successful solution that the company has developed are facial recognition and real-time tracking. Using a smartphone camera, the software can recognize a face registered in its database or address book, before going on to display the information about the person in real-time on the screen. As the person’s head moves, so it is tracked until it goes out of sight.

The company is taking that object analysis a step further with its new Web-based tool Mnemonics. The system differs from existing solutions as it searches for images “by context”, rather than using text.

Mnemonics connects similar images from around the Web, from where these connections can be projected onto maps or a 3D globe model. Images are arranged into ’seedclusters’, which house the most similar images and ’superclusters’, which are largely similar.

More details about Mnemonics are revealed in the video below:

Olaworks’ has worked with various major companies, such as Naver and LG Electronics, who used its technology in search engines, apps and other various software. Olaworks even developed its own app named ScanSearch, however it was only released in Korea and to a limited number of Windows phones users in Europe. The app uses augmented reality to show various locations in the direction that a mobile phone’s camera is pointed; including restaurants, bars and hospitals.

Olaworks’ describes it services as providing “the best experience thru[sic] photos and video”, while CSO Ryu Joong-hee explains company’s philosophy further:

At Olaworks, if we see a need for something in the market then we create the technology or solutions to match those needs.

Augmented reality is coming soon, and the Korean company is one of the pioneers making it happen.

➤ Olaworks