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Google has acquired a Korean Blogging company, TNC (Tatter and Company), for an undisclosed amount as is being reported by VentureBeat. The deal has already been disclosed by the founder of TNC on her blog. According to the co-founder Chang Kim, this is amongst the first acquisitions of Google in Asia.
For those who are unfamiliar with TNC, Chang Kim has done a good job presenting the company:
For those who are not familiar with us, think of TNC as Korea’s Automattic - a company that develops a cool blogging platform that’s favorited by the nation’s A-list bloggers, and also works closely with the open source community.
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.
The acquisition is an indication that Google is now taking the Asian markets seriously and wants to be top three in all Asian countries that matter. And there is no better and quicker way to do it than by means of acquisitions.
I think the Asian markets are the natural progression for Google to move into. There is a huge market there sponsored ads, which let’s face it, is Google’s primary source of income.
If they can put sponsored type google ads on a massively used blog network could be good business.
Don’t forget that in Korea everyone and everything is online.
Here’s another link to a post from a Korean native’s perspective on the deal. Might be interesting to you.
http://technokimchi.com/entry/Breaking-News-Google-buys-TNC-and-TattertoolsTextcube