Google buys Korean blogging software platform TNC, one of first purchases in Asia
Google has reportedly acquired its first Korean company, a blogging software company in Korea called TNC (Tatter and Company), for an undisclosed amount of money.
TNC founder, Chang Kim, blogged about the purchase tonight. He blogs at Web20Asia.com, but his main job is co-CEO of TNC. He said it is one of the first Google acquisitions in Asia.
[Update: Google confirmed the deal Friday morning, saying it wants to "broaden its portfolio of locally-focused products, further encourage creation of openly accessible user-generated content, and improve search experiences of Korean users." In a statement, it also said it will add "additional resources, via acquisition or otherwise."]
Kim emailed us a link to his blog about it and here’s a relevant paragraph on the details:
…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.
TNC says it provides professional blogging software and services to more than 400,000 users, including 65 of Korea’s top 100 bloggers (as of the first half of 2007). The company received an undisclosed amount of funding from Softbank Ventures’ Ranger Fund, which invests in Web startups.
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Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
