Twitter engineers hold app contest in Seoul

“Fascinating! But...”

So said an engineer from the headquarters of the social networking service Twitter in the U.S. in an app contest held in Seoul’s Gangnam district Tuesday. This was shortly after a 20-something entrepreneur finished a one-minute presentation on pitching a business plan.

The engineer asked participants to make their pitches using easy and interesting, stories, saying, “Too much jargon cannot attract investor attention.” The participants had a hard time explaining their apps in English.

Engineers from Twitter joined the Korean pitch contest organized by the company’s venture company support program Twist to listen to pitches by 11 Korean venture entrepreneurs and evaluate their apps. The closed contest was also joined by foreign venture capitalists.

After the competition, Twitter engineers held a software developer session at the same place, a first for Twitter in Asia.

The contenders had diverse backgrounds: a young CEO who started his company shortly after finishing college; another who entered the Korean venture market after graduating from a prestigious American university; and a 50-something man who worked for a large corporation.

First prize went to Im Baek-ho, 29, the president of Lasso & Co. After failing to start a venture company while attending college, he joined hands with Hong Dong-hee, 26, and Choi Jin-seok, 45, to open an app development company in July last year. Though Im`s English pitch was not the best, Twitter engineers gave him high marks for his innovative idea.

Im`s "K-Pop Tweet" updates Twitter accounts of K-pop stars that are popular abroad on a regular basis and translates the stars’ tweets into their fans’ languages in real time. The app has broken language barriers between K-pop stars and their foreign fans.

The app enjoys high popularity among users. Just eight days after its release to Apple’s App Store, it overtook Google+ to finish 16th in Japan’s free social networking site section. Twenty-thousand users have downloaded the app and the revisit rate is as high as 76 percent, meaning 76 out of 100 downloaders use the app.

Twitter engineers showed keen interest in the app, with several asking Im, “Could you send mentions or messages on Twitter?” or “I`ll give you my name card. Let’s talk again if you need my help.”

Im said, “My past failure was helpful to the K-pop tweet’s success,” adding he failed because he tried to provide services deemed important by providers instead of paying attention to the needs of users.

Under advice from Jeong Se-joo, president of WorkSmart Labs, which was chosen as the most innovative app developer by Google last year, Im tried a log analysis for the first time. The log analysis is an online tool used to analyze app use by country in real time.

Through the analysis, Im found that his app was most popular among Japanese. Seventy-eight percent of his app users are Japanese, followed by Singaporeans with 4.1 percent and Chinese with 2.28 percent. Based on such findings, he customized his app`s services.

Competitors in the contest also cited problems with the venture startup system in Korea. Choi Jeong-woo, 27, who set up the venture company GPON in July after graduating from Cornell University in the U.S., said, “Korean venture capitalists are not farsighted and tend to focus on short-term profits.”

sukim@donga.com