CyWorld is four years old and a mobile blogging powerhouse in the South Korean market. Wired magazine reported  "the online service blends homepage building and social networking with a host of other online activities, including Sims-like role-playing  The online community blends homepage building and social networking with a host of other online activities, including Sims-like role-playing" to their own virtual communities called "  minihompy where they can create diaries, publish images, network, host legal background music and more."

CyWorld seems to have ingrained itself in Korean culture. Although initially just another portal allowing people to create social networks and update them over mobile phones, its reach has spread further than similar American services like MySpace.com and Facebook.com.

BusinessWeek reported last fall that " Cyworld is threatening to swallow South Korea. Less than four years after its launch, 15 million people, or almost a third of the country's population, are members." Furthermore, features such as "waveriding" (the ability to interact with each others virtual rooms) and umlimited space for uploading pictures (currently around 6.2 million a day) keep users coming back and reduce churn to levels not seen in many competing services. It is growing and looking to expand into the lucrative Chinese and Japanese markets according to several Korean publications.

We feel this is important because given market saturation of service providers and similar service offerings even established giants such as Samsumg Electronics are hard presses to generate revenues in face of increasing competition. Services such as Cy World on the other hand are betting (and so far correctly it seems) that one way to break this bottleneck is to attract mobile internet users and to plug as much mobile content as possible. We're certainly placing them on our radar of services to watch for 2006.

See CyWorld.com

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