Korean startup accelerator SparkLabs hosted its first Demo Day in Seoul today with five of the six companies in the inagural class it revealed back in November (one company, online gaming studio Merrywind, is developing a game that is currently in stealth mode, so it did not present today). SparkLabs also announced that it will expand into healthcare with its second round of startups, in addition to its ongoing focus on the online gaming, mobile, e-commerce and digital media sectors.
“We were originally planning to expand into healthcare next year, but the inquiries have been overwhelming from entrepreneurs in the healthcare and biotech sectors in Korea to help their companies go global. SparkLabs is excited to open our program up and accept two to four healthcare-related startups when applications open up on March 29th,” said SparkLabs co-founder Jimmy Kim in a statement.
In other news, Tom Peters, the author of “In Search of Excellence,” has joined SparkLabs’ honorary board of advisors, which already includes Mark Cuban, Vint Cerf, Arizona State University president Michael Crow, and ex-Microsoft CTO/current Talko CEO Ray Ozzie.
Here’s a glance at the five companies that presented:
ABLAR/FiveRocks
ABLAR is spinning out FiveRocks, an advertising marketplace for mobile game developers. Their FiveRocks Market launched today to provide a new advertising marketplace for mobile game developers in Korea and North America.
5Rocks Market offers opportunities for game developers to use ad inventory in a variety of deal structures. For example, game developers are able to form a credit union of ad inventory for CPI/CPC or to borrow ad inventory in advance and pay back with inventory or cash (loan). These ad products are designed for small and medium sized game developers to lessen their marketing burden.
NFLabs
NFLabs launched Peloton Personal Edition, which allows individuals, such as data scientists, to utilize their big data platform for testing and analysis. This version includes Peloton’s lightning-fast ad-hoc query engine and dynamic graphical generator. It will allow users to add user-defined functions, as well as custom-built business logic, and this will be used on top of existing Hadoop deployments.
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NFLabs also launched a limited beta release of their Enterprise Edition, which is an end-to-end platform for managing, processing and analyzing large-scale data sets. This is available for one month of free usage without commitment.
WePlanet
WePlanet launched a new personal smart journal called STEP. STEP is a mobile service that is focused on tracking life activities through an intuitive icon-based platform and provides aggregated information through infographics. STEP helps users capture snapshots of their lives in a timely and meaningful manner with just a few icon clicks then easily aggregates and analyzes their activities.
Memebox
Memebox launched their single-touch subscription for mobile. Through a short SMS, Memebox users can click and instantly log into their Memebox account. They can easily complete a purchase through their mobile device with a single click on an item. This is the first of many mobile features and apps that Memebox is launching in 2013.
KnowRe
KnowRe is an educational technology company that develops an adaptive learning solution focused on providing a personalized learning experience for each student. KnowRe presented their recently launched beta for students and teachers with an initial focus on math skllls.
