Hello, Korea! Hello, Korbit!

It’s been a while since I wrote the news that I joined Stokke to be one of the starting members for the innovation hub in Shanghai. We started the R&D tech lab to make IoT products for babies by adapting Stokke products. It was quite big challenging for every one in the company since we’re all new to this kind of edge technology for the baby care products.

We aimed to launch a product in a new category that no one ever had succeeded in it. Due to the high risk of opening new product category for the market, it was not easy to get the safety certificate guaranteed by a safety certification company since they even didn’t know how to do the test to guarantee the safety. Thus we couldn’t launch our products at the moment even though we’ve tried so hard to make those. More over, that year there was an accident and the huge recall made by Fisher-Price due to the product safety failed.

While we were struggle on it, the Corona virus came up all over the world this year, started from China. In addition to that, Stokke also made a decision to shutdown the innovation hub in Shanghai… Accordingly, I had to come back to Korea early of this year for the various of reasons.

Korea’s First Bitcoin Exchange, Korbit!

About a month ago, I got an opportunity to work with a company named Korbit doing Bitcoin exchange business in Korea. Korbit is one of the big four companies in Korea in the field of Bitcoin exchange. They have more than 20 cryptocurrencies published right now supporting the trading in Korean Won. Korbit was founded by Tony Lyu in 2013 and got invested by several parties in the early days including SoftBank Ventures and PANTERA Capital. It’s acquired by NXC afterwards which is well-known as the game company, NEXON, in Korea.

I joined this company recently to be in charge of the mobile app of Korbit and to lead the development team for the app. It’s a new challenge for me again since this is also new area for me while we’re facing lots of difficulties in the business, especially in Korea due to the new upcoming regulatory for the cryptocurrency. Despite of all the difficulties, I’m quite exiting to be part of the journey and want to be succeeded in this challenge.

We’re all facing difficult situations right now due to the virus. Let’s keep working on it step by step. Please take care of yourself first. Thank you.

Korbit | https://www.korbit.co.kr/

PICKME! SNS for Indecisiveness

Last spring semester, I developed a SNS application called PICKME! for indecisiveness with my teammates as a project in the class of KAIST CS408 Computer Science Project. This project aimed to help people who want to resolve their indecisive issues by asking to massive users who experienced similar issues or just asking their opinions via votes or comments.

“How can we resolve their issues effectively?”

Our goal was the developing a mobile service application for end users and recommender system to recommend personalized contents so that users can easily find their similar or interested issues and resolve their indecisive issues which they might be interested.

Key Features

1) Post a card that user want to share to resolve his/her issue
2) Participate vote to share his/her opinions
3) Communicate via comments to share his/her thought
4) Explorer and get recommended contents from recommender system

We used Unity for a client application for Android and iOS platforms, and Firebase and Django for database and server networking. We also extracted and analyzed 15,000+ tweets to test our recommender system based on collaborative filtering with LDA topics. To measure our project, we did a survey to KAIST members with the mobile application as a beta testing.

References

[1] Paul Covington, Jay Adams, Emre Sargin, “Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations”, in 2016
[2] CARLOS A. GOMEZ-URIBE and NEIL HUNT, Netflix, Inc., “The Netflix Recommender System: Algorithms, Business Value, and Innovation”
[3] Michael Hahsler, “recommenderlab: A Framework for Developing and Testing Recommendation Algorithms”
[4] P.Selvaperumal, Dr.A.Suruliandi, “SHORT MESSAGE CLASSIFICATION ALGORITHM FOR TWEET CLASSIFICATION”, in 2014 International Conference on Recent Trends in Information Technology

Rhythm Boxing, Crash Girls Released

Hey guys! Just few weeks ago, the brand new action rhythm game, Crash Girls released! This is the boxing game with cute girls. Let’s challenge for boxing competition with exciting music & rhythm! Yay~!

“Welcome! You are invited to our world boxing championship competition. Compete with global challengers for the world championship title. Fame and wealth only for the champion are awaited. Wish you good luck!” – Mysterious Host

This game is focused on gamers who want to play casual 2d rhythm game with female characters in Japanese style. Yes, here we have cute and lovely boxing girls for you. You can choose one of the boxing girls as your partner to enjoy the game tournaments.

The game also needs playing skill to get high scores and combos. When you punch and guard at perfect time to exciting music and rhythm, you will be a winner of premier leagues. Don’t give up till you take the victory at the champion league.

Let’s talk about the programming part. After we have developed Boom Boom Power, I started to develop Crash Girls for next step. I decided to use Unity for following project, so it became my first official project developed with Unity. Unity is the powerful and effective 3d game engine of Unity Technologies. For more details, visit www.unity3d.com.

In my team, we mainly used to develop games with cocos2d-x. But we needed to develop our following game with Unity for future project. We wanted to support various devices and platforms easily and also make development process good to teamwork. Unity had already everything we want, so we decided to change our development environment to Unity even if the first project needed only 2d features.

Now, the game is begun. We invite you to global ranking of Crash Girls. Invite your facebook friends and fight for the highest world ranker!

Official Website: http://crashgirls.blueo.com/

• ‘碰碰少女’ is the Chinese name of Crash Girls.
• Crash Girls supported Korean, English, Chinese languages.
• Crash Girls may or may NOT be available on your country. It will be released sequentially soon. Please hold on till the market is available.

It was published by BlueO, a subsidiary company of ESTsoft.

Boom Boom Power Released

Today, I’m very excited to announce that we finally released our latest project, Boom Boom Power! We’ve been working so hard for so long! I’m very glad that we eventually made it. Yeah!

This, Boom Boom Power, is the second mobile game project of ESTsoft. It’s a casual racing game with the cutest animal characters. All the characters, objects and themes are so cute and very unique. And the game play of Boom Boom Power is so simple that everyone can play and enjoy it easily. Move your hero, avoid evil enemies, and score your ranking. You can compete with your Facebook friends and share your records onto Facebook timeline. It’s the best way for playing game with your social connected friends.

• Ready 5 adorable characters for you.
• Avoid and defeat more than 10 enemies.
• Explore and reach very special themes.
• Collect all letters and make it a whole ‘Chicken’!
• Invite and play it with your Facebook friends.

We’ve developed it with cocos2d-x for both of platforms, Android and iOS. We use Java and JNI for Android, Objective-C++ and Cocoa Frameworks for iOS, and native C/C++ language for game client. Cocos2d-x is the easiest way to support Android and iOS at the same time. You can build and test on one platform, such as Windows, in development process.

You can play it with both of Android and iOS devices now. Here’s the link to Google Play and Apple AppStore for you. Let’s play and compete with your friends in Boom Boom Power!

For now, we support it only for Korean. We plan to localize and publish it for other languages soon. Please look forward to world-wide version of Boom Boom Power. Boom! Boom!

Official Website: http://www.boomboompower.net/

Beyond Hair Shop Friends for Kakao

It’s been a long time! It’s almost a year after ESTsoft published ‘Hair Shop Friends for Kakao’. Live Team for Hair Shop Friends have been managing it and also have released a couple of major updates with very special themes. There were Choco-Vanilla, Modern-Rococo, and so on.

In the meantime, I have been working on next project in ESTsoft. Now I’m working hard to release our next mobile game and we’re about to publish it soon. I know it’s late, but nevertheless I’m really looking forward to it.

So, I thought it’s a good time to look back our previous project, the first mobile game of ESTsoft, Hair Shop Friends. That’s the reason why I post it with some illustrations and screenshots at this moment. In fact, I wish I could post more unique illustrations including other styles of it, but I’m not sure that it’s ok to publish closed resources.

Oh, I almost forgot to say, HAPPY NEW YEAR 2014 !!

• You can expand all the images included in this post.