Wisia Beta... Social Recommendations (Win A New iPhone!)

Wisia is a new social recommendation service launched out of IWIlab, a startup incubator. This was started by Brian Kim, the co-founder of Hangame and former CEO of NHN Corp. Hangame, which was the leading online casual gaming company in the world, merged with Naver.com several years ago to form NHN Corp, and today they dominate the search market with approximately 80% market share in South Korea.

Anyway, Brian, Dean, John and their team have been working hard to churn out various products for multiple markets across the globe. They recently launched Buru, which was covered by Mashable ("Buru: FriendFeed Plus Delicious").

Now they have launched Wisia's beta and are looking for more beta testers. Just go to their site and use this invite code "bernardmoon" and hack away. Blunt and bold feedback is appreciated.

They are also giving incentive for people to crank on their beta by having a contest where you can win a new Apple 3G iPhone or $50 iTunes gift cards. Check it out!

Web 2.0 Asia has more about Wisia here.

Google Launches Universal Search in Korea

I knew about this for a while that Google was working on launching "Universal Search" in Korea. This allows Google to compete in South Korea, which is the 5th largest online ad market in the world. Universal Search is standard in Korea and Naver.com, which has almost 80% of the search market in Korea has provided it since 2002... I think (Chang or anyone? I forgot the exact year).

"Google adopts universal search in South Korea"

Here's a sample of Universal Search within Naver.com. Even though it's for the Korean language, I entered "Michael Jordan" and here are the results:





So you can look above or go to this link and see that the search results are categorized by blog results, online groups, books, videos, image, news, etc.

Search Engine Land has an in-depth review of the updated service in the U.S. here.