Internet Map Service War - Who’s gonna be winner ?

It seems Korean major internet portals decided to make their map service as the new force to growth.

Naver(www.naver.com), No.1 Internet Portal in Korea, launched ‘Photo Street’, showing photos of downtown and direct call service to make reservation of selected place.

Naver’s ‘Photo Street’

Daum(www.daum.net) will begin to serve ‘Skyview’, showing aerial photograph of Korean landscape with maximum 25cm/pixel level. Also Daum is planning to launch ‘Roadview’, providing real photos of selected street, which is similar to Google Streetview. It will synchronize every contents in Daum like Hanmail, cafe(community) and etc. Follwing is official trail for Daum’s new map services ‘Skyview’ and ‘Roadview’.

Yahoo Korea(kr.yahoo.com) has begun the aerial photograph with 60cm for Seoul and 6 Metropolitan cities and 2m with other area. Its location information searching service ‘Keo-ki’ is linked.

Yahoo Korea’s ‘Satellite Map’

Paran(www.paran.com) serves 60cm aerial photograph and find local information of Korea Tourism Organization and Wikipedia, etc. and user generated map at one try.

Paran’s ‘Open Map’

Google also recently updated its map service in Korea, with updating Korean users can see the map more in detail than before such as road and building names.

Google’s newly updated ‘Satellite Map’

Each player is expecting the prior occupation of portal map market with their resolution and linking-legacy service competition. It could generate additional revenue like advertisement on the maps and sale of map sources and also get evolution of mobile and location base service.

We should keep eyes on these action if they could make the change into the ‘Ubiquitous platform’ which provide the real time information through fixed/mobile network.