Google Acquires Korean Blogging Platform Textcube

Today Google has acquired a Korean blogging platform Textcube owned by TNC (Tatter and Company) for an undisclosed amount. This is the first acquisition for Google in Korea.

TNC CEO describes the company as a Korean Automattic “that develops a cool blogging platform that’s favorited by the nation’s A-list bloggers, and also works closely with the open source community.” Similar to Wordpress, the company offers an open-source blogging software at Textcube.org and a recently launched hosted blogging platform at Textcube.com.

The platform sold to Google is not actually the first blogging software the company sold - the first product, Tistory, was acquired by the number 2 Korean portal Daum. The acquired by Google Textcube is told to deeply integrate blogging with social networking. The platform is reported to be used by 400 thousand users in Korea, including 65 of the country’s top 100 bloggers.

It looks like a trend that Google is starting to buy companies in countries where it does not enjoy its usual market domination in search. There are only 4 countries in the world where search by Google is not the market leader, including South Korea (the other 3 are China, Russia and Czech Republic) and after the recent buy into Russian contextual advertising industry with Begun Google now seems to be determined to buy into other markets as well with the acquisition of the Korean company.

Now that TNC is acquired, the CEO hopes that Google will use its power combined by the platform’s presence in the market to build a more significant presence in Korea and help drive users from the comfort of Yahoo-like portals - which are told to be very popular in Korea impeding startups innovation as competition with these giants is virtually impossible here.