By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
It looks like Daum (www.daum.net) is delivering on its promise to plug the real world into the Web, literally.
South Korea's second-largest Internet company has been desperate to mount a meaningful challenge against NHN, the industry's kingpin that operates Naver (www.naver.com), the country's most popular Web site.
Daum's latest weapon is a detailed photographic map of Korea which offers crystal-clear views of landscapes, buildings, roads and the sushi restaurant you reserved for dinner.
Since its much-anticipated debut earlier this week, Daum's digital map services have been garnering explosive acclaim from Internet users, and company officials are euphoric after seeing the Web portal's daily visitors more than double.
However, it remains to be seen whether Daum's new product proves to be good to a fault, with the slew of reports about identifiable pedestrians and readable license plates suggesting that privacy concerns are real.
The key features of the interactive map are ``Sky View,'' which provides high-resolution aerial images of the country, and ``Road View,'' which provides a panoramic, ground-level view of a given area.
All over the blogosphere are postings from those who claim to have found photos of themselves or their cars on Daum's virtual streets, as well as reports about identifiable faces and license plates. And it seems that the hunt is officially on for bizarre and potentially embarrassing images.
The best bloggers have come up with so far is an image of a young couple entering a motel near a leisure district in Changcheon-dong, downtown Seoul. Another couple is seen cuddling in Olympic Park in Oryun-dong, southeastern Seoul.
Daum officials, although clearly excited about the generated buzz, are concerned about the looming privacy concerns.
The company is currently operating a ``hotline'' system that is interconnected with its map services whereby bloggers may report undesirable photos, and will increase the size of its monitoring team.
Daum has a team of engineers who blur faces and license plates for its Internet map services. The process is a pure manual effort, as the company has yet to develop a facial-recognition algorithm that could scan faces to blur.
``The process is half-automatic,'' said a Daum official.
``Our fingers and the mouse.''
Maps are the new focus of competition in the Internet industry and Naver, Yahoo! Korea (www.yahoo.co.kr), Paran (www.paran.com) and Google Korea (www.google.co.kr) are the other portals involved.
However, in terms of pure quality, Daum clearly sets the industry bar, and the company is confident that the virtual maps and interlaid location-based opportunities will help create new business models and contribute to increasing search traffic.
Although company officials decline to comment on costs, it is believed that Daum spent over 20 billion won to launch its map services, collaborating with SamAh Aerial Survey for the aerial photos and Pix Korea for the street-level images.