SparkLabs 2nd Batch's Demo Day Reflects Trends in Asia, Adds a Dozen New Mentors

Dr. Sang Cha, Creator of SAP HANA; Pat Kinsel, EIR at Polaris Partners; Ty Ahmad-Taylor, Head of Smart TV Services at Samsung Electronics; Over 100 World-Class Mentors Now at SparkLabs


SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA--(Marketwired - Sep 30, 2013) - SparkLabs (www.sparklabs.co.kr), a startup accelerator in Korea, hosted its second Demo Day in Seoul, Korea. The accelerator also added over a dozen new mentors to its stable of world-class mentors, which now boast over one hundred.

"We are excited about our second batch of companies. We believe these companies reflect major trends in Asia in terms of what you'll see in the coming years, such as growth in the e-commerce space, new targeted social networks and completely new innovations," explained Eugene Kim, Principal at SparkLabs.

"Unlike many accelerator programs, our mentors are active since we match each company with 4-6 mentors during their program. Since we now take up to 15 companies per class, we needed to expand our stable of mentors. Dr. Cha, who built one of SAP's core platforms (SAP HANA), recently joined along with Pat Kinsel, who recently sold his company (Spindle) to Twitter, and Ty Ahmad-Taylor, who is Head of Smart TV Services at Samsung Electronics. These are just a few of the incredible people who have volunteered to help the entrepreneurs at SparkLabs," stated Bernard Moon, co-founder of SparkLabs.

For SparkLabs' second Demo Day, eight companies presented:

DesignplusD: Their leading productivity app, MemoZy, announced several new features from changing to a registration-based service, a new "Timeline" feature, and synchronization between the iPhone and iPad. MemoZy has been the App Store's number one productivity app in 12 countries. It is also available for Android devices.

iBabyBox: From a co-founder of CyWorld (Korea's first major social network), Yong Hyoung, iBabyBox launched a social marketplace for baby items. Described as a place where savvy moms go to connect, share and browse all types of baby products.

HeyBread: HeyBread is a leading curation e-commerce company in South Korea that is focused on premium organic breads from local bakeries. Every morning it delivers fresh breads from handpicked bakeries to customers. The company discussed its expansion into new categories.

MangoPlate: This restaurant discovery service for Seoul launched their new UI and service. MangoPlate will help you find restaurants based on recommendations from your trusted network of people. Their app is available on iOS and Android.

StyleWiki: A social wiki platform for fashion enthusiasts that launched an Android app and will soon have a web version. It is a user-friendly, interactive style encyclopedia that collects fashion intelligence from its community to help people to share, discover and get all relevant information about style in one place.

Lateral: The company is launching COGO, a platform for search. COGO automatically retrieves, indexes, and organizes your search sessions so that users can easily navigate and discover to focus on what really matters. You can sign up for their beta at www.cogoweb.com.

Zoyi: The company launched their new product, Walk Analytics. It provides insights to offline business including foot-traffic, visit duration, and engagement data. Taking advantage of high population density and world's best mobile penetration in Seoul, Walk Analytics will help their initial customers optimize marketing and operations performance.

TrakInvest: The company is launching the world's first social investment platform for equities built on a learn-share-earn model. Their beta is live at www.trakinvest.com and users receive a phantom cash allocation to kick-start their investment track record. Users have access to an incredible library of research and analytics (12,000+ research reports update weekly) through their partnership with Reuters. They recently signed a partnership with Religare, one of the major financial and brokerage houses in India, to make available to their users the ability to execute real money trades through trakinvest.com via their portal.

About SparkLabs
SparkLabs is a startup accelerator founded by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs in South Korea. The focus will be on startup companies from the Internet, online gaming, mobile, ecommerce, digital media, and healthcare sectors. The mentorship-driven program will be three months in length and provides funding, office space, a structure program and access to a top-tier network of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors and executives. For more information, please visit www.sparklabs.co.kr

Contact Information:

Contact:
Bernard Moon
Co-founder
+1-650-454-5244
or