South Koreans, who lunch religiously between midday and 1 p.m., can now get an extra treat through a smartphone app that promises to help singles find their one true love; The app now has 800,000 subscribers

April 23, 2013 Leave a comment

“Catch of the day” for Korea’s hungry singles with popular app

2:05am EDT

By Narae Kim

SEOUL (Reuters) – South Koreans, who lunch religiously between midday and 1 p.m., can now get an extra treat through a smartphone app that promises to help singles find their one true love. In a country with the longest working hours among rich industrialised nations, and where 8 million of its 50 million people are thought to be single, the i-um app, which means “to connect”, offers detailed profiles and photographs to help match up busy singles. Subscribers register and submit photographs and personal information. Then at exactly 12:30 p.m. each day they receive a message through a stylised “lunchbox” showing the match of the day – and if both parties click “okay”, they receive the other’s name and phone number. “At 12:30 p.m., the hour and the minute hand make a straight line. That means that both the man and the woman we connect can become one,” said Park Hee-eun, who founded the company that developed the app in 2011. The app now has 800,000 subscribers and Park says that so far, 56 people have successfully found mates. “App dating was my last-ditch effort, (I was) grabbing at straws,” said Lee Ji-sun, a 33-year-old businesswoman who last month married the man she met through the app.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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