Dating back to 2011 in the wake of a devastating tsunami in Japan, the LINE chat application was started as a communication tool for staff at the Tokyo office of South Korea’s internet powerhouse NAVER.

The latter released the app for public use in June the same year and it quickly came to dominate the market in Japan and gained a foothold in many Asian countries. Now in competition with the likes of WhatsApp and WeChat, LINE has 218 million monthly active users, with two-thirds distributed across Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia.

Among the top decisionmakers on technology development for the main LINE app is Euivin Park, the senior vice president of LINE Corporation, who was appointed to serve concurrently as chief technology officer in April 2014.

Park started her career at Neowiz Games Corporation in 2002, where she engaged in game development. She moved to South Korea’s search portal 1noon (now NAVER Corporation) in 2005. Park joined NAVER’s office in Tokyo in 2007 before it was spun off into a wholly owned subsidiary in 2013.

Amid the 17 sessions at LINE Developer Day, Park talked with a group of Indonesian journalists about plans for the country’s market. Below are excerpts from the discussion:

It is uncommon to have a woman in a top position at a tech company. What is the situation at LINE?

I believe that women in tech are becoming more common. I am not the first person who has a high position and is also a woman, but it’s still an honor for me. Today, we here at LINE have many female engineers in different country branches — that can be seen as equality between men and women in this work field.

In your keynote speech you mentioned how LINE responded to the Internet of Things (IoT) buzz by introducing LINE Beacon. Could you elaborate?

IoT is among our main focuses that we’re trying to develop by employing, among other things, LINE Beacon. Although this platform remains a concept today, it will have various utilizations such as setting it up in a toy that will connect to mobile devices or smartphones. We are still developing ideas and trying to realize IoT with the LINE app.

Have you considered entering the hardware business by producing devices such as a smartband or smartwatch, for example?

We don’t have such plans yet as we are still focused on middleware. But it’s not impossible — if we had the chance and found the right partner to build hardware, we could try to take the opportunity to create a device that connects to LINE.

How do you deal with competitors with similar services?

I know that there are many messaging application similar to LINE. I won’t name names because you must know who they are. But we at LINE are optimistic in our development in providing features or services that engage our users. To boot, there are some features we had first that other apps later copied, so we’re still the pioneer in this business.

There are features presently available in other countries but not in Indonesia. What makes the difference?

We rely on observation and surveys on the needs of users in particular countries. We learn that each country has different necessities, therefore we fine tune the features and services accordingly. Indonesia is an important market for the growth of LINE, therefore we observe users in Indonesia more than we do in the US, for instance.

What is in the pipeline for the Indonesia market?

I can’t tell you anything now. Not that there is nothing, but I’m not allowed to reveal it now as the development in Indonesia is taking place so fast. For certain, we will release video broadcast LINE LIVE and some other features exclusively for Indonesia. Just wait.

 

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