SM Planet Wins Grand Prize in Media Startup Competition

Excellence Award Goes to BigLink and Ieogada

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Press Foundation announced on the 10th that they selected five outstanding companies, including SM Planet, through this year's 'Media Startup Support Project' competition.

This project supports media startups that discover creative business models using news data by providing 30 million KRW, expert training, and free use of the news big data analysis system (BigKinds API).

SM Planet, which won the grand prize, developed 'EasyPlus,' an AI-based personalized news platform for digitally vulnerable groups. It is a system that removes unnecessary advertisements and extracts key information to provide visually impaired users with news reflecting their personal interests.

The excellence awards went to BigLink, which developed a generative AI-based news content production platform, and Eogada, which developed an automatic audio content generation system. ThirtyBlack, which created a customer-tailored AI content verification solution, and Saida Economy, which developed an AI content generation service for economic issues, received encouragement awards.

On the same day, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism also held an awards ceremony for the News Big Data Hackathon. The grand prize was awarded to the 'Beagle' team, which proposed an idea combining news big data and generative AI technology. Their proposed AI program, 'Good Question,' is a nonfiction reading education service that broadens background knowledge and improves literacy by answering AI-generated questions.

The News Big Data Hackathon is a competition to discover service ideas using news data. This year, 120 teams participated.