• September 15, 2008

Google has purchased South Korean blogging software company Tatter and Company, or TNC. The acquisition was announced by TNC's co-CEO Chang-Won Kim in a blog posting Friday and confirmed by Mountain View, Calif.-based Google. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Kim said Google has struggled to gain market share in Korea because many of the country's Internet users rely on Web portal-style services. Those services funnel users through one central point for all their Internet needs and limit exploration of different sites.

"Google isn't entitled with God-given right to become #1 in every region it operates in, just because it's Google," he wrote. "It's actually more about the Korean Web industry than about Google. I think the Korean web industry needs a player that can, as a balancing force, provide more options to the users and help create a more open Web." --Tanya Irwin