41998c08.qxd:Blogging Heroes
2/24/08
7:27 PM
Page 103
TJ Kang: ThinkFree
103
We’re at the Inflection Point TJ Kang is the CEO of ThinkFree, where he leads the strategic direction of the company. He has worked with ThinkFree since 1999, when he founded it. Like many people in the Web 2.0 world, TJ has a background that helped lead to what is now considered a prominent Web 2.0 site. TJ talks about his background, about ThinkFree, and about technology.
Tell a little bit about yourself and about ThinkFree. I started this business in my last year of college, while I was a student at a University in Canada. I came across an algorithm with some friends that could be used to automate Korean language input. Although I was living in Canada, I grew up in Korea, and the Korean writing system is different from other East Asian writing systems in the sense that it is an alphabet. It only has twenty-four letters, but you arrange these letters in a two-dimensional space, rather than in a single dimension, as in English, to compose a syllable block. In English, if you want to divide words into syllables, you actually need a hyphenation dictionary to do it properly because there are no simple rules for this. In Korean it’s fairly easy. There is a well-defined orthographic rule that every Korean writer understands. The letters are composed so that each syllable forms a visible whole distinct from each other. Even if you don’t understand Korean, you can always tell where one syllable ends and the new one begins. The alphabetic letters comprising the syllable block may change their shapes depending on what other letters are present in that block. If the same rules were to be applied to English writing, the letter “K” in “King” would look different from the same letter in “Kong.” This obviously made Korean typewriting a difficult process. The typist often had to use two or three different shift keys to select the correct instance of the same letter depending on the context. When computers came along, I figured that with the intelligence that a computer CPU can provide, that perhaps we could automate this. When I looked at this problem with some friends, we found a simple but elegant rule that can be programmed into a computer. So, back in 1982, we created the software for a demonstration on our Apple II computers. And it worked. One thing led to another and we started developing a full-fledged Korean word processor.