The popularity of’Club House’, a social relational service (SNS) that communicates with voice is hot. Club House is a free SNS that allows you to chat with several people through words as if you were calling instead of typing text.
It was developed by Alpha Exploration, a startup (start-up) founded by Paul Davidson, an alumni of Stanford University in the United States, and Roan Seth from Google in April of last year. Until last October, the number of users did not exceed 10,000, but recently it has increased to 3 million.
In particular, Tesla’s chief executive (CEO) Elon Musk and Vladimir Teneb, CEO of Robin Hood, a stock trading brokerage app, drew great attention on the 1st by having a hot war on short selling. Since then, famous politicians such as Park Young-sun, former Minister of Small and Medium Venture Business, Chairman Kim Bong-jin, Chairman of Elegant Brothers, and Toss Lee Seung-gun, and other famous politicians, startup representatives, and entertainers joined one after another, and the number of users in Korea increased significantly.
As a result, Alpha Exploration has become a unicorn, a startup with a corporate value of more than 1 trillion won, with a corporate value of 100 million dollars (approximately 110 billion won) last year, and recently jumped to 1 billion dollars (about 1.1 trillion won). In fact, it predicted the emergence of another giant SNS platform like Twitter and Facebook.
Originally, the clubhouse was misrepresented as a closed-type SNS where you can sign up only by receiving an invitation, so there was an absurd thing to buy and sell invitations in the used market app’Carrot Market’. However, you can sign up without an invitation. When you apply for subscription in the app, the app prompts existing subscribers to recommend subscriptions. If someone agrees, you can sign up right away without an invitation. Actually, when I tried this way, I signed up in 5 minutes.
How to use is simple. When signing up, you can select a number of topics of interest, such as travel, politics, music, books, movies, religion, sports, and economy, and the corresponding chat rooms around the world will appear. If you choose one of these, you can listen to people or speak like a radio. If necessary, you can also create a chat room with a Korean title. Recently, as the number of domestic users has increased rapidly, the number of chat rooms with Korean titles has increased.
However, Club House is still available only on Apple’s’iPhone’. Alpha Exploration has not yet disclosed plans to support Android phones.
Chat rooms opened in the clubhouse. There is also a chat room titled in Korean.
comfortable
The biggest advantage of the clubhouse is its simplicity. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, you can talk in words without having to press the keyboard. That’s why it is known as’audio tweeter’ in the IT industry.
The sound quality is excellent here. The sound quality is so good that it is incomparable to the voice call function of’KakaoTalk’ or’Line’ messenger, and it is like a mobile communication service. That’s why overseas musicians do some kind of impromptu performance in clubhouses. In Korea, Singer Horan entered the clubhouse and sang without accompaniment.
Multi-party conversation threatens mobile communication service
Clubhouse allows more than 1,000 people to enter a chat room, enabling multi-party conversations that are impossible in KakaoTalk, Line, or mobile communication services. Therefore, it is possible to create and utilize a limited room where only them can participate in discussion meetings, meetings and conversations with employees scattered in various countries, or with relatives scattered abroad.
For this reason, experts believe that it will threaten voice calls such as roaming of mobile communications. CEO Jeong Woo-jin of Digital X1 said, “We send document files necessary for meetings by e-mail, and each person sees them and meets at the clubhouse. We will quickly replace the last remaining voice service of mobile communication.”
Stimulating Human Touch in Corona
Experts see the success factor of the clubhouse as a’human touch’ that touches people’s emotions. Kidae Lee, director of the startup alliance, said, “After the spread of the novel coronavirus infection (Corona 19), many conversation meetings have disappeared from all over the world.” ”Explained. In addition to this, unlike multi-party video calling systems that require a face to be exposed, such as’zoom’ and’hangout’, only the voice can be heard, so people can use it without burden.
Clubhouse app that can be downloaded from the iPhone App Store.
Lack of scalability
As of yet, Clubhouse does not support external documents, images, videos, audio files or other apps. Therefore, it is an opinion that it is limited to use as a presentation or radio broadcast. Choi Sang-gi, CEO of Whitrust Coffee, said, “If you can export music stored on your mobile phone right away, it will play a role as a radio broadcaster, but it’s regrettable that there will be a limit to support due to copyright issues.”
Crime abuse concerns
Clubhouses cannot record conversations between users. If this is violated, the user number (ID) is permanently suspended. If you participate late in the open chat room as well as the chat room that ended because it does not support listening again, you will not be able to know the contents of the conversation in front. In a word, there is no trace of conversation like’telegram’.
This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. This is because concerns about the emergence of the Telegram, such as drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and crime simulations by international terrorist organizations, may be repeated.
No revenue model
Crucially, clubhouses still have no way for both operators and users to make money. Like YouTube, the company and users need to have a means of making money, such as sharing profits or offering paid premium services separately, and there is no such profit structure yet.
The absence of a profit model can only increase user fatigue and lead to churn. Kidae Lee, director of the startup alliance, emphasized, “It has a structure that makes it easy to earn money because you can post advertisements that fit the theme of the chat room. You need a profit model to secure audio influencers and increase their influence.”
Yeonjin Choi IT professional reporter [email protected]
News directly edited by the Hankook Ilbo can also be viewed on Naver.
