2021 LINE DEVELOPER DAY: Key Takeaways

LINE Japan recently livestreamed its 2021 DEVELOPER DAY conference: two days and 60 online sessions running simultaneously in English, Japanese, and Korean, sharing the latest updates with LINE developers and businesses worldwide.

Day one’s Opening Keynote featured LINE CTO Euivin Park, Shinichiro Isago, CEO of LINE’s AI company, and Yusuke Yoneyama, representative of subsidiary LVC Corporation. They looked back on the milestones and challenges of LINE’s first decade and shared how Hyper CLOVA and blockchain technologies are being applied today.

A Challenging First Full Decade

Photo Credit: LINE DEVELOPER DAY 2021

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Ten years have passed since LINE officially launched in 2011. It was originally built to give users in Japan a more convenient way to message each other on their phones than email. As smartphones took off, LINE went on to change how people across East Asia communicate. As of June this year (2021), its monthly active users (MAU) had reached 2 million.

Four Milestones from the First Full Decade

LINE CTO Euivin Park opened with a few numbers to recap the milestones of LINE’s first full decade.

1. 400k req/sec｜At peak, LINE’s servers handle 400,000 messages per second from around the world.
2. 11 PB/one day｜LINE users send 11 PB (petabytes) of images, videos, and other media every day.
3. 72 billion｜Connections between LINE users have reached 72 billion, showing how closely users interact with one another.
4. 2.48 million｜The number of channels on LINE today, including LINE Official Accounts and server service providers.

LINE’s Ecosystem Keeps Growing

For users in Taiwan, LINE has long been an inseparable part of daily communication. Beyond everyday messaging, we actually spend far more time on LINE, in far more situations, than we realize.

2021 LINE CONVERGE Marketing Conference: TO THE NEXT BIZ Key TakeawaysLINE Taiwan recently held its 2021 LINE CONVERGE marketing conference online. Unlike LINE Japan’s online DEVELOPER DAY held the same month, which focused on technical applications, LINE CONVERGE zeroed in on LINE’s current growth in Taiwan and its future business direction. Facing shifting user habits in the post-pandemic era and evolving digital marketing trends, LINE Taiwan first reviewed 2021 through first-party user data, then laid out its 2022 direction under the theme “TO THE NEXT BIZ” with four keywords: Data, AI, OMO, and VIDEO. It also revealed the latest LINE CLOVA applications and introduced two new services, LINE MINI App and LINE VOOM.https://oakmega.com/blog/2021-line-converge

Media / Entertainment

Take entertainment, one of LINE’s earliest services. Built on LINE accounts, it lets users stream shows and live content right in LINE, such as TV programs and live sports on LINE TV. At the end of last month, LINE TIMELINE was also rebranded and upgraded as LINE VOOM to take on the short-form video market head-on.

Fintech

From LINE Pay, launched in 2014, to the online bank LINE Bank, LINE has repeatedly changed how users in Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, and other markets manage money, moving them toward more convenient digital financial services. Thailand stands out: LINE Bank signed up 3.3 million users in just one year after launch.

E-Commerce

You can shop on LINE too. LINE Shopping directs users to major e-commerce sites, and LINE Gift lets them send gifts with a single tap. Users can buy what they want faster, while brands can save big on ad budgets and reach customers more effectively through LINE Shopping.

Photo Credit: LINE DEVELOPER DAY

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Challenges for the Next Decade: Web 3.0 and Hyper CLOVA AI

Web 3.0: Blockchain Designed For Everyone

LINE set up its Blockchain Lab in 2018 and launched LINE Blockchain that same year, moving into Web 3.0. In 2019, it established LINE BITMAX in Japan, expanding its financial services to give users the option of trading cryptocurrency.

Yusuke Yoneyama, representative of subsidiary LVC Corporation, explained in the session that LINE’s blockchain technology aims to be “Blockchain Designed For Everyone,” delivering decentralized services through LINE that are more accessible and easier to use.

NFTs (non-fungible tokens), one of this year’s hottest topics, are one example of decentralized blockchain applications. LINE recently announced it will launch a company called “LINE NEXT” next year (2022) to build an NFT ecosystem directly on LINE.

An NFT is a one-of-a-kind digital asset whose ownership is tracked using blockchain technology. With this move, LINE hopes to build an easy-to-use trading platform right inside LINE, where users can send NFTs to each other.

Hyper CLOVA: Building Your Own Brand Data Is the Key to Competitiveness

Brands face two major challenges today: third-party data is on its way out, and consumers are increasingly protective of their privacy. That makes it harder and harder for brands to understand consumer behavior the old way. Meanwhile, the channels brands use to talk to customers keep multiplying. With consumer behavior becoming more fragmented, how can brands bring it all together?

Building first-party data with MarTech such as AI is the only effective approach. LINE is working with its Korean parent company Naver, starting with AI research in Japanese and Korean. The next goals are multilingual use and mature applications in Japanese.

How Do You Build an Effective First-Party Database? CRM Is the Only AnswerIn our last post, we discussed third-party data being blocked. So what will marketers do next? There are now various first-party data CRM (customer relationship management) solutions, such as DMPs and CDPs, all designed for a future where third-party data is harder to obtain and privacy rules like GDPR require businesses to handle user data more carefully. Many voices online are waiting for Google or Facebook to offer more solutions, and some feel there’s no real urgency. If Chrome were blocking third-party cookies tomorrow, that urgency would surely bring all kinds of solutions.https://oakmega.com/blog/crm-solution

How Does Hyper CLOVA Actually Work?

Hyper CLOVA, the AI assistant that debuted at last year’s (2020) DEVELOPER DAY, has seen new developments. Built on AI, Hyper CLOVA can help brands in three areas:

• Summarization
• Text Generation
• Dialogue

Photo Credit: LINE DEVELOPER DAY

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Shinichiro Isago, CEO of LINE’s AI company, used HyperCLOVA Studio to generate a creative marketing tagline on the spot. In the future, brands will be able to fine-tune the output by adjusting parameters such as Temperature, Repetition Penalty, and Maximum Tokens.

For now, Hyper CLOVA focuses only on Japanese. The second half of the session shared real-world use cases for Dialogue, including free-form conversations with virtual characters. (The conversation with a virtual character was shown in a demo video, with the character’s lines generated in advance by Hyper CLOVA.)

Conclusion

As user habits shift faster in the post-pandemic era and digital technology keeps advancing, LINE will remain the everyday tool we know best over the next decade, offering ever more convenient services for messaging, finance, shopping, and more.

At OakMega, we also hope to combine more features to support more of consumers’ everyday needs. With LINE’s high penetration in Taiwan in particular, we can help every user get all kinds of things done, big and small.