-  New location-based service combining T Map Place and social features
-  Daily updates on hot places in 82 categories and themes for 355 local areas   
-  ‘Pick’ to keep track of places to visit and share experience with others
Over 20,000 high-quality local contents from experts and power bloggers
-  SK Planet to partner with 11 St to launch the largest coupon event in Korea in February
-  ‘Pick and donate KRW 500’ campaign to continue until December 31

SK Planet today announced the launch of pickat, which is an innovative location-based service built by integrating social
features into the existing T Map Place.
                                                                    
Pickat is a social local information service and a more evolved version of the T Map Place, which recorded a monthly user
number of 13.4 million in October. Pickat makes it easy for users to gather information about the dining, travel and
entertainment venues frequented by trendy people. It also allows users to upload and share their experience with others.
 
Pickat offers information about the most popular venues by 82 categories—e.g. Korean cuisine, international cuisine,
bakeries and camping grounds—and/or by local themes. Updates are made on a daily basis for easy access to new
information. Various documents available on the web, such as blog entries, are analyzed to rank the hot places to be
for each of the 355 popular local themes.
 
An interesting feature of pickat is the ‘pick’ which allows the user to give a thematic name to his or her favorite place.
The different experiences that users have of a place are stored as thematic descriptions as people ‘pick,’ and the
growing body of this data facilitates the search for a venue that suits one’s taste and the occasion.
 
Pickat has partnered with experts and power bloggers to provide over 20,000 high-quality ‘pick’ contents on must-visit
places. Users can themselves ‘pick’ a place they like or simply ‘repick’ someone else’s contents. They can also sign
up for thematic updates, which will send new input by experts and friends to be viewed on My Page. As the number of
‘picks’ grows so does the body of information about local places. Users can benefit from having reliable information to
choose the hottest places to have fun with friends.
 
In the coming February, Pickat will be distributing the greatest number of coupons in Korea with the support of partners
like 11 St. Coupons that may be used off-line are downloadable at each shop’s webpage, which will ultimately help pickat
evolve into an effective marketing platform.
 
“We are launching pickat, a fun and easy way to utilize local information, built based on the massive location data of T Map,
an extremely popular service used by 14.7 million people,” said Kim Jang-uk, Senior Vice President and Head of Open
Social Business Division of SK Planet. “Going forward, we hope to grow pickat into a true social service platform where
customers not only look for places to go but also share information on diverse themes. By integrating coupons and
commercial services we plan to evolve pickat into a local marketing platform of the future.”
 
Pickat will celebrate its launch with events that will continue until the December 31. By downloading the pickat app and
picking a place, one can actually donate KRW 500 in his or her name. There are also prizes for lucky pickers. Ten
Galaxy Note 2 and 1,000 Starbucks gifticons are waiting to find their owner. After the event, the donations will go to the
Korean Salvation Army.