Yjzone.net

YJzone.NET, often refferd to as YJzone or YJ, is an international online community and eCommerce website primarily dedicated to South Korean consumer electronics. It is an affiliate of Amazon.com, operating eStores in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and France. Popular brands covered include Samsung, LG and iriver.

It is among the first English spoken websites to publish news about South Korean technology and has been frequently the source of information for influencial websites in the industry. On 24 September 2007, Engadget, one of the most most visited technology websites, linked to the first preview of the popular MP3 player, Samsung P2, published by YJzone.NET.

The website has more than 3,100 active users worldwide. It is a fast growing website, ranked as one of the top 180,000 websites in the world in terms of total traffic according to Alexa.

History
Predecessors

Consumer electronics were increasingly becoming popular around the world since the 21st century, in particular high-tech products such as mobile phones and MP3 players made by South Korean brands such as Samsung, LG and iriver. As a result, on 4 June 2006, GadgetKorea.com, the first English-speaking website dedicated to South Korean technology, was founded by Youngjoon Shin, commonly known as 'YJ' in the online community. It was called the '1st Generation' and consisted of a modified phpBB bulletin board designed by YJ and his team, later expanding into a small news section. It originally focused on the multimedia player iriver U10, now known as the iriver Clix, and attracted new members through offering free Adobe Flash contents such as games, applications and animations developed by the newly formed community. Later, the team succsssfuly commercialized some of their work and began selling games and applications through the website for $14.95 each, despite criticisms from other websites.

While the site was increasingly becoming popular amongst technology enthusiasts, the '2nd Generation', based on a newly designed phpBB platform, was launched on August 2006, with new dedicated forums for mobile phones. It was, however, short-lived and suffered eight major attacks from Islamic hackers as the site's servers were present in the United States. The site was down for over 72 hours and the database eradicated, with the then-closed 1st Generation site serving as an emergency backup.

Consequently, the team conducted major reforms to the site system and built a new website based on the more secure Simple Machines Forum platform. The site was renamed to KGadget and called the '3rd Generation', launched in March 2007. The new site benefited from a more modern design and for the first time, opened an international forum in various languages. On April 2007, the 'Breaking News' service was launched, with professional journalists and analysts writing as editors of the site. KGadget became quickly known around the technology world and continued to expand into various other areas such as computers, laptops, UMPCs, monitors, TVs, DVD players, digital cameras and even washing machines and microwaves. Its growth during this period was linked with the growth of South Korean electronics companies in the world and the site later joined the Top 300,000 websites in terms of traffic in July 2007.

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