Line Corporation - LINE

Line (styled as LINE) is a freeware app for instant communications on electronic devices such as smartphones, tablet computers, and personal computers. Line users exchange texts, images, video and audio, and conduct free VoIP conversations and video conferences. In addition, Line is a platform providing various services including digital wallet as Line Pay, news stream as Line Today, video on demand as Line TV, and digital comic distribution as Line Manga and Line Webtoon. The service is operated by Line Corporation, a subsidiary of Korean internet search engine company, Naver Corporation. As its competitor Kakao dominated Korean messaging market, Naver Corporation launched a messenger application NAVER Talk in February 2011 in South Korea. However, because South Korean messaging market was dominated by Kakao, the business of NAVER Talk was depressed. Naver Corporation was expanding their messaging application and targeted to other countries' messaging markets which has not been developed yet. Naver Corporation released their messaging application, which changed its name as 'LINE', to Japanese messaging market in 2011. As LINE became a huge success, finally NAVER combined NAVER Talk and LINE in March 2012.[7][8] They changed NAVER's Japanese branch name NHN JAPAN as LINE Corporation. LINE reached 100 million users within eighteen months and 200 million users only six months later.[9] Line became Japan's largest social network in 2013. In October 2014, Line announced that it had attracted 560 million users worldwide with 170 million active user accounts.[10][11] In February 2015, it announced the 600 million users mark had been passed and 700 million were expected by the end of the year.[12] It is the most popular messaging application in Japan.[13] It is also popular in Taiwan, Thailand, Turkmenistan and Indonesia.[13][14] Line was originally developed as a mobile application for Android and iOS smartphones. The service has since expanded to BlackBerry OS (August 2012),[15] Nokia Asha (Asia and Oceania, March 2013),[16][17] Windows Phone (July 2013),[18] Firefox OS (February 2014),[19] iOS tablets (October 2014), and as a Chrome Browser Application (via the Chrome Web Store). At one point, Line was available as a website (non-browser-app), but it has since been discontinued. The application also exists in versions for laptop and desktop computers using the Microsoft Windows and macOS platforms.