/Courtesy of Kakao

Kakao Entertainment announced on the 23rd that it successfully concluded its in-house AI hackathon, 'Enterton 2024,' on the 20th and revealed four award-winning ideas.

Enterton is short for the Kakao Entertainment hackathon, a competition aimed at employees to receive innovative and progressive ideas for business, service, and work innovation, and to review them for actual application. It started in 2022, and this year, it called for project planning ideas under the theme 'entertainment with AI.'

During the three-week submission period from Nov. 4 to 22, 66 crew members submitted 37 ideas in 29 teams, showing great enthusiasm. Kakao Entertainment announced the winners of one grand prize team, one excellence award team, and two merit award teams during a company-wide town hall held on the 20th after preliminary, main, and final rounds.

This year, ideas that create new fandom culture through AI particularly stood out. The grand prize went to 'Comment Snack TOP 100,' which developed an AI model to measure user responses to music comments and applied it to the Melon chart. This idea forms a new standard music chart called 'Comment Snack TOP 100,' based not on existing streaming aggregate charts but on the responses of Melon users to music. It presents a new value of 'capturing the minds of fans who love artists and music in the chart' and scored the highest in creativity, completeness, and growth potential.

The excellence award went to 'Commentent,' which processes the best comments from KakaoPage webtoons and web novels for use in social media promotion and marketing, while the merit awards went to 'Fan-made Live Highlights,' which provides summary videos by analyzing data on fans' chats and reactions after an artist's live session using AI, and 'Music Nerd,' which extracts popular rising music data from Melon and offers users AI analysis results about the reasons behind it.

Winning teams will be provided with opportunities to review the feasibility and apply their ideas to real business. In fact, the first hackathon excellence award (1st place) idea, Melon 'Music Wave,' has led to service application. The Melon Music Wave PLAVE chat event held in August recorded a maximum number of concurrent users at 10,639 and a total number of participants at 35,200, becoming a representative fandom service.

Kim Gi-beom, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Kakao Entertainment, noted, 'Enterton is a project aimed at reinforcing synergy by having crew members actively participate in discovering the company’s future growth momentum,' adding, 'We will continue to strengthen our AI technology development capabilities led by the Kakao AI brand Helix and drive the entertainment industry in both content and technology.'