Couple weeks back at the Red Herring conference, I met the CEO of South Korea’s WiZarD Works. WiZarD Works is a personalized startpage that is very much like Netvibes, iGoogle and Pageflakes. Their presence is only their home market and in terms of brand recognition in personalized startpage, they still lead the market with Google not too far behind.

Wzd does plan to offer other languages, Japanese and English are in the works. It was interesting to find out that they do not utilize the community like many of the other web services in the States when it comes to localizing their site. In the case of Japanese, they work with a company for that. Also, they’ve got a lot of cool new features lined up that separates them from the other services above and could be a profitable business, at least in Korea. Like others, APIs will be made available as well.

Wzd is the first personalized startpage to come out from Asia. I can’t comment on how successful they are in Korea, but in Hong Kong, the idea of a personalized startpage is a new one with low adoption rate. There is no clear leader although I bet Google has a clear advantage over everyone else here. According to a notable local blogger, Just a Sidekick, Google Taiwan (Google HK only has a sales office here, hidden somewhere in IFC) came and held a gathering with some local bloggers a couple months back with their new iGoogle design specifically for, to test the Asian market.