My friend, Chang who is the author at Web 2.0 Asia, our fearless leader of the Open Web Asia Conference (Register NOW!)and the CEO of TNC, Tatter and Company and company that runs the Korean blogging platform Textcube. As reported by Chang himself, they have been acquired by Google Korea. I am pretty surprised by this acquisition because it’s a blogging platform and an acquisition from large US companies in Asia are few and far between.

Google obviously wants to make inroads in Asia, where they are playing catchup in the big markets, South Korea, China and Japan. Local search giant Naver will eventually fall, (I’ve been told) there’s a cycle that all Korean search engines go through and Google could be a contender to replace Naver in the near future.

It seems like with this acquisition, Google Korea has almost all the ingredients to replicate what other search engine have already accomplished. They now have their own blogging platform in TNC, YouTube for videos, Picasa for images. What’s missing are cafes, shopping site, content on the mainsite (which they probably have access to alread) and other components consumers love. If that’s the case, that won’t be very innovative for Google.

This is some good news for startups in Asia. Google didn’t seem to have much success introducing acquisitions made from US startups, now they are shopping locally. After this deal, I expect Google to make more acquisitions in Asia for the Asian market, especially in Korea and China. As with everything here, the deals in Asia should be on the cheap, and I don’t expect gazillion dollar deals like you see from counterparts in the US startups.