Kakao will launch a mobile service for parking at South Korea's largest airport, the company has said.
Kakao Mobility, the chat giant's transportation services subsidiary, has signed a cooperation agreement with Incheon International Airport to use the latter's data and combine it with its services to make reaching the airport more convenient.
The first area of cooperation will be in parking, with Incheon's data to be used for Kakao's yet to be named parking app, to be launched within the year.
The airport will provide real-time parking lot information and traffic levels at the airport to the company.
The users of Kakao's parking app will also get guidance to other parking lots nearby when their terminal's parking lot is full. The app will also handle all payments for parking.
Kakao Mobility currently offers Kakao Taxi, its flagship chauffeur service, and Kakao Navigation, a navigation app.
Kakao, once just a chat app provider, has aggressively expanded to lifestyle services in Korea, leveraging its chat dominance, and is now a major player in most of them. Now it is attempting to apply its AI platform, Kakao I, to most of these services.
The firm is also cooperating with Samsung to sync their AI platforms.
Source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/kakao-to-launch-smart-parking-service-for-incheon-airport/