Korea increases its share of global TV market

As reported in The Korea Times and elsewhere, South Korea, led by Samsung and LG Electronics, increased its share of the global market for television sets in the second quarter of 2012.  These two firms dominate the international television industry and are pushing ahead with AMOLED and other new technologies.
South Korea's dominance of the television industry should not be viewed in isolation.  I read a report recently that suggested owners of Samsung flat screen television sets were more likely to consider purchase of a Samsung smart phone.   Such a pattern would make sense in markets all around the world.   With the move to cloud computing and smart devices, people want to be able to access all of the content on the internet, including television and video, from a phone, from a tablet, or from a smart screen in their home or office.  The following graphic (click to see a full size version) from a recent DisplaySearch study shows that this trend is even more pronounced in emerging markets, including China, than in the so-called "mature" markets such as the U.S. As noted in the text of the report,“Because many households in emerging markets have only one TV but multiple generations living under one roof, mobile device penetration in these markets is high, which enables consumers to access content in other ways.”

Progress on Open Courseware in Korea

A very interesting and informative article appeared recently in The Korea Herald.  It summarizes developments in Korea in response to the open courseware movement that was pioneered by such universities as MIT in the United States. As noted in the article, the Korea Education Research Information Service,a state-run agency,benchmarked MIT's Open Courseware program and initiated the Korean Open Course Ware project in 2007. In 2009 it launched the KOCW site (www.kocw.net) to offer free online lectures from universities across the country. Note that as of this date the KOCW site and its lectures are entirely in Korean.

Samsung SDS and Freebalance in an alliance to promote e-government

South Korea is a leader in e-government (see an earlier post), so the news that Samsung SDS and the Canada-based company Freebalance have entered into an alliance caught my eye. FreeBalance, based in Ottawa Canada, is a global provider of Government Resource Planning (GRP) software used in Canada, developing countries and emerging economies. As noted in the release on PRWeb, Samsung SDS is leading the way for computerization and advancement of public administration across the world, spreading the Korean e-government model to other markets.

Akamai's "State of the Internet" report for first quarter of 2012

Akamai has published its "State of the Internet" report based on data for the first quarter of 2012 (available for download here).  Not surprisingly, South Korea still has the fastest broadband internet in the world, by quite a margin over second ranked Japan and many other nations.  Those of you who choose to delve into the data will see that no other country seems poised to catch Korea anytime soon.
This quarterly report contains a few changes, one of which is that Akamai has changed its definition of "high broadband" from connections of 5 Mbps or higher to connections of 10 Mbps or higher, in keeping with global trends toward higher and higher speeds.   According to the new measure, South Korea had the highest level of "high broadband" adoption at 53%.   Another change in the report is that Akamai is no longer reporting city-level data.   However, in addition to its wealth of data on internet speed, the quarterly Akamai report continues to offer useful data on such topics as security (attack traffic), adoption of IPV6 and mobile connectivity.  See one of my earlier posts for an idea of what you can do with the online data visualization capability provided by Akamai.

More on North Korea's mobile telephony

There is interesting news coming out of North Korea these days regarding the continued growth of its mobile telephone networks and the possible implications of that for efforts by the country's government to control the flow of information in and out of the nation.    The Wall Street Journal carried an article, with the accompanying graphic (click to see a full size version), showing that there are now one million mobile phone subscribers in North Korea.  Also, as noted in the article, Chinese handsets smuggled into the country continue to form an important link for communication with the outside world.
Adding interesting detail to this picture, as reported by The Korea Times, North Korea has disabled video camera and memory card functions in the newest mobile phones being distributed.  In conjunction with this move, they have reportedly raised the price of mobile phones with those services to about U.S. $1,000, putting them beyond the reach of ordinary citizens.  We will continue to follow these developments.  Readers interested in the issue may want to look at earlier posts (for example here, and here.)
 

A breakdown of Samsung Electronics record profits

As widely reported in the press, including an article in the Korea Joongang Daily, Samsung Electronics achieved record profits in the second quarter of 2012, driven by, but not limited to, sales of its Galaxy smart phone series.  The graphic (click to see a full size version) contained in the Joongang Daily article is very revealing, showing Samsung's broad strengths in the technologies that underlie the information revolution--semiconductors, displays, consumer electronics and IT devices including mobile.

North Korean flag mistake at London Olympics and misperceptions of Korea

I must confess that I was only slightly surprised to learn that the North Korean women's soccer game against Colombia had been delayed because of the mistaken display of South Korea's flag on a big screen in the stadium which was used to introduce North Korea's players.  Reuters and other major media published a photo illustrating the problem (click on the photo to see a full-size version).  The reason I was only mildly surprised is that public misperceptions of Korea are rather widespread around the world, especially in the West.  I'm sure that survey data would show quite a large number of people  are unaware of the difference between North and South Korea, or even that Korea is divided.  Readers may be interested in my earlier posts on the topic of Korea's national image (e.g. here,)

Korea leads the world in wireless broadband use

The OECD has just updated the data in its Broadband Portal, and on one of the measures, "wireless broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants," South Korea leads the world.  In a sense, this is not surprising since Korea made a bold decision in the early 1990s to adopt CDMA technology as its mobile communications standard.  In the ensuing years it became the first nation to commercialize CDMA and by the turn of the millenium virtually all Koreans were using 3G CDMA-based mobile phones, capable of accessing the internet and data services.  However, things change and today South Korea is leading the world in implementation and use of LTE networks and the number of people using LTE phones is rapidly rising.   As shown by the accompanying graphic (click to see a full size version) the OECD data show that Korea has become the first nation in the world where wireless broadband subscriptions exceed 100 percent of the population.