Korea's Covid vaccine pass system crashes

 On Monday of this week the Korean government initiated a vaccine pass system to limit access to restaurants, coffee shops and other establishments to those who have been fully vaccinated against COVID.  Unfortunately, as shown in the picture and widely reported in the local press, the system's servers crashed during the lunch and dinner hours due to the high traffic load.  As reported by the Korea Joongang Daily, "The country’s expanded vaccine pass system got off to a poor start Monday as it crashed around lunchtime because too many people were using it. The COOV app, which holds an official digital copy of Covid-19 vaccination records, was nonfunctional from around 11:40 a.m. to 1 p.m., preventing people from using it to gain access to facilities like restaurants and coffee shops.At around 6 p.m., the system again became very slow to load or nonfunctional.  Other apps connected to COOV for QR code verification such as Kakao, Naver and Toss Bank, also did not work, either leaving the QR Code screen blank or displaying a wrong vaccination status. "  

Kakao now Korea's third most valuable firm

 

As reported by Yonhap, Kakao recently surpassed Naver to become Korea's third most valuable firm.(Click on the graphic showing Kakao's headquarters in Jeju for a full size version) As reported by Yonhap, "Kakao Corp. has an insatiable appetite for platform businesses, spanning messenger, e-commerce, mobility, content and finance, and now it has earned another title: South Korea's third-most valuable company."  As of June 15, "Kakao's shares rose 1.4 percent to close at a record high of 144,500 won (US$129) on Tuesday, extending its winning streak to a seventh day. Its market capitalization stood at 64.1 trillion won, taking the No. 3 spot following two chip giants -- Samsung Electronics Co. and SK hynix Inc."  Furthermore, "While the nation's top two platform operators were once content to stay in their own competitive fields -- Naver in portal and Kakao in messenger -- they are now competing on multiple fronts, including e-commerce, mobile payment, content and finance."

Is Google search finally gaining traction in Korea?

Over the years I've posted frequently on the topic of Internet search engines and Google's failure to penetrate the Korean market, which was dominated by Naver.  (see some of the prior posts here)  Recently, The Korea Joongang Daily published a short article indicating that the long term trend of dominance by Naver began to change sometime after 2016.  The article contained this graphic (click for a full size version) indicating the shift in market share. As noted in the Joongang Daily article, " Google’s presence was negligible at 0.78 percent only five years ago, according to data tracker Internet Trend, but the share shot up to 41 percent this year, the average of the index between Jan.1 and March 10.  At the same time, the share of the homegrown portal shrank from 86 percent in 2016 to 53 percent this year. The change in the share indicates that the gain of Google has primarily come at the expense of Naver.  Both Naver and Google declined to confirm the numbers.  Industry insiders say that people in quest of unpaid query results turned towards Google especially for their research or work-related tasks." The shift reflected in this graphic, based on market share data from Internet Trends, would seem to indicate that something important is happening in the search market here in Korea.  Koreans in large numbers may be finding value in searching the global, multilingual internet, rather than relying only on Naver as a Korean language domestic portal for various types of information.

Naver hires MIT professor Kim Sangbae: Naver Labs in the robotics industry

As reported in the Korea Joongang Daily, Naver Labs has hired MIT professor Kim Sangbae as a technical consultant.  Readers of this blog will know that I met and first posted in 2009 about Mr. Kim's role in the creation of a Gecko-like robot called "Stickybot." (see earlier posts here)  According to the Korea Joongang Daily article, Professor Kim will be advising on a range of possibilities, including the use of bio-mimetic robots to analyze location data and help in drawing high definition 3D maps for autonomous vehicles.  Congratulations to both Naver and Prof. Kim!

Fake news, search, and Korea's problem with portals

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Readers of this blog will know that I've posted frequently over the years about the continued dominance of Naver in Korea while Google became the dominant Internet search engine in all but a small handful of countries. (see these posts, for example)  To understand this dominance, one must first understand that, strictly speaking, Naver is a web portal and not a search engine.  This overwhelming preference among Koreans for Naver is also understandable because its content is almost entirely in the Korean language and is presented in a manner that fits well with Korean cultural preferences.   However, the almost-exclusive use of Naver by some also illustrates the Korean proverb "frog in a well."
The Korea Joongang Daily has published an informative article entitled "Debriefing:  Korea's problem with portals."   I recommend it.

Digital laundry and reputation management services

Korea's extensive, advanced and fast broadband networks come with many advantages and allow consumers here to be among the first in the world to experience somethings.  For example, Cyworld, a web-based social networking service was introduced half a decade before Facebook and was universally popular among young people at the time of Facebook's introduction.
However, Korea's advanced networks also present some problems.  Internet addiction became a concern in this country years before being recognized in other countries.  These days, as reported by The Korea Joongang Daily, the problem of online scams such as porn phishing has led to concerns about privacy the digital reputation of individuals.  These concerns, in turn, gave rise to the business of digital laundry, which refers to the work of removing malicious comments or other online material to clean up an individual's online reputation.
The Korea Joongang Daily article describes the services provided by one digital laundry service, the Santa Cruise Company. Back in 2008, the company "...asked web portals to remove some malicious online comments about one of the company’s child models, and that was his first foray into digital laundry service.
After that, companies, celebrities and individuals began to knock on the door of Santa Cruise in hopes of getting rid of traces of their past lives or deleting negative comments associated with their names. Santa Cruise works with local web portals like Naver and Daum that host message boards as well as with local file-sharing services like Webhard."
(click on the graphic at left to see a full size version)

What's wrong with these maps?

This morning I showed the accompanying map from the Information Geographies collection at the Oxford Internet Institute to students in two of my undergraduate classes at SUNY Korea in Songdo. (click to see a full size version of the graphic)  I'm a great fan of the various graphics being produced by the Oxford Internet Institute, and indeed the problem with this map lies in part with its data source (Alexa) rather than the Oxford researchers.  I'm referring, of course, to the grey shading for Korea, which  indicates "no information" and which also covers the whole Korean peninsula, merging North with South Korea.
The first part of the problem, that of "no information" about Korea may be because the Oxford team did not trust the 2013 Alexa data.  I just checked Alexa and found that Google.com is listed as the top site in Korea, followed by Naver.com.  However, these Alexa data are highly questionable and should not be used for South Korea.  Alexa's data are gathered from a panel of users that install an English language toolbar in Microsoft's Internet Explorer.  Although IE is widely used here, the fact that the Alexa toolbar is only available in English, immediately makes it almost useless in Korea, where the vast majority of users prefer web browsing in Korean.  For a good critique of Alexa versus other companies that provide web statistics, see this article, "Web statistics for internet market research: pick a number, any number".
In fact, Naver.com is the most widely used web site in South Korea, with about 31 million unique visitors or almost 95% of internet users (reach) during the most recent measurement period by Nielsen Korea.  It was followed by daum.net with an 82% reach and google.com ranked eight with about 12 million unique visitors and a reach of 37%.
As to the second part of the problem, that of shading the entire Korean peninsula grey, it obscures the digital divide between North and South Korea, the most dramatic and poignant such divide in the entire world and a tragic vestige of the Cold War era.  South Korea has the highest rate of internet penetration in the world, while North Korea ranks near the bottom among all nations of the world.

So the second problem with Korea's representation on the "Most visited website per Country" map is shared with another, otherwise very informative map based on internet population and penetration. (click for full size version)

Korea's largest internet companies in global context

The Economist published a nice infographic recently that shows the top three internet companies in a number of countries, ranked by peak market valuation.  (click on the graphic here to see the top part of the infographic, or click here to go directly to the full, interactive infographic)  South Korea ranks fifth on the graphic, which is remarkable given the much larger population of three of the other four countries ahead of it. The three largest internet companies in Korea, in rank order, are Naver, Nexon and NCSoft.  Naver, of course, is a Korean language "search" portal, while the other two companies specialize in online games.
The data for The Economist infographic and article came from the World Startup Report, a not for profit organization.  Another graphic published by that organization helps to put the size of Korea's internet companies in global context. (click on graphic to see a full size version)  As noted by The Economist, Google is larger than the peak value of the companies in all other 48 countries combined.