Korea Poised to be a Leader in Smart Grid Technology

The industry press is noting a new report by Pike Research on Korea's smart grid plans.  These were the subject of earlier posts last year.  The new report suggests that Korea's efforts will result in investments totalling $15.8 billion within South Korea itself between 2009 and 2016.  Noting that Korean companies have been at the forefront of innovation in ICT, an industry expert suggests they are now posed to take a significant leadership role in the smart grid market, both within Korea and on a global level.  This will be one of the interesting areas of industry convergence to watch, since a smart grid essentially involves convergence of ICT with the electric power industry and also because smart grids are considered a green technology.

Korea is a Leader in e-government

The latest global e-government survey by the United Nations shows that Korea ranks number one in the world.  As reported in the Joongang Daily today, this results in a wide range of conveniences for Korean citizens.  Other countries are taking an active interest in Korea's e-government systems. (click on graphic at left to see a larger version) Even Japan, it is reported, wants to learn from the Korean experience and introduce similar measures at home.  There is little question that Korea's efforts toward e-government have provided for greater transparency in many transactions and more efficient service to citizens across a range of services.  However, this leadership could be enhanced if the country could break out of its Microsoft monoculture (see my earlier posts) and allow secure banking and financial transactions.

More on Naver versus Google in the Mobile Market

The Korea Herald carried an article that provides some interesting detail on the changes taking place in internet search with the introduction of the iPhone and Android phones here.  Although Naver is still far ahead of Google in both the PC and mobile web market, the gap is smaller in the mobile arena.
Google, which held a single digit share in the PC web market, grabbed a 23.1 percent share in the mobile web market in January, according to the local market research firm Matrix. Naver controlled 82.6 percent of mobile web usage that month.  However, I suspect these figures lump iPhone and Android users with users of the older feature phones that still predominate.  Also, as Hugo Barra, Product Management Director at Google noted, with Android devices coming to Korea a whole new ecosystem of cloud computing based applications will be born.

Naver Complains of Google Monopoly in Smartphones!

NHN, the provider of South Korea's popular Naver search service, is unhappy with the smart phone market, where it claims rival Google is squeezing other companies out of business.  Samsung Electronics Android phones set Google as the default search engine, while Apple's iPhones use the Safari browser in which Google shows up by default.  NHN CEO Kim Sang-hun said it is "virtually impossible" for competitors to enter the market as only Google is connected.  "Users must be able to choose which search engines to use."   For the full story see today's Chosun Ilbo English edition.
I have commented extensively on Google's lack of success in the Korean market in earlier posts.  Naver does not really search the internet, but rather provides social information of value to Koreans, in the Korean language, and within what is essentially a Korean intra-net within the much, much larger internet.  I still stand by my earlier  arguments, but would only add that Google's services go well beyond search.   Google Earth (which is not available on the iPhone in Korea--why?), Google maps, Google Books and an array of other content and services are attractive to smart-phone users.  Over the past two and a half years, while Naver was building up its business within the Korean-language intranet with its Korean-language only service, Google was investing significantly in location-based services, and other services relating to books, scholarly documents, cloud-based applications, to name just a few.

MIT Researchers Create Molecular Chips

The news reported in The New York Times today that MIT researchers have created molecular chips should resound through Korea's semiconductor industry.  This development suggests that the growing power and decreasing size of semiconductors may continue to fuel the information revolution for some time to come.  The graphic accompanying the story (click on the graphic here to see a larger version) is an actual photograph of the molecular chip developed at MIT.  The researchers used a new technology called "copolymers" to allow chip manufacturers to take molecules and arrange them in complex patterns on silicon chips.