Korea's "Smart Grid" test draws international interest

As reported in The Korea Joongang Daily the town of Gujwa in northeastern Jeju last year became the only full test of a smart grid. Consequently, it has attracted international interest.
Around 6,000 homes are on the smart grid system and 168 companies are testing the grid’s technology, including the power company, telecommunications companies and even automobile and home appliances companies. As of last month, about 270 billion won ($236 million) was invested and the companies involved in the project include SK Telecom, KT, LG Electronics and GS Caltex.
A smart grid is a digitally enhanced electrical grid that gathers, distributes and acts on information about both electricity providers and consumers in order to improve the efficiency of electricity services. As shown in the accompanying graphic (click to see a larger version) the Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology predicts that the global smart grid industry (including research) will expand from $200 billion last year to $238 billion in 2016 and $870 billion in 2030. Korea’s smart grid industry last year was around $3.8 billion in size, the institute said, and is expected to grow to $4.5 billion in 2016.
The Joongang Daily article is worth reading and this is a story that is worth following. South Korea clearly has the potential to be a world leader in smart grid technology.   One of the most interesting aspects of this nation's broadband revolution of the 1990s was the role played by the Korea Electric Power Company (KEPCO).   As described in some detail in my book with Dr. Myung Oh, KEPCO began installing fiber optic cable throughout its network as early as 1980.  This meant that, when it came to the big push to build out commercial broadband services in the 1990s, the KEPCO fiber network became extremely valuable.   Today, the simple fact that South Korea possesses the most extensive and advanced digital networks in the world would seem to suggest that it will utilize these networks, alongside the electric power supply grid, to become a leader in "smart grid" technology.

The DMZ as digital divide and nature preserve

When the United States and the Soviet Union agreed upon the 38th parallel as the point to divide their zones of occupation of Korea following World War II, few thought that this would mark a division of Korea that would last more than half a century.   However, due to changes in the world and in the DMZ itself, the very character and meaning of this strip of land that crosses the Korean peninsula has changed.
The information revolution has transformed the character and meaning of Korea's DMZ.  Formerly it was simply a military demarcation line and a visible, tragic reminder of the long Cold War and the lack of a formal end to the Korean war.  Today it is the world's deepest and most prominent digital divide, separating the world's most advanced and extensive digital networks in South Korea, from North Korea which ranks last or near last in the world by most measures of digital networking.    Chapter 8 of my recent book, Telecommunications and Transformation in Korea:  A Personal Perspective, explores the implications of this change on the Korean peninsula for the manner in which we think about national division as well as the manner in which reunification is likely to occur.  The change is also powerfully symbolized by satellite photographs of  the Korean peninsula at night, published in earlier posts on this blog.

Other dimensions of the Korean DMZ have been recognized by the DMZ Forum for Peace and Nature Conservation, which has published some wonderful resources on its web site.  In addition to the photograph published with this post, visitors to the site can tour the DMZ  using Google earth.  The photograph here immediately struck me, probably because I spent my first two years in Korea in Chuncheon, teaching English at Kangwon National University.    I like the fact that the DMZ Forum hopes to enlarge the peace park project to encompass both Diamond Mountain and Sorak Mountain in eastern Gangweon Province, which is more mountainous and less populated than western stretches of the DMZ.   Of course, the success of such a park will also signify reunification of the only Korean province split right in two by the demilitarized zone.

Virtual shopping in South Korea

Last fall I was living in Seoul's Gangnam district when the British retailer TESCO introduced its "virtual shopping" experiment at a nearby subway station.  It appears that this experiment has achieved some degree of success in Korea and may spread to other markets around the world.  Forbes, in an article entitled "The future of shopping is virtual," reports that, the retailer Peapod is trying out a similar scheme in Chicago.  As noted in that article, virtual shopping pioneered in South Korea.   The video below provides an interesting glimpse into the fast moving Korean marketplace and how retailers are exploring new uses for those smart phones that nearly all consumers will soon carry.

Samsung turns to outside talent for mobile software

The Wall Street Journal carried an article noting that Samsung Electronics has begun to aggressively hire foreign software engineers, especially from India, in an effort to keep up with its rival Apple.  The article adds some interesting context to current developments.   However, there is a somewhat misleading sentence early in the article, suggesting that "...as the smartphone market rapidly shifts its emphasis from hardware to software, the Korean manufacturer is realizing it must change its insular corporate culture." In point of fact, the smartphone market has been heavily dependent on software from the very beginning, especially the variety called mobile "Apps," but including all of the software required to support an "ecosystem of services." This reality helps to explain why there was such excruciating shock in the South Korean market when Apple's iPhone finally arrived in late 2009, after it had already been adopted in about 80 other countries over a two and one half year period.
The need for an ecosystem of services that provides useful information service applications also explains why there are two dominant players in the global smartphone market today, Google and Apple, which I identify in order of the degree of their present and future dominance.  Google, with its Android software and growing array of cloud-based information services, has chosen a course that seems likely to make it far more dominant in the global marketplace than Apple.   As to the Microsoft-Nokia alliance, I think that both of those companies came late to the party.   Microsoft especially, suffers from being so closely tied to the old, Windows desktop model of computing, which is now rapidly being replaced by cloud-based, mobile solutions.  Here in the Korean market, LG has paid a heavy price for its decision to use Microsoft's mobile software.
The Wall Street Journal article also notes that Samsung's own mobile software platform, Bada, has been unpopular with consumers.  Rather than attempting to introduce an entirely new mobile OS, I would think Samsung could benefit over the long run by putting its software engineers to work on ensuring that all of its mobile devices run efficiently on Android and on the development of both Android apps and logical extensions of the Android platform (which after all is an open platform) in Asia and for the global marketplace.

Akamai's "state of the internet": A report from Daejon

Akamai has released its State of the Internet report for the fourth quarter of 2011.  Readers of this blog will know that I've been following those reports somewhat regularly in recent years, most recently in a post last fall. This latest report takes on even greater interest now that I've moved to Daejon in order to join the faculty of KAIST.   You see, Daegu and Daejon  (spelled Taegu and Taejon in the Akamai report) topped the list of the worlds cities with the fastest average broadband connection speeds, as shown in Figure 9 of the report.  In fact, they were the only two cities with average connection speeds above 20 Mbps.

In this era of increasing use of big-data and data visualization on the internet, the Akamai report is well worth reading, and reading carefully with an eye toward data sources, sample size and possible sampling error.  Even more interesting and useful than the downloadable quarterly State of the Internet report, are the online tools that can be accessed on the same page of the Akamai web site.  They allow the easy creation of line graphs comparing data from different countries.   For example, Figure 8 of Akamai's quarterly report contains the table presented here (click to see a full-size version), along with a world map that shows  the location of leading countries.  Although this static picture is interesting, it is possible to create a more informative picture of what is happening in those countries by using the data visualization tool on the website to create and download a line graph from the data made available.  
I've done so and the graph is presented here (click to see a full-size version).   It shows the average broadband connection speeds for the top five nations in Figure 8 by quarter, for over four years from the third quarter of 2007 through the end of 2011.  This line graph is only one small example of what is made possible by Akamai's  "State of the Internet Data Visualization" tool.  Indeed, it is possible to compare data across time for many different combinations of nations.   I found it very interesting to note that the world map presented on the Akamai site contains data for North Korea, but only if you hover over that country with the mouse pointer.  Data for North Korea are not available on the drop down menu of nations and individual U.S. states.  For the record, North Korea shows an average connection speed of 1,012 kbps, or just over 1 Mbps.
There is much, much more that could be said about the gathering and reporting of big data on internet trends, but I will leave that for future posts, while I continue to enjoy "Daejon-speed" broadband internet.  As always, comments are welcome.