Korea's Information Society 한국의 정보 사회

Mobile Phone Communication with North Korea: Current Status

2010-03-09T09:28:00.000+09:00

An article in today's Korea Times provides some very interesting specifics about how North Korean refugees in South Korea communicate with people in North Korea by mobile phone. Seo, Jae-pyong, the Secretary-General of a group called North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity (NKIS) said that NKIS has run a news outlet service based on mobile phone conversations with secret correspondents in North Korea since 2008. The purpose of this effort is to provide more information about the reclusive nation. The NKIS provided the stringers with cell phones that have an international roaming service. International phone rates between South Korea and China are applied when North Koreans call NKIS people. Although he declined to give information about how much the stringers are paid, the NKIS representative said that their allowances are high enough to feed their families. He also said that "When we have conversations with people, especially from the border area between North Korea and China, we hear them as clearly as our phone conversations with our colleagues in South Korea." Mr. Seo, an engineer, escaped from North Korea in 2001. Out of approximately 20,000 North Korean refugees that have settled in South Korea from the 1990s, about 600 are college graduates. About 300 of these educated people have joined NKIS to let people outside North Korea know more about it.
Seo also said that North Koreans can access the latest South Korean television dramas at home without much difficulty, despite the government's strict ban on the circulation of South Korean cultural products. Two or three weeks after airing in the South, these dramas are copied onto CDs in China, and then these CDs are sold to distributors who deal with the North Koreans.

96 Percent of South Koreans Think Internet Access is a Fundamental Right

2010-03-09T08:15:00.000+09:00

According to an international survey conducted by Globescan for the BBC World Service, 79 percent of adults around the world think of internet access as their fundamental right. The percentage here in Korea is a world-leading 96%, compared to 94% in Mexico, and 87% in China. 78 percent of respondents worldwide felt the internet had brought them greater freedom, 90% thought it was a good place to learn, and 51% said they now enjoyed spending their spare time on social networking sites like Facebook or Myspace. Despite this enthusiasm, the poll also showed concern, with many users cautious about speaking their minds online. 72% of Germans, 70% of Koreans, 69% of French and 65% of Japanese did not feel they could safely express their opinions online. More than half of internet users worldwide (53%) agreed that "the internet should never be regulated by any level of government anywhere," including large majorities in Korea (83%), Nigeria (77%) and Mexico (72%). The poll surveyed 27,973 adult citizens in 26 countries.

Number of iPhone Users in Korea Reaches 400,000

2010-03-08T08:35:00.000+09:00

According to a KT Executive, as reported in today's Joongang Daily, there are now over 400,000 iPhone users in South Korea. That amounts to an average of about 4,000 people a day who have purchased the device since it was introduced last November 28. For those of you keeping track, that also amounts to an annual sales rate of nearly 1.5 million phones. I feel vindicated about the prediction I made in an earlier post when all of the industry experts here were making lower estimates.
According to a demographics survey conducted by KT, half of the new iPhone users are in their 20s, 70 percent were men, and 30 percent came from the wealthier districts of Seoul. This is only the beginning of the mobile transformation in Korea!

Korean Mobile Operators Prodded to Create Unified App Store

2010-03-07T20:31:00.000+09:00

As reported by The Korea Times today, the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) is prodding the nation's three mobile telephony carriers to create a unified application store, to meet competition from Apple's iPhone. Handset vendors Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, which each run their own online applications store, will also be allowed a chance to join in the planned alliance between mobile carriers, the KCC said.
I encourage readers to take a close look at this article in The Korea Times. In reading it, note that two subjects are not mentioned:

One is the inherently global scope of the internet. Does the KCC suggest that Korea's mobile carriers and handset manufacturers team up for success in the global market or only here in the domestic South Korean market?
The second subject is the role of language in creation of internet applications and content. Although progress is being made toward "machine translation," applications (apps) for the mobile internet still need to surmount language barriers. Language is central to culture, and applications that may appeal to people within the bounds of Korean culture and language may still fail in Western or other markets around the globe. Witness the failure to export Cyworld to the United States market, despite the fact that this social networking innovation arrived in Korea years before Facebook showed up in the U.S.

Part of Google's success is that it attempts to provide its applications in all of the world's languages. I think Korean companies can mimic Google in this respect, to their great benefit.

Global Media Trends---Korean Media Trends

2010-03-07T11:51:00.001+09:00

From April 19-22, Fulbright Korea will be hosting a U.S. State Department-sponsored Social, Mobile and Visual Media Workshop on "Advising in the Digital Age." The workshop will be attended by fifteen Education USA advisors from around the Asian region with possibly some international involvement. I've been asked to give a presentation on the opening day on the topic "Global Trends in New Media." Today, while preparing for that presentation, I ran across the following video on YouTube of Google CEO Eric Schmidt's presentation at last month's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Each of the major trends discussed by Eric Schmidt and his colleagues has direct and profound implications for Korea and its ICT sector. Enjoy!

More on the "iPhone Effect" in South Korea's Telecoms Market

2010-03-03T10:11:00.000+09:00

As time goes on, it is increasingly apparent that the introduction of Apple's iPhone provided a shocking jolt to South Korea's communications market, sometimes referred to in the press here as the "iPhone effect." This has been the subject of previous posts here.
The full awareness of the transformation taking place in Korea's mobile market has still not sunk in at SK Telecom, which recently announced that it would not allow use of VOIP services such as Skype on its mobile phones. In an earlier post I suggested that this would simply drive SK Telecom users to KT, which allows such services on its phones, including the Apple iPhone. Today's Joongang Daily notes a report by Atlas Research that shows 46 percent of iPhone users switched to KT from one of the other two mobile service providers, and more than half of them from SKT. This trend of customers switching from SKT and LG Telecom to KT is unlikely to stop until those companies offer Android-based phone services, with emphasis on the apps and content, that rival those of the KT's iPhone service.
South Korea's domestic market was caught off guard by the introduction of the iPhone and Android phones, even though even though its large electronics companies were manufacturing the latter for export long before their introduction here. A full answer to the question of how and why the market here was caught off guard can shed a great deal of light on the strengths and weaknesses of South Korea's telecoms sector.

Korean Government to Set Up App Store

2010-02-27T16:28:00.000+09:00

Why am I not surprised to read in The Korea Times that the Korean government is planning to set up an online app store? One reason is an incident I vividly remember that occurred sometime last year. My wife and I were waiting at a bus stop to catch the airport bus on one of our trips to the United States. Right in front of us, a policeman stopped a black sedan that had made an illegal U-turn a few hundred yards up the street. However, instead of pulling out a pad of paper to issue a ticket, the policeman punched some numbers into his mobile phone and showed it to the driver. Within a few minutes the whole process of issuing a traffic ticket was finished, with absolutely no uncertainty about the identity of the driver and other relevant details.
In certain respects, South Korea is leading the world in e-government. The Korea Times article reports that the government is now looking to set up a government "app store" to improve the distribution of public information such as weather forecasts, traffic updates and job openings. An official from the Ministry of Public Administration said that the plan is to launch the app store as an internet site and then expand it to mobile platforms. By allowing the public access to and use of public information the private sector will be given the means to create more value-added services.
It will be most interesting to see how the government's plans work out.

Forecast for Touch-Screen Mobile Phone Growth

2010-02-27T14:28:00.000+09:00

Here in Korea, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and other companies are racing to develop advanced touch-screen technologies in the wake of the Apple iPhone's debut. And they should be racing.
Back in December of last year, shortly after I had purchased my Apple iPhone 3GS, I wrote a post talking about capacitive versus resistive touch screens. The capacitive touch screens, led by the iPhone are the ones most prized by consumers because of their speed and responsiveness.
Not surprisingly, the market for touch-screen mobile phones is projected to expand rapidly over the next several years. A recent study by Displaybank (click to see a full size version of the accompanying graphic) suggests that one in four mobile phones will be touch-screen models by 2013. I expect that most of these will be capacitive. As the processor speed of these phones increases, along with improvements in the touch technology, they will give users a sense of wielding the power to instantly retrieve and manipulate vast amounts of information with simple taps, swipes and other gestures of the thumb and fingers. These are indeed handheld computers, empowered by GPS, digital compass, other sensors and most importantly, high speed internet access.

SK Telecom Still Doesn't Get It: Smartphones and VOIP Services

2010-02-25T08:49:00.001+09:00

It appears that the leadership of SK Telecom, South Korea's leading mobile service provider, have not yet comprehended what is happening to the mobile communications market here, and the implications for their business, both medium and long term. As noted in the Joongang Daily, beginning next month SK Telecom will start charging customers for voice services on a per-second basis, rather than in 10-second increments. This will make Korea the fifth country to have such a charging system and will save SK Telecom users an estimated $14.5 million every month. However, at the same time SK Telecom announced that it would continue to block use of VOIP services on its smartphones!
What is even more remarkable than the announcement as reported in the Korea Herald, is the company's reasoning that allowing its smartphone subscribers access to cheap internet calls using services like Skype will "deal a blow to its revenue."
One probable result of SK Telecom's policy, if indeed they stick with it, will be an increasing number of its customers who drop SK Telecom's service in favor of Korea Telecom. That's what I did late last November and I haven't had a single regret. Skype, by the way, was one of the first applications I loaded on my iPhone 3GS and it works great!
The leadership of Korea Telecom seems to have a better grasp of the revolutionary changes underway in mobile communications and greeted the SK announcement by saying that it would continue to focus on reducing mobile internet charges rather than on calling tariffs. KT is also moving broadly to offer useful content and applications, which will no doubt generate handsome revenues. SK Telecom would be wise to do the same, rather than cling to dwindling voice revenues as a source of future revenue.

More on the Microsoft Monoculture in Korea

2010-02-23T18:02:00.000+09:00

The explosive transformation taking place in South Korea's mobile broadband market is creating ripples that go in all directions. The local media and blogs are picking up on the fact that Korea's electronic transaction and internet banking regulations are causing inconvenience for users and businesses. The current laws favor a sort of Microsoft monoculture, which has been the subject of earlier posts.
The Hankyoreh carried an excellent article on this topic a couple of days ago. When I saw the drawing that accompanied the article, I just knew that this would require a post here. It depicts Microsoft's ActiveX as a ball and chain restraining Korea's online market and online banking. A great illustration with a powerful message!

Chipmakers to Battle in the Smartphone Market

2010-02-22T11:49:00.001+09:00

The next big battle in the semiconductor industry, as described by an article in The New York Times today, is over chips for the coming generations of hand-held mobile devices. As the article aptly begins, "The semiconductor industry has long been a game for titans." The going rate for a state-of-the art chip fabrication factory is about $3 billion. The plants typically take years to build and the microscopic size of chip circuitry makes for challenging engineering in order to keep up with Moore's Law.
The next phase of chip wars will focus on smartphones along with tablet and notebook sized devices. Intel, which until now has had a very small presence in the smartphone market, is joining the fray. The current market leader is ARM Holdings. Global Foundries, a spinoff of Advanced Micro Devices, this year plans to start making chips at one of the most advanced factories ever built in Dresden, Germany. Global Foundries has been helped by close to $10 billion in current and promised investments from the government of Abu Dhabi.
Other competitors in this industry include Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, United Microelectronics and, of course, Samsung Electronics.

North Korea Reportedly Cracking Down on Cell Phone Use

2010-02-22T06:55:00.000+09:00

The Eurasia Review and other sources are reporting, not surprisingly, that the North Korean government is again attempting to crack down on the use of Chinese cell phone services. One recent defector from North Korea reported that the North Korean authorities were jamming cell phone signals and that it was practically impossible to make a call. He said that "you can switch phone cards and the call appears to go through, but nobody in North Korea picks up." North Korea also appears to have made overseas purchases of expensive cell phone tracking and jamming equipment which it has installed at various locations in Shinuiju, Hyesan, and Hweryong in the border area near China, according to North Koreans living in border areas as well as those in South Korea.

The Future of "Smartphone" Operating Systems

2010-02-19T14:39:00.001+09:00

An article in the Joongang Daily today points to the obvious importance of operating systems in the rapidly changing "smart phone" market. As shown in the accompanying graphic, the iPhone and Android phones are expected to gain market share over the next several years, at the expense of Symbian, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. As the article notes, consumers are more and more likely to ask themselves, "Do I want an Android or a Windows Mobile?" rather than "Do I want a Samsung or Motorola?" This observation is partly true, but what is really going to drive consumer decisions in the next several years is not the OS per se, but rather the information that is accessible and the power of the applications allowed with that OS and how the OS interacts with the applications. To put it another way, if Google's array of online applications work equally well on an Android, iPhone or Symbian phone, then those three operating systems are going to share the market roughly equally. It is the underlying content and information, rather than the OS itself, that will determine the power of these new handheld devices. They are more than simply "smart phones," and they are also more than just a hand-held personal computer. They are information machines that draw heavily upon mobile access to broadband internet, global positioning data, and live visual information (as in augmented reality applications like the iPhone's INeedCoffee app here in Korea). It will indeed be interesting to see which OS prevails, but it would seem that in terms of applications that "organize the world's information" Google is way out in front. That is why I would not be surprised if Android phones take up even more of the global market by 2012 than the graphic here (click to see full size graphic from Gartner) suggests, on the shoulders of Google's information services.

Multiple Screens: Digital Convergence Gathers Strength in Korea

2010-02-18T09:14:00.000+09:00

Several articles in the newspapers this morning offer concrete evidence that the convergence of digital media in South Korea is strengthening and accelerating. According to The Korea Times, both KT and SK Broadband are doubling their investment in IPTV this year from last year. They also aim to double the number of IPTV subscribers this year, over the number in 2009.
Not surprisingly, The Korea Times report notes that IPTV is driving broadband usage and demand, particularly when it is bundled together with fixed line and mobile services. In fact, SK Broadband in partnership with SK Telecom will promote a "three screen (TV, PC and Mobile) package to smartphone and IPTV users. This reinforces a point made in my last post. With convergence people will sometimes use a handset, sometimes a tablet, and sometimes a desktop PC, but increasingly they want the same content available at the touch of a finger on all the devices.
Three screens by no means represents the limit, since another new consumer trend is that people are putting the new flat screen television sets in more rooms of the house than just the family room or entertainment room, at least in Western countries.

Samsung Takes on Apple

2010-02-16T10:02:00.000+09:00

One of my Google alerts this morning turned up an interesting short article in Forbes with the headline "Samsung Takes on Apple." The report noted that Samsung is hurriedly developing its own tablet computer to rival Apple's much-hyped iPad. The report quoted the President of Samsung's mobile communications division as saying "We will respond." Samsung reportedly has several major projects in the works, with the other major focus being to increase its dominance in the smart phone market.
I'll say! The current revolution in mobile communication is all about bringing mobile broadband internet to consumers, whether that be via a phone-sized device, or a notepad size device. People will use a hand held device differently than a note pad or notebook size device. However, in general I think it is safe to assume that most people would like to have the ability to fully synchronize information and applications across all of their devices. A notebook or even a small desktop machine is more comfortable while sitting at a desk, while a notepad device may be ideal while lecturing or conducting a tour, and the mobile-phone sized devices, of course, are the most mobile because of their size.
Samsung is right to take on Apple, because the latter company is so far leading the way in creating fast, easy and intuitive user interfaces for the mobile internet.

KT to Seek Management Control of BC Card

2010-02-13T09:55:00.000+09:00

In another symptom of the coming era of mobile broadband and ubiquitous networking, Korea Telecom has announced that it plans to buy a large stake in BC Card and eventually gain management control of the company. According to the Joongang Daily, KT has already signed a memorandum of understanding to acquire Shinhan Card Co.'s 14.9 percent stake in BC Card (see graphic). A spokesman for KT said that "We see a great possibility in creating synergy between telecommunication and finance."
An earlier post noted that e-business in Korea is mired in the past because of an overly-heavy reliance on Microsoft software, and legal requirements that led banks and other businesses to require the use of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and active-X controls for internet transactions. Obviously, Korea Telecom is looking beyond the present situation to a future in which most Korean consumers will use mobile broadband via iPhone, Android or other handsets. There are currently over 24 million mobile phones equipped with USIM (universal subscriber identity module) chips which can identify subscribers and store various content, including credit card information. In addition, KT is reportedly mulling over new services in which a customer might search for a restaurant using their smart phone, pinpoint its location, and pay the bill using a credit card and coupons downloaded to the smart phone from web sites.
The mobile broadband era is coming to Korea, and it is going to arrive very fast, for the simple reason that consumers want mobility and they want these services, just as in other advanced countries around the world.

Google to Test Fast Broadband in Selected Communities

2010-02-11T08:33:00.000+09:00

Google announced on Wednesday that, in an effort to spur innovation in the United States, it would launch a project to offer fast broadband service in selected communities. According to The New York Times, and a post on Google's corporate blog, the company will test a high speed fiber optic broadband network capable of allowing people to surf the web at 1 gigabit per second.
How does this relate to Korea? As many of you know, this country is already building a nationwide fiber optic network that will deliver gigabit per second broadband speeds to all major communities in the country by 2012. If Google and Korean policymakers are correct, this should make South Korea, along with Google's selected communities in the U.S., centers of innovation!

Korea's "IT Powerhouse" Paradox

2010-02-10T20:19:00.000+09:00

I've been puzzling a great deal these past several months over the paradoxical situation that exists in South Korea. On the one hand, this country has the most advanced and extensive digital networks in the world, yet it managed to lag behind much of the world (80 or more other countries) by two and a half years in adopting mobile broadband, as symbolized here by the Apple iPhone. How could a country that invests so much in education, R&D and infrastructure, find itself in this situation? The following are some thoughts I have. They are only initial attempts to find an answer, and I'd love to receive some incisive comments on this post.

The information and communications technology (ICT) and telecommunications sectors in Korea are dominated by large companies, including the chaebol groups. Inside these large companies the workers and the labor unions exert a great deal of influence, making it difficult for them to adapt quickly to technological change.
The established mobile service providers, along with the manufacturers of handsets and network equipment, were making a lot of money with the current arrangments, so why upset the apple cart by introducing the iPhone or Android phones to the Korean market? If we include the government here, another interpretation could be that, while profitable in the very short term, this was a costly policy mistake for Korea over the medium to long term.
Finally, I cannot help but observe that language and culture played a role in all of this. After all, Koreans have not yet widely adopted Google as an internet search engine, preferring Naver to search within a Korean-language walled-garden. Heavy dependence on Naver and other Korean language portals, along with overly-heavy reliance on Microsoft, undoubtedly contributed to the lag in introducing real mobile broadband via the iPhone and Android phones.

These are some of my preliminary thoughts. What is missing in this picture? I invite your comments.

Government to Spend $341 million on IT Workforce Training

2010-02-09T08:42:00.000+09:00

The Korean government has announced that it will spend $341 million to fund a four year program aimed at enhancing the country's information and communication technology sector. According to the Joongang Daily, the money will be used primarily to train basic researchers for the corporate world, with lesser emphasis on training for employees of government agencies and in the IT convergence sector. The money will be given primarily to universities across Korea to develop training programs and provide students with financial support. The primary emphasis of this new funding, in a departure from past patterns, will be on graduate level training rather than undergraduate.

Korea's e-business Mired in the Past?

2010-02-08T19:42:00.000+09:00

An editorial in the English edition of the Chosun Ilbo today declared that "Korea's E-Business is Mired in the Past." It pointed out that people in Korea cannot shop online, do internet banking, or access government or tax office sites using their smartphones. The editorial notes that this is unheard of in the 80 other countries that introduced smartphones (read Apple iPhone and Android phones) before Korea.
The reason for this situation is the officially certified electronic payment standard used in Korea, which was introduced in 2000. To meet that standard, local companies developed solutions that were only compatible with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser and required use of ActiveX controls. According to the Chosun Ilbo, Korea is the only country in the world to use a certification program using only ActiveX functions. Furthermore, it notes that other countries have chosen standard web technologies that can be used on both personal computers and smartphones and do not require users to download one ActiveX security program after another to make a single electronic payment.

Seamless Home Networking to Debut in 2011

2010-02-08T08:57:00.000+09:00

Not far in the future, when a housewife is caught in an unexpected rain shower, she won't have to rush home to close the apartment windows. Instead, she will be able to use her cell phone to shut the window through a ubiquitous home networking system. Not only windows, but almost everything in the home will come under the control of its owner when home networking is fully realized.
As outlined in The Korea Times, the government this year is preparing standards for such home networking systems. Starting March 2011, any newly-built apartments will have to equip their network gateways with a general purpose engine developed by the state-run Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute late last year. The engine will bridge the differences of various technologies or communication protocols. Older apartments will also be able to add the ETRI engine to their gateways as the government plans to offer the program free of charge to enable upgrades to older systems.

Sales of Mobile Phones Sizzling

2010-02-01T09:58:00.000+09:00

The Joongang Ilbo today notes that sales of mobile phones have been sizzling lately, largely due to a rise in consumer spending and increased sales of so-called smart phones. According to the London-based research firm, Strategic Analytics, world mobile phone shipments stood at 324 million units in the fourth quarter of 2009, a ten percent increase over the same period in 2008. As shown in the accompanying graphic, (click on graphic to see larger version) Nokia remains the market leader with a 38.1 percent share of the global market. Samsung and LG together have a 30.6 percent share of the market, followed by Motorola with 4.9 percent and "other" manufacturers, including Apple with 20.1 percent.
A couple of things should be noted about these 2009 market share figures. First, they represent the end of an old era in which feature phones dominated the mobile market. Feature phones are those with certain features, such as the phones camera or music capability, are accented to appeal to different market segments. The feature-phone era is ending and giving way to the new era of hand-held broadband internet computers, as discussed extensively in earlier posts on this blog.
Second, the figures and this graphic do not break out sales of either the Apple iPhone or Android devices. These two categories promise to take up most of the global market share over the next five years or so. It appears that the major challenge for LG, Samsung, Motorola and Symbian is to see how much of the Android market share they can occupy.
Third, mobile handsets are well on their way to becoming a commodity, just as happened with personal computers. The key value in the global mobile market is in the software and applications. What a person anywhere in the world can do with his or her mobile device will simply depend on the speed of the internet connection and the power of the Apple apps, Android apps, and ....we'll see what others might become competitive in the global market.

The Mobile Revolution: More on the iPhone Effect in Korea

2010-01-29T09:37:00.000+09:00

As time passes, it becomes more and more apparent that the introduction of Apple's iPhone has sent shock waves through the mobile communications sector in South Korea, revealing some of its salient characteristics. This phenomenon, the so-called "iPhone Effect" deserves a more thorough treatment than in my earlier post. The following are some of my thoughts about the iPhone effect.

The iPhone effect is occurring now only because leading industry and government players chose to ignore the implications of the transformation in mobile communications taking place around the world starting more than two and a half years ago with the introduction of the iPhone. Neither the handset manufacturers, nor the mobile service providers, nor the government seemed very concerned about this until mid 2009. The effect was that Korea continued to pursue an old model of mobile communication, based on feature-phones, while mobile broadband and "apps" were taking hold elsewhere in the world.
It underscores Korea's relative weakness in the development of software and internet content, versus the manufacturing of hardware. LG and Samsung Electronics together command a large share of the world market for mobile handsets, but are relatively weak in the so-called "smartphone" segment (I don't like this term, because the new phones, iPhone and Android, are really hand-computers or hand-broadband devices) show signs of being caught flat footed by the success of Apple's iPhone in the Korean marketplace.
The iPhone effect also highlights the continuing high dependence on (or preference for) Korean language web content, as illustrated by high levels of usage of Naver, a Korean-language service, and relatively low levels of usage of Google. The vast majority of the iPhone and Android apps being downloaded and used around the world are written in English or other languages. The iPhone in Korea is exposing consumers to many of these applications, disclosing a clear "App-gap" with many of the most useful applications not yet available in Korean.
The iPhone effect occurs partly because the Apple iPhone has introduced a multi-touch, capacitive touchscreen that is more than just screen technology. It is a user-interface (UI) that everyone else is copying as we enter this new era of the handheld, internet-connected PC. The iPhone is faster, easier to use and just a bit more intuitive than any of the competing phones on the market today, including Google's Nexus One and, most pointedly, Samsung's local T-Omnia II. In this revolutionary era, the iPhone is setting the standard, much the way that the IBM PC did way back in 1980.

The revolutionary transition in mobile handsets from phones to internet-connected computers is well underway, both in Korea and globally. Given the nature of semiconductors and other components that go into the handsets, it is clear that handsets will soon become a commodity, much like PCs are today, with more or less modular, interchangeable parts. The big money and the major impact of this transformation will be found in software and content. Therein lies the future challenge for Korea.

English-Teaching Robots for Korea by 2018?

2010-01-28T08:48:00.001+09:00

An article in today's issue of The Korea Times proclaims "Robots to Replace Native English Teachers." Participants in a recent robotics forum speculated that, by about 2015 robots should be able to help English teachers in the classroom and that by 2018 they should be able to teach on their own, while communicating with students." Robots are already available in English classes through a pilot project in Masan, aimed at testing the viability of robotic teachers. Some participants in the robotics forum also saw English -teaching robots as a remedy for the lack of English teachers in small rural farming and fishing villages.
After reading this article, I remain very skeptical. Nothing is mentioned about the current state of the art in machine translation and the considerable challenges of teaching English to native speakers of Korean. The linguistic and pedagogical challenges of teaching English would seem to be too large to be overcome by developments in software and artificial intelligence in less than a decade. In any event, we'll all see.

Hardware versus Software

2010-01-21T19:46:00.000+09:00

The Chosun Ilbo carried an opinion piece today that focused on the relative lack of development of South Korea's software industries. Among other things, it pointed out that

Last year Korea exported IT products worth U.S.$121 billion, which accounted for a third of the nation's total exports of U.S. $363.5 billion.
The leading exports were all manufactured products: memory chips, displays and mobile handsets.
On the other hand, exports of Korean-made software totaled just U.S. $300 million, less than 1 percent of all IT exports.
Foreign products take up 78 percent of the local software market.

The editorial concluded with reference to the rapidly growing smartphone market, which shows that manufacturing good handsets is no longer enough.