The very high tech Korea
This is my fourth day in the beautiful city of Seoul, South Korea, attending the SEK 2006 International Press Lounge. It's the annual electronics exhibit in Korea that highlights mostly Korean IT companies. It's not your CES in the US or even CeBIT in Germany but I'd say this event captures mostly what the Koreans are doing in terms of mapping out their IT infrastructure. And boy, is it high tech!
It's hard to start anywhere with this trip but the first thing I'd like to say is that Seoul is a nice city. However, the caveat is that when you go to a highly urbanized city anywhere in Asia, everything else just looks the same. Singapore, Taiwan, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Hong Kong or Beijing have the same tall buildings and the same types of shops. Other than that, the language and the food are among the few things that make these cities different from each other. By the way, Seoul has meaner traffic than even Singapore, but not as bad as in Manila or Bangkok.
Anyway, Korea claims itself as the most innovative when it comes ot its telecommunications systems, even comparing itself to Japan's own high-tech mobile phone and Internet industry. According to executives from SK Telecom, KT and the Ministry of Information and Communication, the Internet penetration rate in Korea is 33 million or 80 percent of their population (45 million, that's just a little over half of the Philippines!). Of that number, 13.3 million have broadband. They also have 38 million mobile phone users, compared to the Philippines, which has has 30 million mobile phone users. This country truly is connected.
But not connected enough, according to their government officials. So, they come up with a long-term national strategy called IT839 that intends to converge all communications and broadcast services into a single seamless network by 2010 and the first part of this massive plan is in the offing. I was joined by about 25 technology reporters from Europe, the US and Asia to see Korea's technology showcases. It'll be hard describing what we've seen because there was so much technology but I'll try to describe the more relevant ones.
The first is the Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB). This is basically mobile TV and it was introduced just in time for the FIFA World Cup in Germany. It's not surprising because the Korean's are crazy about the World Cup especially after their team became the first Asians to get into the semi-finals in FIFA 2004. The DMB service allows subscribers, especially those with DMB-ready Samsung phones. These are phones whose screens could be re-oriented on a lateral position to look like a mini-TV. The video stream is particularly good. But I heard that most DMB users, numbering to just over 5 million, only access it at least 1 hour everyday since they open their TVs when they get back home to watch the games. I think DMB would work in the Philippines especially in far flung areas. But I suppose the cost of a DMB-ready phone and the service itself would be far from the reach of ordinary Filipinos.
Another technology that was previewed to us was the Hubo Robot. Actually, it looks like the Honda Asimo and also has the same capabilities such as walking, going up a flight of stairs, shaking hands and dancing. There's this one particularly scary looking version of the Hubo called Albert Hubo, so named because it has a fake head of Albert Enstein. I didn't want to guess what it did.
But the real highlight of the whole event was WiBro, a brand name for wireless plus broadband. It's being deployed by SK Telecom and KT and it's a hybrid version of mobile WiMAX. You could do voice-over-IP, video conferencing, streaming video or audio, web browsing and email ALL AT THE SAME TIME WITHOUT LAG. That's with emphasis, baby! Just imagine that WiBro is your Wifi on nitros. Yep, it's faster, has more personal services and can do transmission handovers like in cellular phones. That means you don't have to lose your connection while on the move. Both KT and SK Telecom are also coming up with services that will eventually allow subscribers to do virtual shopping and control their home appliances either using a voice activation system or a mobile phone if outside of the house. It's just like in those futuristic movies. We saw this in the u-Dream ("u" for ubiquitous) experimental house.
But I had to remind myself that all these technologies being shown to us reporters aren't anything new; we've seen them in previous "digital home, digital office" concepts of other technology companies like Microsoft, HP, Intel, Cisco, Alcatel, among others. What the Korean companies did is just to consolidate all of the service providers and create an environment allowing for close coordination between them, the government and other service providers to come up with a seamless service. Maybe we should have that in the Philippines…
The schedule for the press conferences and technology tours were pretty tight (not to mention the information overload that made it hard to choose what to write) but we managed to squeeze in some time to go out of our gigantic hotel/convention center. At least I got to make a lot of new foreign friends in those three days. I was able to talk to reporters from Germany, the US, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Italy, the UK and Croatia. It was truly a diverse group of technology reporters.
And yes, the food. We were treated to traditional Korean food. It was restaurant near the Coex Intercontinental Hotel and it featured traditional Korean music. I still don't understand why female singers have to make their voices so deep that they begin to sound like males. Oh well, I'm not one to diss culture.
It was a really great trip in Seoul. It's actually my second trip. The first one I was able to a lot of places like Dongdaemun, Nandaemun and the Blue and White Houses, which are the homes of the Korean royalties. This year, I was hoping to gather enough reporters to go to the Demilitarized Zone near Panmunjom. It's a tourist area wherein you could see the two Koreas facing each other and the closest you could ever get to North Korea. Unfortunately, time was, as I said, pretty tight. We ended up just drinking soujou on the last night of our stay in Seoul.
Oh well, time to go. My flight's in about five hours and I have to fix up my stuff. It's been fun staying in high tech Korea. Hopefully, I get to visit it again.
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