Korean Mobile Operators Prodded to Create Unified App Store

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

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

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.