Korean Government to Set Up App Store

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

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

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.