Intel to Invest $20 million in Korean WiBRO Venture

As reported by Reuters and other media outlets, Intel will invest $20 million in a wireless broadband joint venture with Samsung Electronics, Korea Telecom, and Korea's National Pension Service.  The joint venture was announced last May by KT, with capital of $280.9 million.   It will expand South Korea's mobile WiMax coverage to 82 cities by March of next year, covering 85 percent of the nation's population.

The expansion is part of KT's effort to cope with surging data traffic following introduction of Apple's iPhone in late November of last year.

Google's Transparency Report and Government Requests From Korea

I noticed a bump up in traffic to this blog over the past few days and then found that R. Elgin had called this a "neat blog" in a post over at The Marmot's Hole.   Thank you for that!   In the same post he noted a Joongang Ilbo report about the Korean government's requests for information from Google.  I'd seen the same article and this prompted me to look more closely at Google's transparency report.

During the first half of 2010, according to Google's data, the Korean government requested the removal of web content 38 times, involving a total of 8,549 items.  The Google report indicates that 100 percent of the removal requests were "fully or partially complied with."  As reported in The Korea Times, the number of removal requests was the largest in Asia and the sixth highest worldwide.

Why so many removal requests from the Korean government?  The vast majority of such requests, according to Google Korea, are for removal of URLs that contain personal information in the form of Korean resident registration numbers (RRNs), which contain date of birth, gender, registration region, and registration order.

The Korea Times article also noted that Google's transparency report did not disclose similar data for China because, according to Google "Chinese officials consider censorship demands to be state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time."  

The Rapid Diffusion of Smartphones in Korea

The Joongang Daily carried two articles today that underscore important aspects of the transformation taking place in mobile communication, here in Korea as well as globally.  The first article noted that the recent Chuseok holiday led to a surge in the downloading of smartphone applications. Applications for road navigation, expressway traffic congestion and charye, the Korean ancestor veneration ritual, topped the popular application list during the holiday period. The same article noted that smartphone users in Korea currently number three million, a figure that is expected to double by year's end. I expect that may be a conservative estimate. Just think of how many family members and relatives had a chance to see the iPhone or Android phones in operation over the Chuseok holiday! That sort of exposure probably represents the most powerful form of sales promotion for these devices here in Korea.

A second article described the parts bottleneck that is being faced by the manufacturers of smart phones. As shown in the accompanying graphic (click to see a larger version), industry forecasts in the spring of 2009 significantly underestimated the worldwide growth of demand for smart phones.  Consequently, such parts as the organic light emitting diode (OLED) screens are in short supply.  The manufacturing process for such parts bears many similarities to that for semiconductors and requires long lead times to build fabs and ensure adequate capacity.