Thundernewt in Korea

Opinion and analysis on Korea's technology scene, and general thoughts from a raging, inexorable lizard that changes colors and stomps on things.

NHN buys Livedoor for $68 million

Some of you may recall Livedoor for its scandalous accounting fraud, which drew global attention to its flamboyant CEO, and which saw the apparent suicide of an executive at a securities firm that was raided by prosecutors as a part of the investigation.

Well, now Livedoor will be known as the massive doormat that Korean firm NHN used to rush in and dominate the Japanese market.  Korea's NHN now controls 30 million monthly uniques per month through a single web property, http://livedoor.com.

I've got a friend who works for NHN Japan.  I was hoping that he'd come back to Korea, but considering how busy NHN's Tokyo office will now be, I don't think I should count on him coming back soon!

[Source: Techcrunch]

Wetoku design update and platform change

This is a sneak preview of the new Wetoku.

We are switching from FMS to Wowza. Performance seems to have increased, though we'll have to test with more people to know for sure.

Pen with embedded subway map feature

Ok, so this is a decidedly low tech approach... But nonetheless I was
impressed (perhaps childishly so) by the rollout subway map in a pen I
found sitting on my kitchen counter.

Swarm of micro-helicopters to create giant 3D display

Now this is cool.  Imagine a swarm of robotic fireflies, controlled by a computer, changing formation to create stunning images in 3D, right in front of your eyes.  E Roon Kang, a former UI designer in Korea who left for the US and is now a post-graduate research fellow at MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory, is collaborating with MIT's Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems (ARES) Lab to bring this vision to reality.  He is the project leader for what MIT is calling the Flyfire project.

“Each of the helicopters then acts as what we call a smart pixel.  By controlling their movement, we can have the pixels flying through the air.”
Kang's vision is a much cooler imagining of the media skin wall concept that we're working on implementing at my office.
 
Priya Ganapti from Wired points out that "Simple as the idea may seem,  creating an army of microcopters poses some significant technical challenges. For instance,  each of these little devices will have be self-stabilizing. That means as they hover,  they will have to maintain their co-ordinates with extreme accuracy for at least a few minutes."  Given the challenges of achieving this type of accuracy, we may not see a production version of this anytime soon... for now, check out MIT's Flyfire video:

Local 3D street search venture scores $6M funding from Korea's #1 telecom's US subsidiary

Street views generated from photos stitched together is nothing new.  But with Everyscape's immersive take on street view, there are some buildings that you can go inside.

Apparently, SK Telecom Americas was impressed enough to lead a $6 million Series C funding that saw Everyscape, a Massachusetts-based venture, increase their total funding take to $17.5 million.

[Daum's take version of Street View... they call it Road View.]

Given that the Korean market has a few players already in the street view game (Daum, Naver, and PlayStreet), I wonder why SK Telecom of America's decided to align themselves with Everyscape... especially since one of them, Playstreet, is a hungry startup that wants to make it on the global stage.  In fact, Playstreet has already started to make some noise in a market outside of Korea, albeit in the relatively small New Zealand market.

[Playstreet's New Zealand site, Showstreet]

RIM pokes and prods its browser division

Physics nut and co-CEO of Research in Motion, makers of the iconic BlackBerry device, has finally realized that the outdated browser being maintained by his browser division is what has really been holding back his company from performing at iPhone-sque levels in the market.

Sure, BlackBerry has 41.6% marketshare vs. 25.3% for the iPhone in the U.S [source: Comscore, via Electronista].  But consider that RIM was the ONLY smartphone worth buying until 2006.  And also consider that many enterprises in the U.S. have committed to the BlackBerry by creating & installing custom applications critical to their operations on those BlackBerries.  A good portion of the corporate BlackBerry users actually want an iPhone, Mike.

RIM also lost me.  I was a dedicated CrackBerry BlackBerry user until I switched to the iPhone 3G in July 2007.  When I arrived in Korea in October 2008, I spent a very painful 6 months without a smartphone, until I bought a BlackBerry Bold from SK Telecom... the Bold is the only BlackBerry sold in Korea.  But when the iPhone was released in Korea, I immediately jumped and got myself a shiny new iPhone 3GS.  The iPhone is, quite simply, the best mobile computing experience on the market right now.  Everyone else is a me-too device that fails miserably, or a concept that has yet to be executed in the market.

I hope RIM gets its act together with a proper browser.  If so, I'll again have real options as a consumer, and I might just switch back to the BlackBerry... but then again, I might wait until I have a third option, if MS can really pull together a solid product in Windows Phone Series 7.

Korean Tech Is Losing Its Cool - BusinessWeek

We have tremendously strengthened our software, which has been our weak spot," says J.K. Shin, president of Samsung's handset business.
via businessweek.com

I fell off my chair laughing. I can't believe that Samsung's handset business had the cojones to say that their software has been "tremendously strengthened."

I feel bad slinging shots at Samsung's software, because I know a few people who are involved in it. The disclaimer is that Samsung rarely makes it's own software... they outsource project management and development.

Samsung needs to bring software development in-house, and make it a real priority. They have too many brilliant people to be excused for churning out such terribly unusable software.

Back in December 2008, I bought a Samsung NC10 netbook. Great hardware for a netbook, in a gorgeous form factor. But the network settings utility that shipped with it was too large to fit on the screen (even at maximum resolution), and the tab sequence to cycle through text fields, radio buttons and buttons was random AND failed to get me to the "OK" button to commit changes. Brilliant.

SKT launches user-generated AR application

The Korea Times reported a few days ago that "The country's biggest mobile telephony operator unveiled new software Wednesday that uses the built-in cameras on phones to offer users a wealth of location-specific information, such as transportation, restaurant, and shopping options, and the number of tickets available at movie theaters nearby."

This is much like Layar, but with one difference... I think this is useful.  SKT seems to have accumulated a wealth of POI data, but isn't settling there -- they've raised the game by adding a slick interface for displaying user generated content.

SKT takes the opportunity to sling mud at my company, which released a novelty app called iNeedCoffee, saying that "The existing applications that claim to provide AR, such as the Odivar and iNeedCoffee application for iPhone users, have provided only a limited range of information, such as finding subway stations and coffee shops, and failed to sense and analyze where the user is exactly positioned and offer the relevant information to him or her."  Ouch.

While the SKT rep is quite right in his assessment of the limitations of iNeedCoffee, he should consider that that was sort of the purpose... the application wasn't about augmented reality, it was very simply a way for me to more easily get my caffeine fix when I'm in a new neighborhood.  We've since moved on beyond GPS-based augmented reality, and are now generally focused on finding ways to augment augmented reality with computer vision, something that SKT should be aware of since they asked us to assist them with their investigation into the field of high performance computer vision for the purposes of augmented reality devices.

Get social with your book list

Seoul startup UserStoryLab wants people to engage each other about the books they are reading.

The guys at USL launched the beta of UserStoryBook.net in Korean.  I'm looking forward to seeing an English version of their service.  Using UserStoryBook, I can enter a list of books I want to read, that I am reading and that I have read.  I can follow other members and see what is on their reading list, and see who else is reading books that I'm interested in.

So far, it looks like their business model is referral fees for triggering transactions at Amazon or Aladdin, a Korean online book store.

Yuno Jung, the CEO of UserStoryLab, has assembled an interesting team of people.  I had a chance to meet him at last year's StartupSeoul event.  Since then, it looks like Yuno has been keeping busy.

Let there be light! (for our media skin wall)

Caught some flashing lights out of the corner of my eye, and this time I wasn't in Vegas.  The Zenitum Geek Crew is building a media skin wall that I wrote about before, twice.  They added LEDs to a few of the hexagonal panels that are controlled using compressed air.  See the video for more.