Mobile Korea

S-DMB soon to reach 1 million viewers

(Source: MocoNews) TU Media’s S-DMB service in Sth Korea has signed up 950,000 paying customers who watch an average of 62 minutes per day, according to President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Young-Kil Suh. “TU Media is targeting 2.2 million customers by the end of 2007, according to Suh. By the end of the decade it plans to have 6.6 million customers, generating more than $1 billion in revenue, he said. South Korea has more than 40 million mobile phone users.” This compares with the competing T-DMB service, which has picked up 1.8 million viewers but its advertising model is bringing in less than 10% of the revenue required to break even.

Korean-Chinese SMS service launched

(Source: Digital Media Asia) SK Telecom has launched 'Korea-China Korean SMS services' allowing transmission and reception of text messages in Hangul with China Unicom subscribers. Korean mobile phone subscribers have been sending and receiving SMS or MMS messages in English to or from overseas mobile phone subscribers. However, Korean text messages could only be exchanged with roaming customers in countries where automatic roaming with SK Telecom is possible (US, China, New Zealand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand). With the launch of the new service, China Unicom's CDMA subscribers in China will also be able to exchange SMS messages in Hangul with SK Telecom subscribers in Korea. Also, subscribers to China Unicom's CDMA services will be able to exchange Korean text messages with one another. Subsequently, users in China will be able to use their handset and mobile number to send and receive Korean text messages. Along with the new SMS Service, SK Telecom plans to provide Korean language text services to subscribers of China Mobile by the end of the year. By early next year, the company plans to enable the transmission of SMS in not only Korean but Chinese characters as well.

LG embraces Starbucks to promote DMB phones

(Source: Chosun Ilbo) LG Electronics will join hands with the global coffee chain Starbucks to market its mobile phone. LG said Sunday it will open an “experience zone” where customers can test LG Electronics’ pocket TV phone while sipping coffee at 10 Starbucks stores in Seoul until Nov. 12. With the collaboration, LG aims to promote its 10.95 mm pocket TV phones equipped with the terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) technology. LG Electronics said customers can experience “the stylish design and superb image quality” of the firm’s DMB phones there.

Samsung's 10 megapixel camera phone

(Source: Webuserblog) It had to happen sooner or later: the world's first ten-megapixel camera phone. Just launched in Korea by Samsung, the SCH-B600 promises to be the ultimate mobile snapper (at least until an eleven-megapixel model arrives). Besides that incredible resolution, the phone features a 3x optical zoom, 5x digital zoom and an autofocus for sharper images, even in poor light. There's also white balance, manual focus, continuous picture-taking and movie recording.Other notable functions include an MP3 player, Bluetooth connectivity and a business card reader.

SK Telecom and China Unicom in handset deal

(Source: DigitalMediaAsia) SK Telecom and China Unicom are understood to have decided on a 'joint handset sourcing' in order to target the markets of South Korea and China. This is reportedly the first time that any conspicuous achievement has been announced since the alliance between the two companies. On 21 June, SK Telecom established a contract for purchase of CBs (Convertible Bonds) worth $1bn issued by China Unicom. Also, through the establishment of a 'Strategic Alliance for CDMA Services' with China Unicom, SK Telecom announced alliance and co-operation in joint handset sourcing, joint development of additional services, joint platform development, marketing/distribution, CRM and network. As a result, for specific implementation of the six areas of alliance between SK Telecom and China Unicom, a consultation group and task force consisting of 50 working level members from both companies are in operation, with discussions on specific ways of cooperation through mutual provision of consulting in each area, sharing of expertise and provision of market information. SK Telecom and China Unicom have agreed to source joint handsets of six types in the first half of 2007 for the South Korea and China markets, and plan to continue expanding the supply of model types and volume by 2008.

KT buys another media company

Korea Telecom has announced that it will buy Olive9 for $21.9 million. Olive9 is a digital media company specialised in next-generation delivery of entertainment services. The company produces and supplies media content for DMB, portable internet and IP-TV. This is another step in the value chain integration started by the Korean carriers. In the past, SK Telecom has invested in TU Media, started up a joint venture in Warner Music and purchased a share in the media company IHQ. Korean operators believe that content ownership benefits the uptake of wireless data services, since carriers can offer better prices and reduce conflicts of interest.

Korean consumers prefer slide-type handsets

Research and Markets, in its 'Mobile Device Convergence Report 1H, 2006', has said that South Korean consumers prefer slide-type handsets, while clamshell is the most popular in Japan and bar-type has the biggest market share in China. The aim of this half-yearly report is to present the future direction of the markets by providing periodical analysis on new mobile device launches in Japan, South Korea and China, which are leading the telecom and mobile markets in Asia and reveal the differences between these countries. The report provides information on mobile devices launched in each country.
The handsets analysed in this report include all the models launched in the first half of 2006. These include 269 models by 21 manufacturers.

KTF cuts earnings forecast

(Source: Reuters) KTF,  Korea's second-biggest mobile operator, cut its 2006 earnings forecast on Tuesday to reflect a fall in interconnection rates and higher marketing costs, sending its shares 2 percent lower. KTF said its 2006 EBITDA margin (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) would be 33 percent, down from a previous 37-39 percent range, and against its 2005 EBITDA margin of 39 percent. The revision, slightly shy of forecasts by analysts of around 35 percent, follows bigger rival SK Telecom cutting in August its 2006 EBITDA forecast by 9 percent to 4 trillion won ($4.24 billion). South Korean mobile carriers are trapped in margin-crushing competition that has intensified after the reintroduction of partial handset subsidies in March, while revenue growth is stalled in a country where four out of five have a mobile phone. "We expect second-half marketing costs to edge down from the first half, but they will be certainly higher than a year earlier," said No Mi-won, an analyst at Goodmorning Shinhan Securities. "A wider-than-expected fall in interconnection revenue is also negative."

 

LG introduces handset for the blind

LG Electronics has unveiled the world's first talking phone capable of reading books to blind users, officials said on Wednesday. The LF-1300 model hit the domestic market this week, priced at around 400,000 won ($417). "The LF-1300 is the world's first mobile handset capable of reading books for the blind. This is part of our efforts to contribute to society," said  Song Keun-Yong, spokesman for the world's fourth-largest cellphone vendor. The blind, visually impaired and dyslexic can buy the talking phone after presenting a government certificate. The phones are being offered at a special low price. Users can download about 300 audio books free of charge through LG's digital library website on a computer specially designed for the blind, Song said. They can also download the digital books directly onto cellphones through the wireless network by touching a hot key on the handset, he said.   

Are Korean callers being overcharged?

(Source: Chosun Ilbo) Subscribers with Korea’s largest mobile carrier SK Telecom on average spend about 200 minutes per month on outgoing calls and 110 minutes on incoming calls. The average monthly bill is W44,000 (US$=W956). There are plenty of four-person families spending W200,000-300,000 per month on mobile phone charges, which can become a hefty burden. With KTF and LG Telecom the situation is about the same. The Ministry of Information and Communication and the industry insist the phone rates are cheap compared to other countries, and the reason for hefty bills is that people spend a lot of time on the phone. But a survey of the billing programs and consumer habits in the U.S. by the Chosun Ilbo found that supposing subscribers in both countries use their handsets for a similar amount of time, the amount spent per month was more than W10,000 greater here. Park Il-geun lives in Austin, Texas, where he no longer has a landline, only using his cell phone. Last May, Park signed up for a 300-minute plan with mobile carrier Sprint, which costs him US$29.99 (tax not included) a month. Calls at night -- from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. -- and on weekends are free. “The free call benefit covers a long period of time, so I rarely use up my 300 in-plan minutes.” The major U.S. carriers -- Verizon, T-mobile, and Cingular -- offer similar programs. If you want to talk a similar amount in Korea, you better be prepared to fork over significantly more in fees.

The 190-minute plan from SK Telecom is W36,000: around 20 percent more per minute than Sprint. Minutes used on nighttime calls count against the plan. Again, the situation is similar at the nation’s other mobile carriers, who offer comparable plans for W34.500-36,000.

Once again, its WiderThan...

WiderThan announced two new 3G personalization services, Caller Tag and Photo SMS (short message service). The services use global mobile standards and are now available for wireless carriers in the U.S. and Europe, Middle East and Africa. With Photo SMS, wireless users can have an image or photo sent with their text message. The sender simply types a text message using SMS, and the receiver is delivered an MMS (multi media service) by having the Photo SMS service automatically combine the text with pre-defined photo images and converting to an MMS message. This service enhances the simple text messaging by adding a visual aspect to text messages making them more fun and personal. Currently, more than one million SK Telecom subscribers are using a similar service in Korea. Photo SMS provides an additional revenue stream for wireless carriers, boosts messaging usage, raises awareness of MMS services, and improves revenue for MMS services.

Widerthan launches Ringback tone service for Telstra

(Source: News Blaze) Telstra, Australia's largest mobile service provider, recently announced that it has launched its 'BigPond Caller tones', ringback tone service. The service, is powered by WiderThan (NASDAQ: WTHN) a leading provider of mobile entertainment solutions for wireless carriers worldwide and provided to Telstra in partnership with m.Net Corporation Ltd., a local mobile services company. Telstra customers using the WiderThan ringback tone (RBT) service, can personalize the ringing tone usually heard by people who call them with music, personal messages, humor or other audio clips. This personalization of the ringback tone can be customized by time of day or for the person calling. BigPond Caller Tones lists more than 1,000 music and other pieces of content in its launch point catalogue and is available to Telstra's nationwide GSM and 3G wireless subscribers.

WiderThan available on Amp'd

WiderThan, an application provider and publisher of games, is deploying two of its games on Amp'd Mobile, the Los Angeles-based MVNO targeting the youth market. Amp'd said yesterday that WiderThan's Cubetrix and Zoo Keeper games are now available for sale to Amp'd Mobile subscribers. The deal is the first for WiderThan on a 3G MVNO. WiderThan is a developer of mobile games, and was recently acquired by RealNetworks.

New Card Phone by Samsung

Today in Korea, Samsung announced the successor to its calculator styled SGH-P300, the SGH-P310. The P310, also known as the Card Phone II, has a revamped exterior that gets rid of the old retro calculator look of brushed aluminum, and updates the device with a matte black finish. Samsung also decided to slim down the P310, reducing the thickness from 8.9mm to 8.5mm. The feather light device weighs in at a mere 75g (2.6oz). Don't be fooled by its credit card thin look, this triband GSM/GPRS/EDGE device hosts quite a multimedia package. It sports a large 1.9" 262k QVGA display, features Bluetooth 1.2 with stereo support, and comes equipped to sync with Microsoft Outlook - email included. Other features of note include a 2 megapixel digital camera, 80MB of on-board memory, and a microSD memory card slot. The P310 also includes both a video and music player, as well as a dual-function carrying case/extended battery that will give the P310 extra battery life to work with. Samsung's new P310 will be available in the European market in late September, with the South East Asian market to follow in late October.

RealNetworks to buy WiderThan

(Source: TelecomPaper) RealNetworks has agreed to acquire the mobile music and entertainment group WiderThan for USD 350 million cash. WiderThan supplies ringback tones, music-on-demand and other mobile entertainment services to over 50 mobile carriers in more than 25 countries, including SK Telecom, Verizon Wireless and Bharti Airtel. For the six months ended 30 June, WiderThan had sales of USD 61.9 million, up 39 percent over the same period in 2005. Net income was USD 7.4 million, an increase of 79 percent from the prior year, while adjusted EBITDA rose 64 percent to USD 14.2 million. A t the end of the first half, WiderThan had cash of USD 93 million. RelNetworks plans to continue with the WiderThan brand name and staff levels, with the takeover to add to 2007 earnings, excluding acquisition-related costs.

Social Networking Korean-style

BusinessWeek has written a nice overview about Cyworld. No shocking news, but always interesting to see the whole Cyworld picture: Launched five years ago, Cyworld has almost 19 million members, close to 40% of South Korea's population. It pulls in an average of 900,000 unique visitors daily, and 20,000 users create some form of content every day. That makes it one of the most popular Web sites in the country. Members chat with their friends via the site's instant-messaging service, keep logs there, put up photos, and meet new friends when visitors stop by their Cyworld site. "I met my husband at a Cyworld club," says Kim Hye Kyung, a 31-year-old furniture designer. "Now I keep a photo log of my family at Cyworld." Like other social networking services, Cyworld lets people create their own home pages that can accommodate an unlimited number of photos, documents, and other data. The site has become so popular that some 40,000 companies, non-profit organizations, government agencies, and universities have joined as members to promote their businesses and activities through Cyworld. One thing that differentiates Cyworld is that users personalize their home pages, known as mini-homepi, by decorating their "rooms" with digital furniture, art, home electronics, wallpaper, and music. All these digital items are sold for anywhere from 20 cents to $9. Users first have to convert real money into cyber-currency called dotori (Korean for acorns), which costs 10 cents each. Cyworld gets an average of $270,000 a day selling this virtual currency.Cyworld is not just a PC community. The company is owned by SK Telecom, Korea's largest mobile carrier, and 3 million Cyworld users regularly log on with their phones. To encourage loyalty (and use of mobile phone service) SK allows users to post as many photos as they like, and every day Cyworld users upload millions of photos, many of them directly from camera phones.

Pantech to launch new S-DMB phone

(Source: PhoneMag) Pantech announced the launch of the IM-U140 handset, a satellite digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) handset that provides users with a genuinely unique mobile phone experience via its innovatively designed display screen. The LCD display is designed to pop up automatically at a 30 degree angle when users push a button next to the screen, optimizing user’s angle of view. The display adds significantly to users’ enjoyment of movies and TV programs, maximizing the user-friendly nature of the phone. The 2.6-inch wide QVGA LCD is the largest display featured on a DMB handset in Korea, further augmenting the portable TV viewing experience.

Irdeto to showcase S-DMB solutions at IBC

Irdeto Digital TV has been deployed at more than 300 network operators and content owners worldwide and these customers have enjoyed more piracy-free years and fewer smart card swaps than any other provider’s customers, which validate the solution’s proven performance and effective security. At IBC, Irdeto will demonstrate its latest solution highlighting content protection for HDTV as well as secure applications for the personal video recorder (PVR), ensuring safety for today’s and tomorrow’s generation of products. The demonstrations will feature the latest set-top boxes from Irdeto partners and showcase how operators can implement new business models, such as Push Video on Demand (VOD), to generate more revenue per subscriber. Another focus at Irdeto’s booth will be on its content protection solution for IPTV. Irdeto is supporting the rapid adoption of IPTV by creating fully tested, integrated and end-to-end security solutions with best-of-breed partners. Through partnerships and alliances, Irdeto helps operators to develop their IPTV security infrastructure with ease. It uses patented technologies for integration with its SoftClient solution.
As the world’s first CA vendor that delivered content protection for all three mobile standards S-DMB, T-DMB and DVB-H, Irdeto will furthermore globally present its first customer deployments in South Korea (S-DMB used by TU Media), Germany (T-DMB used by Debitel) and in South Africa (DVB-H used by MultiChoice).

Sofor Wireless to enter Korean market

Sofor Wireless from Finland and Korean company  UbiwareLab Inc. have signed an agreement to cooperate in selling and promoting the Waplane technology in Korea as well as providing easy, expandable mobile solutions to UbiwareLab's customers. To enter the Korean market, Waplane has been tuned to support the Korean character set, and it has also been localized for the Korean users. The mobile internet platforms are largely standardized in Korea and differ somewhat from the Europeans. Waplane has been tested on all Korean mobile operator platforms and is now totally compatible with all terminals used in Korea. UbiwareLab is a mobile solution leader in Korea focusing on ubiquitous and security business areas. One of their leading products is the mobile anti-virus solution that enabled SKTelecom to start commercial service world-wide first in 2004. UbiwareLab won the world-wide IBM Beacon Award in 2005 for successful development of an enterprise information portal for the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affair & Trade.

Nokia, Sony Ericsson wanting to enter Korean market

(Source: ETNews) Global mobile phone heavyweights such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson are now keen to expand into the Korean 3G mobile (WCDMA and HSDPA) market. Yet, they still face a major barrier of the country’s wireless Internet standard WIPI. The world’s first and fourth largest mobile phone companies are now tapping into deals with local wireless operators like SK Telecom and KTF, aiming to jump into competition in Korea. The multinational firms are seeking to provide single band single mode phones without changes in platforms and software so as to save initial costs. SK Telecom and KTF are in talks with these mobile phone companies, which they expect to help reinforce the lineups of handsets. Nokia withdrew from the Korean CDMA phone market in 2003, and is gearing up to re-enter the market in 4 years.