1. Samsung has released its latest Galaxy S5 smartphone and wearables in 125 countries around the world as it battles squeezed profits and challenges to its top market position. Such a large simultaneous launch is the biggest of its kind for any of its previous products. The previous generation S4, the best selling android phone ever, started selling in 60 countries, and the Note 3 was first released in 58 countries. 2….

KT – Cisco team up for 5G network Korean telecommunications giant KT said recently that it aims to jointly develop a fifth-generation (5G) network with Cisco Systems under new corporate initiatives being pursued by KT CEO Hwang Chang-gyu. “While 5G is still just a concept rather than a reality, you should keep in mind that being proactive means thinking and acting ahead of anticipated trends,” said a KT executive. The remarks come…

Mobile Shopping Users In Korea Exceed 20M For First Time A recent survey has shown that Koreans using mobile shopping applications has grown such that there are now more mobile shoppers than there are KakaoGame players in Korea. According to Rankey.com who conducted the survey, the number of shopping app users totaled 21.63M, as of January 2014. This figure is 2.7M higher than the number of KakaoGame Play users and represents a…

Samsung unveils Tizen-based wearable devices Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s largest maker of smartphones, unveiled its first wearable devices that run on its own mobile operating system Tizen in Spain on Sunday, as it seeks to break its heavy reliance on Google Inc.’s Android software. The unveiling of the Samsung Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo, Samsung’s successors to the Galaxy Gear, which was released in September last year, also comes as…

Japan has been much harder hit by the global financial crisis than its North East Asian neighbors and has since struggled to catch back up. The country’s recovery has of course further been hampered by the devastating tsunami and subsequent nuclear crisis in Fukushima. Suffice to say that Japan has seen better days, and now news that in the lucrative semiconductor market Japan is also losing out to Korea. According to research…

Although Michael Bay stole many of the headlines for his walkout at CES Samsung have been trying to regain the spotlight and have claimed with confidence that the will grab top market share of UHD TV sales in the first quarter of 2014. “Although our launch of UHD TV was little late, we are confident that we will take the world’s No. 1 position within the first quarter,”  Yoon Boo-Keun, head of…

South Korea’s tech giants are battling it out at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, promoting their cutting-edge “smart” products. A total of 3,200 global players will showcase at one of the largest tech shows on earth Jan. 7-10, demonstrating how they aim to change our digital future. First round seems to have gone to Samsung, with their Smart Home solutions, which have out-shone LG’s Smart TVs, for now….

Samsung’s 4Q Operating Profit Likely to Fall Short of 10Tn Won Target Amid predictions that Samsung Electronics’ fourth-quarter operating profit will likely to fall short of their target of 10Tn won, the company’s stock price of Samsung Electronics hit a downward slope. Market watchers also predicted that this down-trend would continue into the first quarter of next year. According to financial information provider FnGuide on December 26, the consensus figures for Samsung…

Many had thought that the plethora of law suits that we saw earlier this year between smartphone giants Samsung and Apple has all but disappeared, but now it has emerged that Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s largest smartphone maker, on Thursday suffered a legal defeat against Apple Inc. on its home turf after a local court ruled that Apple had not in fact violated its patents. The Seoul Central District Court ruled…

Samsung releases ‘Galaxy Round’, the first phone with a curved display   The new “Galaxy Round” phone from South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics will make its debut in the domestic market this week, the nation’s top mobile operator SK Telecom said Wednesday. The most prominent feature of the latest Galaxy series phone is its curved display. It also features a 5.7-inch screen, the same as the Galaxy Note 3, with a…

Samsung Electronics achieved a record-high performance in the third quarter of this year. Unlike market expectations that the growth of its smartphone business would slow, Samsung sustained a record-breaking pace in smartphone sales. Moreover, its semiconductor and telecommunications business, which slipped to supporting roles, reemerged as one of main actors. The most striking feature in the third-quarter results released by Samsung on October 4 is that its operating profit reached 10.1 trillion…

Samsung is clearly taking its drive for innovation seriously, in order to compete with the likes of Apple and to cement its position as global tech / electronics leader. After spending $1Bn on a new innovation center in Silicon Valley, the tech giant is now set to introduce a radical new work policy in Korea, to spur creative thinking. Samsung will adopt a four-hour flexible working system company-wide on the condition that…

  For a number of years Korea has been firmly established as a global production base for core display materials. This is partly due to intense competition in the industry between the two domestic heavyweights LG and Samsung. Chinese display makers are making aggressive investments in the sector, but investments in the materials and components for next-generation display are still concentrated in Korea, and China has some way to catch up the…

LG Display and Samsung Display Co. have settled their longstanding quarrel over their display technology as the world’s two biggest display makers face growing competition from Chinese rivals and an industry slump, industry sources have claimed. LG Display and Samsung Display have been locked in a legal battle over organic light-emitting diode (OLED) and liquid-crystal display (LCD) technology following probes into an alleged technology leak from Samsung Display to LG Display last…

Samsung has announced that in October they will be releasing a new ‘Noum’ model smartphone handset with a curved screen. This demonstrates Samsung’e drive to become not only the world’s top handset maker, but also the most innovative. Curved displays are an early stage in screen evolution which is shifting to bendable or foldable designs, eventually allowing mobile and wearable gadgets to take on new forms that could radically change the high-end…

Large corporates, particularly Korean large corporates, have often been charged with the slogan that, “big companies don’t innovate”. That’s a statement Marc Shedroff, VP at Samsung’s Open Innovation Center in Silicon Valley, disagrees with. Samsung, which now has a $1Bn R&D operation in the heart of Silicon Valley, is pushing hard to convert new ideas into innovative products in an increasingly tough market (primarily phones & tablets). The company spends over $10…

Samsung Galaxy S4 Understands Korean Dialects?!  Samsung Galaxy S4 ‘s ‘S Voice Engine’, ‘S Translator’ and ‘S Voice Drive’ now allows for a more correct translation of Korean dialects. The South Korean conglomerate have been collecting data about different dialects around Korea (and mind you, they are remarkably different from standard Korean). Samsung Electronics have been continuously making developments in the voice technology area. S4 had a ‘non-touch’ concept that allows you…

Zuckerberg (center) walks into Samsung Electronics’ building to meet with executives of the Korean tech giant. Samsung We wrote earlier that the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg will be in Korea (read the article here). The meeting with the Vice Chairman of Samsung Electronics, Lee Jae-yong was one of the key points in Zuckerberg’s short itinerary in Korea. It was speculated that he will be visiting President Park Geun-Hye – but he had also…

Facebook’s Co-Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg will visit Korea at the end of this month, according to Yonhap News. Seeing that Bill Gates and Larry Page visited Korea recently, it seems likely that Zuckerberg, too, will discuss the future of IT with the Park administration. People are speculating that he will visit Cheongwadae (the presidential residence in Korea, or the ‘blue house’) at the end of June. He will be spending about…

“Two’s not enough to provide true competition. These guys are getting ready to kill the Internet, that’s where this [disordered, no-rules and] unregulated duopoly is headed.” -Mark Cooper “Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.” – Thomas Edison A duopoly is a market condition in which two companies producing a similar type of product have control over the market. It’s a situation in which two companies own all or nearly all…