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Net-Nexus Seoul
An anonymous reader writes: "Wired has a story in their new issue about Seoul, Korea and how it is The Bandwidth Capital of the World It is really interesting how popular the internet and cybercafes are as a social medium there. They also have a huge following of online game players, with over 70% of broadband users playing online. For me, the best quote about the business opportunities that have sprung up is '(We) wanted to focus on interaction. And what is more interactive than games? We made this market. We made new sectors. American media companies were just using online capacity to distribute offline media.'"
"The government has even set up a certification program to rate buildings based on the quality of their data lines"
Where I am all appartments are cable ready, you dont need to ask. Next will be the trains, planes, etc...
Elsewhere (UK *COUGH*), its a joke, if they had data ratings built into the prices of accomodation then maybe more rollout would be done. After all you want the largest price for accomodation right?
I can imagine me asking a landlord in the UK "Is it cable ready", he would laugh at me. Here, they say "Dont be stupid, ofcourse it is".
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
I was there for a few months this past spring. It's true, Seoul is *very* connected. People are crazy over there, spending 8+ hours a day/night playing games. Diablo 2 is particularly popular over there. Man.. so many wasted hours I had over there. It's a different culture, not as many people own their own pc's, you go to an internet cafe instead. It's definitely different.
Have you hugged your Karma Whore today?
Don't forget the SPAM!
SCO (noun.)- A Slimy Corporate Ogre. Often seeks free money.
Wow... I always wondered where all those human bodies encased in slime REALLY were.
I guess we're all really encompassed in goo somewhere in Korea. It's okay...
I would have preferred Thailand for all the cheap sex when I decide to take the red pill and wake up, but I can live.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
they want to keep the condition where they talk and the others listen.
I think the reason is that american media is the largest creator of content in the world, and they are affraid of losing that.
So they try to keep hirarchical distribution networks.
A Korean cable network would probably not care what is going trough their cables, as long as people are paying.
In the us timewarner has a shitload of tv channels, movies, etc to push trough their cables, so they do care.
Also in the us, while almost every building is cable ready, there are only a few cable companies that are monopolies and provide pretty mediocre internet service.
Here ya go! It's Cheetos, but so what?
And the brethren went away edified.
In the last paragraph, she kind of hints at what I was wondering for the last couple of pages:
She makes a big deal about the country's great bandwidth. But it seems like the big selling point involves real-world interaction -- playing games and hooking up in baangs, playing games and hooking up with people in other baangs. As she describes it, it's the social scene that's gelled around computer clusters that's important. (Sort of like pre-Internet CS clusters, except with much more attractive people.)
So, maybe providing bandwidth to the home is a dead end and it's developing cybercafes that's the key to a computer-centric culture?
(I've really got to visit Korea one of these days. I've changed planes in Kimpo plenty of times but never went outside. The biggest impression the country made on me was when I was watching a "Good Morning America" type show and the Katie Couric-ish host modeled the season's new thong bikinis. That was an adrenaline shot at 7 am, after a 12 hour flight.)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I've always wondered what country could possible have enough bandwidth to send out the amount of Asian spam I get each day. Gotta love Mozilla...it actually shows up with the right character set.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Bandwidth capital of the world, eh? Maybe that explains why I had to resort to filtering EVERYTHING from .kr out of my email. No, I didn't read the article, but I just love the quote, "American media companies were just using online capacity to distribute offline media."
I was just in Korea to watch the World Cup. I couldn't believe how wired Seoul was. People who think the San Francisco Bay Area is wired haven't been to Seoul recently.
Seoul has some insanely large amount internet cafes with super-speedy boxes and nice, flat crt's that cost about $0.80/hr to use. Seoul also has Webvan-like services that can do same-day delivery if you order early enough in the day.
And everyone I met seemed to have a cable modem at home. And I can't even count the number of times I saw some mom-and-pop restaurant even in the outskirts of Seoul sporting the URL for their homepage on their business sign.
Later adopters of the technology, rather than sinking their Bux and building their models on the first, shitty generation of the technology, get the good stuff and then surpass the creators of the form.
China, for example, has skipped landlines for phone service in a lot of areas, and gone straight to mobiles.
We're going to see a lot more of this in the next decades, while America drowns under the weight of it's enormous, wasteful military budget (I'm not against a strong America, but I have worked for defense contractors and know the score here) and it's completely outdated model of global politics.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
A friend of mine hangs out with "Grrr..." (top French Canadian profesional SC player). He's a huge star there... people recognise him walking down the street, and ask for autographs, etc. Let's hope the rest of the world catches up with Korea someday :)
Why doesn't Slashdot just save some front-page real estate and make a Wired SlashBox? Seems like every story except the letters section is featured here.
I know it's a good mag...I have a subscription. I just didn't think they needed to be featured here all the freakin' time!
We wanted to focus on interaction. And what is more interactive than games? We made this market. We made new sectors. American media companies were just using online capacity to distribute offline media.
I don't think I've heard anything as progressive and rational as this statement from any company in the US for a long, long time. Good stuff........
gawd... that is just SO wrong in so many ways.
i mean, in a movie theatre, where you also do not communicate much, at least the two person have something in common that was shared, besides the snuggling and making out and the occational nobody-is-around-so-lets-get-down-and-dirty. but this is horrible. you might be sitting next to eachother but in reality the two of you are further apart than if i was chatting with my gf in morse code or campbells-cans-and-string
besides that, there is the $$ issue. i am sure the love-stations costs more, but there seems hardly a point to it, since the exact same can be accomplished if the two person is sitting across the room, nay, across town from eachother.
bah... maybe i am just used to the old method(s) of dating.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
It's the whole issue with change. The companies with a lot to lose (ie, the ones in power) resist, while companies with nothing to lose (ie, the underdogs) embrace new tech with a vengance. They key to survival is to build a market while the old guard are still assessing the threat. In the US, the old guard have gotten better at dealing with threats over the years, hence the heavy emphasis on legislation as their bludgeon of choice.
The rest of the world better be damn careful of what treaties their politicians sign with the WTO, or else they may be getting a visit from US lawyers, applying formerly US only draconian IP laws to everyone else (shudder)...
After wandering around the city, I found a well-stocked Internet cafe that sold decent coffee and fairly decent cigarettes (Mild Sevens). The per-hour price wasn't bad, and it wasn't exactly difficult to master the Korean language keyboards. This particular cafe was classy, boasting a waxed wood floor and decorative plants. The drop-down Windows "run" menus of its 3-4 PCs were full of Ivy League servers, vestiges of touring American bluebloods.
Unfortunately, this particular cafe shuttered relatively early in the evening. Later in the night (when I wasn't occupied w/ meetings), I'd frequent an entirely different sort of Internet cafe accessible through a alleyway door and a staircase. This dim, windowless cafe was crammed wall-to-wall with high end PCs -- almost all manned by a stooped Korean teens mesmerized by StarCraft. For some reason, the beefy proprietor always waved away my cash, never accepting any of my proferred payment.
I haven't thought about Korean Internet cafes (or posted to slashdot) for some time, until encountering this article. Good to be back, and props to the trollaxor crew.
Insects and Grafitti Photos
And just like the arcades, local government politicos are starting to impose local ordinances to control cyber-cafes as well...
This article describes something that could happen in USA: A revival of arcades based on broadband.
One of the major appeals of arcades was that they let you play on technology more powerful than anything at home, with your friends, for as little as 25 cents. They steadily lost that advantage in the 1990s until they got to today's point where home games are MORE powerful, and arcades games cost 50c to $1 per play.
But what if they got that advantage back? What if arcades were based on broadband? I've noticed that in USA broadband is far more likely to be set up in large buildings and institutions than in homes. And when it does become popular in homes, the standard connection for large organizations might jump ahead again.
I'd like to see broadband arcades where you could play with people in the same room and people hundreds of miles away at the same time! And of course it would allow for voice chat, and maybe videophoning as well. The arcade owner would only have to install hardware and software once: The cabinet/cocpit itself would auto-update software forever after. And it should cost have a reasonable cost, the way arcades used to.
Would you go?
"Sure I want to be the biggest telecom company in the world, but it's just a commodity. I want to be able to form opinion.
By controlling the pipe, you can eventually get control of the content."
-IDT chairman Howard Jonas
(IDT is an enormous Telco).
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
When something like this is gonna penetrate the US/EU market. I for one would love a wired cafe with instant noodles, drinks, games and like minded ppl where you can surf, game, mail and ssh to my servers to code
;-)
I mean ppl who love football have hangouts, ppl who love cars have hangouts, etc.. When is the computer loving part of the world gonna get over their nerd-stigmata, and hang out as well?
If anyone is setting something like this up in Amsterdam (NL), letme know, ill be a regular
There is quite a large discrepancy between the US and Europe in terms of mobile coverage and use. In Europe the fact that I don't have a landline (Mobile and Cable) is not special or out of the ordinary. Mobile coverage is almost 100% across the continent. And it boils down to one thing really: Standards. I think in the US you have three competeing standards. Here in Europe it's just GSM(slowly GPRS as well). In Korea they don't have game consoles and everything is standardised on the PC (did they pay MS for all the licences?).
Not that I have anything against competition, but sometimes one does wonder if it wouldn't just be easier to skip the competition thing.
This is the most important part of the article, how they did it.
This has been done in the USA in a few places. A few lucky people have cheap fiber optic to the curb thanks to their local/regional municipal power companies. Their prices are comparable to South Korea's. This isn't happening here because in most states, the cable and telcos have bought legislatures to prevent this from providing their current customers with superior competition.
In the past, companies located next to cheap resources, mainly power and raw materials. In the future, companies will be looking for cheap broadband data access. South Korea will be one of these places.
The cities and rural areas with public power who have sense enough to leverage this into broadband public data access will be the hypergrowth areas in the future.
That growth will come at the expense of the areas whose people allow themselves to be governed by tards whose law-making capability is at the disposal of the highest bidder.
"People always get the local governments they deserve."
E.E. "Doc" Smith
Tech Public Policy stuff
What appeals the most is the fact that most of the people dont have pcs at home.
Not really...Pc-rooms aren't popular simply because of the fact that people don't have PCs at home-many people do, and in many, many cases I've seen people go out and play at pc-rooms rather than just playing at home-despite their p4 PCs and DSL broadband connection.
Its not the lack of PCs, or services, or anything that makes pc-rooms addictive-its the culture.
I mean, aside from geeks, who has two net-connected computers in their home? One thing alot of people should understand, is that not too many people go to pc-rooms alone-its a social place.
A pc-baang doesn't replace the computers Koreans have at home- it complements 'em.
I just got back from Seoul. The thing about Korea is that it is mostly mountanous and has a sparse amount of land for living on. Since land is so valuable, there are really NO suburbs in Korea. Most people live in high-density urban areas inside cookie-cutter 15-30 story apartment complexes. Getting broadband to the masses is EASY over there since the masses are piled into a small number of densely populated areas.
On a semi-related note, one of the things that impressed me was that Korean companies are providing more interesting services to their customers. I went to one of the many high-tech Internet cafes run jointly with a cell phone company (i believe it was naver.com). Anyway, you buy cell phone service and it gets you in for free at all their Internet cafes. Besides having a load of PCs there, the one I went to had gaming-specific LANs, DDR video games, and even a private recording studio that let you do karaoke in a room with video cameras. At the end of the session, it even spit out a CD-R with a video recording of your session.
The other thing I found funny....You can rent cell phones in Korea right when you land. This is typical because there are very few wired public phones in Korea these days as everyone has a cell phone.
I don't want the government to mismanage anything else. They're already overreaching the powers granted in the Constitution.
It's very nice to portray South Korea as a techies' paradise, but let's not forget the more than 50 individuals languishing in jails there for the "crime" of being trade union activists.
.
The unions in South Korea also use the net, and they use broadband and they have been doing cutting edge stuff on the net for years, including daily video webcasts. But while the society is all very 21st century, or so it appears, in reality the present government is one of the most repressive Korea has ever known.
If you want to help use the new technology to support the imprisoned Korean trade unionists, go here: http://www.labourstart.org/actnow.shtml
To learn more about repression of trade unionists in Korea, go here: http://www.kctu.org or http://www.labourstart.org/korea/
I know from past experience that one is likely to get flamed on Slashdot for even mentioning trade unions, but I guess that's not much of a sacrifice compared to what the Korean trade unionists are going through . .
Workers of the world, unite! http://www.labourstart.org
And what is more interactive than games?
Actually, sex is considerably more interactive than games, but these guys wouldn't know...
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.