Korean Internet service provider KT has revealed that it is looking for a share of profits generated by smart TV sellers, after it switched off Internet access for smart television sets in the country.

As a report from Reuters explains, the ISP is concerned that the demands of Web-connected TVs will put significant strain on its network and affect its service. The firm already cut smart TVs’ access to the Web and now, with products tipped to grow significantly, the company is looking to develop an approach to monetise the products, as KT executive Kim Hyo-sil explains:

We want the value of our network recognised by (Internet TV) platform operators and want to create a business model that enables us to share profits generated from using our networks.

Those Internet-TVs can be likened to heavily-loaded trucks dominating network highways and slowing down the overall speeds, and the issue only becomes more serious as the Internet TV market grows.

Fellow Korean firm Samsung, which is planning to introduce revamped smart TV sets this year, is not in agreement wit KT’s proposal, as a company statement revealed:

Samsung is a pure manufacturer making TVs, smartphones and computers. It’s not logical to demand network fees from a manufacturer that makes products using networks.

In addition to Samsung and other ‘smart TV’ offerings, Apple is said to be planning to unveil its own TV — which may well be gesture and voice activated — while Google has its own offering, and Samsung is also committed to carrying a Google smart TV.

KT’s request is not unlike one that Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo made to Google, after revealing that certain Android apps were placing strain on its mobile data service. The carrier requested that Google reduce the activity that certain voice-calling apps places on mobile networks.

When YouTube hit the internet in 2005, it changed the way we view videos online. Suddenly Web users could search for almost anything and watch related videos instantly. Now viewing video has become an everyday activity and users all over the world spend billions of hours watching online video.

I have been fortunate enough be part of a closed beta realease for a new video service called Image2Play developed by Korean startup Enswers. As soon as I used Image2Play, I knew straight away that it had that ‘wow’ factor which could definitely revolutionize the online videos space in the same way that YouTube has. I took a closer look at the company to find out more about Image2Play and its other services.

Enswers was founded five years ago and the company’s name is a combination of ‘entertainment’ and ‘answer’. Essentially, the company aims to provide entertainment-related solutions and products, and is deeply involved in online media and search technology. Enswers recently announced that it had been acquired by major operator KT, but the company has been busy developing several products over recent years.

Image2Play

Image2Play is Enswers’ latest service which searches for videos via images on a webpage. Operated through a browser plug-in, the service automatically takes all images displayed on a webpage and runs them through its database of millions of videos in a matter of seconds. If the image returns a match, a play button is displayed in the top-right corner, after which the click of the button instantly plays the video match. Originally only a Chrome plug-in was available but recently support for both Internet Explorer and Firefox was added to the closed beta.

While using the closed beta, I was surprised by just how often I used the service. Whether browsing a news site or blog, once the play button pops up, it is very hard to resist clicking to watch related video content. Though videos appear to only be a minute long, it is enough to give you more information on the image or simply watch a good portion of the video it came from. Enswers also plans to allow embedding in blogs so users who do not have the plug-in installed can still view videos via the service.

Worldwide, the number of users uploading content continues to grow and finding videos or clips of copyrighted material has become a lot harder these days due to sites like YouTube clamping down on unlicensed uploads. Enswers has solved this problem by going straight to media outlets from the beginning and it has agreements to prevent any breach of copyright.

The extensive amount of video available from major networks, cable channels and even movie channels is very impressive. The benefit for broadcasters lies in publicity and revenue, as Enswers also intends to add marketing and purchasing features — users could, for example, purchase a DVD series or movie from the matching search result.

The domestic market in South Korea is Image2Play’s primary target market but the service has already picked up considerable interest internationally. Earlier this year, Enswers was chosen from a number of teams from Korea, China and Japan to demonstrate at the AsiaD conference in Hong Kong. As the video below shows, COO Sherman Li showed how Image2Play technology can also be used in conjunction with mobile devices.

Other Services

Enswers’ other products have also helped the company’s success. In early 2011, it acquired popular Korean entertainment site Soompi, a service that allows users to subtitle episodes of foreign TV programs and dramas so a wider audience can enjoy them. Enswers revamped the website using its own media technology. The site has been hugely successful worldwide drawing approximately 6 million visitors per month, boosted by the growing popularity of Korean dramas and music around the world.

One of the company’s earlier services – enswer.me – is a video search tool which utilizes a number of different video sites including YouTube, Veoh, Hulu and other international sites such as China’s Youku, Japan’s NicoNicoDouga and Korea’s Pandora.tv.

Searches through the service cross-reference to filter out irrelevant duplicate videos, showing the number of overlapping videos that exist across the services. According to its website, Enswer.me uses “proprietary ClusterRank search algorithm and VideoFuse large-scale clustering technology” to do this.

Enswers’ products and technology are also licensed to other businesses, such as Platform-V, a P2P platform which monetizes downloadable content while ensuring copyright of content is protected. Other solutions such as audio fingerprinting technology and interactive TV with smartphones are also listed as solutions that Enswers offers.

Though Image2Play will initially be aimed at the domestic market first, PR manager Kim Ju-yeon explains that Enswers sees the service as having worldwide potential:

“Of course all companies compete in the market, but going global is one of our main goals and we can reach it with our technology.”

➤ Enswers | Image2Play

Apple has passed the landmark of one million iPad sales in South Korea, where its tablet device is a considerable distance ahead of rival Samsung’s efforts on its home turf.

The statistic, which is reported by the Korea Herald, makes Apple the country’s top tablet vendor, with sales of the original iPad and iPad 2 estimated to account for 70-80 percent of the nation’s market. Perhaps Samsung needs to work on its advertising in the country, the latest of which is inspired by Apple but seemingly not working on Korean gadget buyers.

Tablets are a growing sector in Korea’s technology space, where smartphones are still becoming established among mainstream consumers. However, Apple is said to have seen an encouraging 700,000 iPad devices sold last year, since introducing the iPad in April, and momentum has increased in the new year as it has gone on to hit seven figures.

Local press sources, cited by the Korea Herald, suggest that there may in fact be more iPads active in Korea. The official figure accounts for devices sold in the country alone, however the actual number could be “far more” due to early adopters who bought devices from overseas channels before it launched in the country.

Further details reveal that the WiFi-only versions of the iPad are the most popular, accounting for two-thirds of all sales, suggesting that, for now at least, most Koreans avoid running the device on carriers’ data networks.

The gulf in sales will frustrate Samsung, which has always taken pride in performing well in homeland. Indeed, the company is so sensitive to the Korean market that it reneged on plans to fight the launch of the iPhone 4S there.

Tablets have been a key part of the international legal disputes between Apple and Samsung with Germany the most recent  battlefield. A German court last week dismissed Apple’s attempts to push for a sales ban on the modified Galaxy Tab 10.1N, which itself was introduced to avoid a sales ban following a successful legal challenge from Apple.

Recent developments follow Samsung’s unsuccessful attempt to overturn a ban on the original Galaxy Tab, which it was looking to sell again in Germany. Apple was the first to up the ante in the European country this year, as it filed new lawsuits against 10 smartphones and 5 tablets in Germany in January.

Both companies are set to introduce new tablets to increase the competition in the space in 2012. Samsung is rumoured to be announcing an 11.6-inch device, which will become the world’s largest tablet, at some point this year, while Apple is strongly tipped to launch the iPad 3 next month.

Blogging is huge in South Korea, where most of the population go online everyday — through their phone, tablet device or personal computer — and local firm TNM is very much a major player in the space.

Strong community

The startup has built a 300 blogger strong platform of news and analysis based on partnering with some of the country’s most influential “power bloggers”, whose audiences are vast and dedicated. The company, which was founded in 2009 by Seung-eun Myung and Young Han, selects its contributors based on their levels of traffic and quality of content, with an emphasis on recruiting enthusiasts with expertise in their field.

TNM also helps foster a sense of community between bloggers with frequent events, workshops and parties that enable its partners to meet face to face.

Making money

The firm generates revenue in a number of ways, including the provision of content from its network to traditional media outlets which, for bloggers, can mean the negotiation of contracts that would be difficult to gain off their own back. Ads on the site are delivered through its own advertising network, which operates in a similar way to Federated Media in the US, while TNM provides social media and blog consultancy to clients through which it draws additional income.

Monetisation is not limited to the site itself however, and the company creates and sells mobile software and web platforms that are designed by its team of developers. In the past, its projects have included All That, a series of apps to promote operator SK Telecom’s flagship T-Store service, and its web development activities have produced more than 100 different apps, which have seen a total of 4,500,000 downloads.

Diverse activities and interests

Its diverse range of activities and interests have led to TNM being mistaken for a marketing company, but it is, in fact, a registered media organisation as well as a content provider. Its latest project has seen it partner with Yonhap, Korea’s largest news agency, to develop a crowdsourced news site which runs articles and photos from bloggers, whilst managing copyright issues.

The site is called Kurry – a mix of three Korean words, which mean ‘material’, ‘market place of ideas’, and ‘mixture of content’ – and it is designed to be simple and easy to use, a combination that TNM believes will make it a go-to resource for Koreans seeking breaking news and expert analysis.

Going mobile and beyond

TNM’s latest move in the mobile space saw it release TNM Reader, an app for both the iPhone and Android, which gives mobile users an optimised platform on which to read content from across its network. Articles can be perused by category, app users can create their own reading list to keep up with their favourite blogs and all content is easily shared thanks to in-built support for a range of social media sites.

TNM also has international plans as the firm is aiming to translate and distribute content from its Nanoomi network outside of Korea. English-language audiences are a prime target for the international push, as The Korea Herald reports.

You can find more information about TNM and its activity through the links below.

➤ TNM | On Twitter

Imagine what life would be like if all public trash cans automatically compressed the trash inside them. If the compressors were powered using solar energy? And the units could let city services know when they were full and ready to be collected?

That vision of the future is not so far away from South Korea where local startup Ecube Labs is working hard to turn its ideas into reality for trash cans around the country.

Soon-beom Kwon, who founded the environment-focused startup with a group of fellow students, came up with the idea after noticing bins overflowing with trash everyday. Figuring that the answer was to reduce the volume of trash in the bin, he investigating the possibility of using a solar-powered compressor.

During the market research stage of developing the idea, the team was surprised to find that a similar concept existed in the US. However, they continued with plan and refined their idea into a product that could bring the concept to reality.

The “smart bins” are equipped with solar panels and batteries which can operate for up to five days once fully charged. Waste is compressed to a fifth of its original size which allows the bin to hold a lot more than its usual capacity.

As it utilises space more efficiently, a smart bin need to be emptied less often which reduces the pollution created by garbage trucks that come to collect it. Each bin is equipped with a 3G transmitter which provides sanitation workers with a real time alert when it is full through a smartphone application that also displays its location.

Commenting on the product and benefits of the technology, Ecube Labs said:

If waste removal operations decrease by 10%, carbon emissions decrease by approximately 1,000 tons. If the 5,000 bins around Seoul are replaced with these bins, waste removal will decrease by over 20%. This is the same as planting 150,000 trees around Seoul.

The company is currently preparing a prototype model and plans to start trial operations within this month near Gangnam Station, the busiest subway station in Korea. The smart bins are expected to cost around $1,300-$1,700 but, as Kwon says, over time they have the potential to pay for themselves:

After three years the bins will actually end up reducing costs. We intend to offer a range of purchasing options for local governments who find the initial cost too much.

If the venture proves to be successful there is no doubt that everyday citizens will benefit from the system. While the situation has recently improved, Korea is well known for its lack of trash cans in public places due to commercial dumping and terrorism concerns.

➤ Ecube Labs

[Image courtesy of Huguette Roe / Shutterstock.com]

Korean social network Cyworld is gearing up to have a second crack at the international market with the launch of Global Cyworld.

The new international version of the service, which is Korea’s most popular social network, now includes content in English, Chinese, German, Japanese and Spanish in addition to Korean, as the fallen giant looks to revitalise itself in overseas markets. Previous attempts to enter international markets in the U.S, Japan and Europe flopped as the different sites were independent, meaning international users were unable to interact with each other.

Although Global Cyworld has been integrated into one platform this time, there are still some kinks in the service and design. The language feature only applies to the user interface, meaning that if a user accesses the homepage of someone that uses a different language, the page will display it in its owner’s language instead of the visitor’s.

The quality of English is another problem which held the site back last time and continues to give Cyworld issues. Problems like this will need to be fixed promptly if Cyworld is serious about penetrating markets which already have well established social network services.

With little to differentiate it from other services that already dominate overseas markets, the second launch is looking like a very optimistic move from Cyworld.

The social network, which is owned by Korean operator SK Telecom, was once an Internet pioneer, as one of the first social networks to monetise virtual goods, which brought it 60 percent of its revenues in 2006. Despite a steady drop in users, Cyworld remains the leading social network in South Korea, although other services have begun to challenge it.

The site, which launched in 1999, is based around a user’s ‘mini hompy’ — short for mini homepage — which is a platform where users can upload photos, text and various other multimedia to pages which can be customised by purchasing skins and background music from the Cyworld store.

[Image courtesy of Martin Lehmann / Shutterstock.com]

Additional reporting by Jon Russell

First let me just say that no, robots will not replace journalists. Robots will likely only replace jobs with particularly low cognitive loads. So, maybe press release re-writing bloggers, but not thinking, analyzing, interviewing, friendly journalists.

In an on-going experiment called “My Boss is a Robot,” an alliance of journalists and computer scientists aim to combine the distributed human brainpower of Amazon’s small-task outsourcing engine, Mechanical Turk, with a robot boss pre-programmed to absorb a myriad of discrete human-accomplished tasks into something resembling the work of a single person. Niki Kittur, a Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of Human Computer Interaction and freelance science and technology writers Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell are heading up the experiment.

We’ve seen automated “robotic journalism” before. The NYTimes uses the semantic web to automate wedding announcements. Business Week used software to replace sports journalists. Infonic’s Sentiment software analyzes thousands of news stories to determine how a particular company is faring. And TV journalism could be replaced by a prototype of software that uses voice-over narration of a rapid-fire series of pre-taped stories, vidclips and images to present television news.

The Mechanical Turk has even written a simple encyclopedia entry about New York City. Based on this success, the scientists behind My Boss is a Robot believe Turkers (as the distributed workers on Mechanical Turk are called) could transform a research paper into a 500 word piece of original science journalism.

Are we confident that our experiment will work? Absolutely not. In fact, we’d be surprised if it did. But we think it will be interesting to try. Equally importantly, we hope that chronicling our progress here will trigger debate about the future of journalism and of crowdsourcing. We’d love to hear your thoughts on our plans and, later, our progress.

Where does the robot boss come in to it? The crowdsourced workers will be coordinated by an algorithm. If the process works, we will hand the algorithm a research paper and, perhaps a couple of days later, it will spit out a polished news article.

The deeper question Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell hope to answer is whether or not the process of journalism or any other kind of knowledge-based work can be deconstructed and then restructured algorithmically.

If it works, the result will likely be something similar to AOL‘s Demand Media-style content generation efforts, also known as “The AOL Way.” But this “Bionic Journalism” will not be the future of media so long as human beings avoid falling into a meatspace existence and still enjoy reading thoughtful, creative and educated news stories on their iPads.

Non-mechanical fingers crossed.