nanoomi

Leave the car at home on the 11th.

Shakespeare once said that brevity is the Seoul soul of wit. In modern times, nowhere is this more apparent than with Twitter. It is amazing how, with just 140 characters, biting satire and political commentary can now wing its way around the world faster than you can say interfering paternal state propaganda.

The G20 summit is in Seoul next week and in preparation the city and central governments have been preparing Seoulites for the inevitable delays and inconveniences, which is pretty swell as governments go.

But along with warnings about traffic have come some interesting and, some might say, insecure messages along with some totally nonsensical ones.

Reminding that Seoul will have the eyes of the world on it next week, the city’s denizens have been asked to NOT throw away unsightly (and malodorous) food waste, NOT to drive – as noted above, and NOT be afraid to speak to foreigners.

Read the full story

In case you didn’t know, we were recently in Toronto for three weeks for our summer vacation. Oh, how we missed Canada! Funny thing is, when we were in Canada, we missed Korea as well. We felt kinda homesick, in a reverse homesick kinda twisted way. Luckily for us, since we were in Toronto there were two different Koreatowns for us to visit to get our fix for Korean culture.

Read the full story

This is the third, and final, part of a brief series looking at Google’s Android mobile Operating System and its success (or otherwise) in Korea.

So I’ve looked at Android in general, and already those stats are beginning to look a bit shoddy as news came out this week that Android handsets are outselling Apple’s iPhone. I’ve also gone into a brief history of Android in Korea, and indeed looked into our crystal ball at one rumour that I would like to come to fruition. In this final post I’m going to look at arguably the most important part of the whole equation – especially in terms of handset sales and market dominance – Content.

Its one thing to have a flash whizz bang handset, but if you can only make calls on it you may as well go back to your Motorola RAZR. Smartphones are all about doing more. Some have called them mini computing platforms, still others have shied away from this moniker, but everyone agrees that smartphones are excellent for content consumption.

Enter Tatter & Media, a blog aggregation, curation, organisation, and among other things design, company which I am affiliated with through Nanoomi. TatterMedia (for short) curates so-called “power bloggers” in Korean-language K-Blogland who discuss all manner of subjects in their respective fields of interest.

Read the full story

In this, the second of three posts looking at Android, I look at the situation in Korea.

Android in Korea is characterized by one letter and one letter only: “S”, as in Galaxy S and Samsung, but while Samsung has a long pedigree in Smartphones (I can’t say I miss my BlackJack II or my Mirage) and indeed Android outside it’s domestic market, it wasn’t first to market with an Android handset in Korea. That dubious honour goes to Motorola who, despite falling sales world wide, launched the Motorola Roi back in January.

Read the full story

As the consumption of coffee, either as a daily necessity (forget what I write below – I would prefer it by IV), or as a lifestyle product grows and matures in Korea, more and more vendors are bringing new marketing ideas and new products to market in order to increase their share of the growing market.

Elsewhere, foreign brands who, frankly, are now just a part of the Seoul cityscape as anything else, but were reticent in bringing their traditional coffee ideas to Korea, have jumped on the bandwagon en masse.

Dunkin Donuts has been on said bandwagon for at least a year, and sparked something of a coffee war amongst retailers with McDonalds Korea coming out with it’s McCafe brand (disappointingly not the same as Australia/NZ) while Starbucks looked to shore up its brand and become even more of a self-named “premium” product. (See previous “lifestyle” link.) Interestingly Dunkin Donuts will actually export 30 tonnes of roasted beans (about USD$300,000 worth) from its North Chungcheong plant to Thailand and Malaysia this year.

But for coffee to really take off, in Korea, and for those purveyors of the God Juice to really start making some money, people have to be able to access good coffee from home.

See my post about my own setup for making delicious coffee at home here.

Enter Dunkin Donuts with their new “HandDrip” coffee filters.

By no means a new idea, but an interesting one, and at KRW 5,000 for four filters prepacked with your choice of Costa Rican or Columbian Blends, arguably some of the cheapest coffee – at a palatable reasonable level of quality.

Hand Drip coffee a box of four filters, including coffee, goes for KRW 5,000, eight for KRW 9,000.

A pretty simple process – in pictures – for those who are Hangul impared. As with any Korean packaging, though, there are some Konglishie moments – the Costa Rican blend I went for has a roasting point of “Hight” – I would argue “medium” might be more appropriate. On the scale though (you can’t see it thanks to the iPhone photo) the lightest roast is called “Ligth”. A touch of Korean dyslexia as opposed to Konglish?

Take your filter out of the packet,

And your presented with your prepacked filter.

Boil your kettle

and prepare your 10 Magazine coffee mug. (You don’t need a 10 Magazine coffee mug, but check out all my tech writings at 10 Magazine.)

Pull out the filter’s “legs” so that the filter sits in your mug,

And add water.

Now at this point I’m not entirely sure of the efficacy of the filter. Do you ⓐ keep filling up the little filter and let the coffee drain through, or ⓑ fill up the cup and let the filter steep like a tea bag. My thinking is your first option is the way to go, like a real drip coffee system, but the second option might be a little more efficient in terms of how long you spend in the kitchen making a cup of coffee.

Finally grab the filter by its legs – an easy and convenient way to remove of and dispose of it.

Hey presto! A passable cup of drip coffee that you made in your pajamas in the comfort of your own home, and at a reasonable price.

This is the first part of two three looking at the current state of Android, Google’s mobile operating system, both around the world, and in Korea.

Android continues its onslaught in terms of sales of handsets around the world, and the same is about to happen in Korea with Samsung’s Galaxy S, and to a lesser extent the Nexus One being pushed by KT as well as LG’s Optimus offerings.

While Apple and its iOS claims the largest share of smartphone operating systems, Android continues its rapid growth and will eventually challenge Apple on the basis of the number of different handsets available, versus Apple’s one.

This is how the market looked recently, courtesy of Mashable:

“Other” being RIM’s Blackberry OS, Nokia’s various implementations of Symbian, WebOS from Palm/HP and whatever Windows Mobile phones are being sold out there.

While Android may constitute less than 25% of the current market, expect that to grow considerably over the next 6 to 12 months on the back of there being so many different handsets from different handset manufacturers entering the market space, as opposed to Apple’s single-model offering (which will probably maintain its dominance despite the influx of different Android offerings).

Another interesting aspect of comparing the different platform shares in the market is what version consumers are using. Both Android and Apple have arguably 4 versions of their operating systems available. Apple users are split pretty much 50/50 between the current 4.x release of iOS and its predecessor 3.x — the latter being the playground of the jailbreakers and unlockers out there.

By contrast Android users are all over the place in terms of version, a result of not being able to upgrade earlier, underpowered hardware, and also just because of the sheer number of different hardware iterations – something that Google and manufacturers need to address if they are to grow their market share.

So it looks like Android is beginning to embark on a long and probably protracted battle against Apple’s iOS and, to a lesser extent, other smartphone operating systems on the market.

The second part of this (short) series on Android will look at how Android is doing in Korea, and some of the distinctly Korean reactions to it, and the rise of smartphones in general.

Posted by Tammy

Since 2010 seems to be the year of the Korean taco truck, I decided to bring this popular Korean fusion food to you. I’m serving up a So-Cal  vs. Nor-Cal face off between two very different versions.

California is Korean fusion cooking central, in a manner of speaking. According to the 2007 U.S. Census, more than 322,628 native Koreans make California their home. It has the largest number of Korean immigrants of any in the U.S. states, even Hawaii.

Kogi-style* Korean Tacos

First off the grill is a version inspired by Roy Choi’s famous Kogi taco truck. The Kogi Korean taco was born in Southern California, with a strong Hispanic influence. A warm corn tortilla is topped with bulgogi (savory-sweet grilled beef), shredded cabbage and the spiciest kimchi you can find.

Read the full story

If you’ve been with us for a bit, then you might remember that a while ago we mentioned that we were going to be on Arirang TV. Remember that? We posted pictures on Twitter and wrote about it on our Facebook Fan page as well. You probably thought we were lying, didn’t you? Well we weren’t! The videos are finally finished and airing tomorrow (Monday June 28th, 2010) on Arirang TV!

The first TV show is called “Quilt Your Korean Map” and it explores green tea and traditional Korean rice alcohol, makgoli. If you’re watching Arirang Korea, it will be on at 9:00PM, and if you’re watching Arirang Worldwide it will be on at 8:30PM.

The second one is a part of the “Today’s Blog” series, and it’s just a mini-TV show that features bloggers living in Korea. We don’t know when it will be aired, but they gave it to us so we could put it up on our website! Yay! We hope you enjoy the shows, they were really fun to film. If any of you do happen to see us on TV, please let us know! We haven’t actually seen the final version of “Quilt Your Korean Map” yet, so we’d love to hear what you think about it.

You can read Eatyourkimchi’s original post here.

What do The Mori Museum in Japan, funky beats and Do It Yourself space satellites have in common? Each license their work under various Creative Commons licenses.

I’ve talked about Creative Commons before, and this weekend the Creative Commons Asia conference was held in Seoul at the impressive National Museum in Yongsan, so I went along.

There were a number of sessions to choose from and attend. Amongst them I sat in on two panel discussions. Together they were titled 열린 창작 창작에서 open의 의미 or “The Meaning of Open In An Open Commons”(?) The first featured Takahiro Saito and Izumi Yoshida from Creative Commons Japan, Song Ho Jun from the Open Source Satellite Initiative and Brett Gaylor, movie director, from Canada.

L-R Saito, Yoshida, Song and Gaylor and the panel moderator.

Saito and Yoshida presented their project “Into Infinity” wich paired various musicians from all manner of different genre with artists who matched 20 second musical loops with drawings and paintings on 12 inch discs (like the LP) Supported by DubLab – an influential (and awesome) online radio station – some cool beats were laid down in conjunction with some really trippy art in a number of exhibitions in Japan and The States. Even better though is Infinity Loop’s iPhone app that allows you to mix your own tracks from the available loops and artwork, and even use it as a ringtone.

Brett Gaylor is a movie director responsible for the movie “RIP: A Remix Manifesto” a movie put together by hundreds of contributors in an open source way each licensing their efforts under The Creative Commons for reuse, redistribution and remix, the results of which can be seen at the link above.

These two projects are the pretty artsy stuff that I have come to associate with Creative Commons – it’s openness and flexibility of licensing working really well with distributed, ope source projects. Song Ho Jun’s presentation was a lot different.

The sole Korean on the panel Song started OSSI, or the Open Source Satellite Initiative. Song seems crazy intelligent building his own plans for a little home made satellite, a receiver station and payload launching system, in collaboration with experts in the field. In addition to CCAsia 2010 he has presented at MIT, and you can follow OSSI on Twitter: @opensat.

The biggest stumbling block to launching your own satellite into space? predictably it’s money. Whether it is the inflated costs of parts that you might need to smuggle into Korea because of the bans on export of certain parts (like springs and bolts!), or the actual cost of a “piggyback” satellite launch, this is a bit of a difficult one! Of course you can support OSSI by buying a t-shirt. (of course!)

The second panel was very heavily photography based. It has struck me as interesting that in Asia especially no one seems to mind if you take photos of stuff in Museums. Fumio Nanjo outlined The Mori Museum’s efforts to allow patrons to take photos of its works on display and the positive effect it had on the PR budget because of the explosion of blogs using photos from its flickr group etc and posting about the museum’s exhibitions.

Handong Zhu from Creative Commons China Mainland talked about the Creative Commons China Mainland photo competitions and various related projects.

Rounding off the presentations was a keynote from Lawrence Lessig, one of the founders of The Creative Commons, and probably the number one expert on the law as it applies to The Internet and techie things in general. His presentation, in line with the whole conference, raised questions as to the meaning of openness and the ability to be innovative in an open environment.

He chartered the period from the late 80s / early 90s where a closed platforms (like Microsoft) stifled innovation through a time of relative openness to today where we seem to have gone back to some closed, or what he calls “controlled and controllable” platforms such as Facebook (read their terms of service lately?) and Apple’s iPad (Apple gets to pick what goes in the app store etc.). Yet in these so called controlled environments there is still huge amounts of innovation happening.

And no conference is complete without the swag report:

Clockwise from top left, Daum search box themed desk pad, Naver notebook, Cyworld pencil case, note book and pencils and Daum post-it notes. Coolness.

Asked why I choose to support Creative Commons my response is two fold. Firstly Creative Commons, through it’s open approach often attracts the most talented individuals in any given field who create interesting funky stuff – which I enjoy. The second reason is that the current regime of copyright and licensing is broken. Creative Commons provides a workable and most importantly fair alternative.

You can find out more about Creative Commons here.