September | 2010 | Eugene is huge!
10 Korean products I would export to the U.S. (if I had an export business) #8, Photography Studios.
When was the last time you took a picture for an passport and were pleased with the way it turned out?　In my case, it was in 2010, when I renewed my passport! It’s one of those things that I can be thankful for, because I live in Korea!
Usually ID photos make people look like criminals. No, that's not me.
Perfect Hair (and shameless plug of unrelated product).
This is continuing the series of Korean products which I think we should export to the U.S.
Allright, it’s been a while, and these are becoming not weekly at all. Anyhow, here’s today’s joke.
Jesa is a ritual remembrance of one's ancestors.
Chuseok is probably the most important holiday in Korea. As such, I get the whole rest of this week off from work, which is awesome. But I’ll be extremely busy, as during chuseok you have to spend a lot of time with your family. The part of my family that’s in Korea doesn’t live in Seoul, and thus I’ll probably be stuck in traffic for a good part of the 6 day weekend. So that means I probably won’t be updating very much.
What is Chuseok exactly? Well, some people call it the Korean Thanksgiving. It’s origins are that it is a harvest festival. It always happens on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Lunar calendar, which is Tuesday, September 21st this year.
On Thanksgiving in America, we celebrate the beginning of the systematic genocide of native Americans our nation, as pilgrims in search of religious freedom came to a new land to convert or kill scores of native Americans in the name of their religion flee religious persecution, and start a new life in America.
Chuseok is similar in that Koreans give thanks for the harvest, and remember their ancestors in a ritual called jesa, which some people translate as “ancestor worship”. I’d say it’s more to do with remembering members of your family who have passed away, and giving thanks to them for their contributions to your life.
Happy Chuseok everyone, and I’ll see you in a week.
This is the beginning of a series of articles in which I will highlight a product that is specific to Korea (in only the Korean market) and make a case for why it should be exported to the U.S. I’ve made a list of 10 of these products, and I think they would do extremely well in the U.S. market either because they don’t exist there (and I think Americans would definitely use them) or they are better than their American counterpart.
Korean companies beat the competition today, but will this always be the case?
I found an article in the Korea Times that poses this very question.
Samsung Electronics, now the planet’s biggest technology company ahead of Hewlett-Packard (HP), is the world’s largest maker of flat-screen televisions, memory chips and liquid crystal displays (LCDs), while trailing only Nokia as the No. 2 handset vendor.
It also mentions LG having similar success, being #3 in electronics behind Samsung and Sony.
The article however warns that Korean companies need to adapt to the future markets, and not rest on their laurels.
As we can remember, Sony in the 1990’s was pretty much a world standard when it came to personal audio devices, with it’s walkman, discman, and later minidisk, but failed to jump on the MP3 playr bandwagon fast enough. After Apple, a company not known for audio devices made the i-pod, Sony’s signature product, the walkman, disappeared.
Will something similar happen to Samsung and LG?
Another thing the article talks about is Apple envy, and how it appears that Samsung is making products similar to Apple’s products. We talked about this on this blog before, from the iPhone and it’s Samsung counterpart, the Galaxy-S phone, as well as the iPad, and it’s counterpart the Galaxy Tab.
The article’s author seems to think that the answer to this is to create better software platforms for the products in question, rather than going with google’s android. But I’m not really sure if that’s such a great idea.
I don’t think Korean companies really should have much to worry about, after all, no company will be apple other than apple. If they were smart, they’d try to negotiate some kind of deal with apple to be it’s manufacturer for the next series of i-phones. If not, then perhaps it would make more sense to focus on other emerging technologies, and just be happy with the market share Samsung already has in the smartphone market.
One thing that I would like to see Samsung develop is an affordable touchscreen monitor for desktop computers, a wall sized LCD TV that isn’t simply 9 smaller TVs, 3DTV that comes out of the TV rather than appearing like a window you are looking into, affordable solar power generators that can be hung on apartment balconies (or larger Solar Power plants), electric cars, and other useful things such as these.
If we’re talking about super future technology, then I want a self cleaning floor and cars that can somehow drive themselves without killing people.
Water damage? The whole inside of the phone is water!
Okay, this is only a concept phone, but since my phone got damaged a few weeks ago when I rode my motorbike home in a typhoon, it reminded me of this one.
With iPhones being damaged by moisture, why not create a phone where water bubbles are the focal point of the design? Presumably that was the thinking behind Seoul designer Bon-Seop Ku‘s Aqua GUI concept phone.