Koreans have long embraced the benefits of online auction websites, and since 2000 when GMarket entered the marketplace the website has had great success. It is now considered a reference when looking to buy something online. Such has been the success of this company that they went public on June 29th, 2006 on Nasdaq and its market cap stands at about 1.16 billion dollars.

Gmarket’s success has not gone unnoticed by some other larger players, sparking rumors that Yahoo might choose to buy the company, among other rumors. Now, SK Telecom has entered the game and created the open market that is www.11st.co.kr, combining this with some of the other businesses that SK already participates in we can possibly find many synergies that will make 11th street a credible threat to Gmarket.

The market dynamics in Korea, in which traditional, large and powerful players compete with new innovative actors, and combined with the convergence of different sectors and industries, may provide a vision of things to come, as we can see SK is busy with this and their acquisition of Hanaro Telecom which is already creating a lot of waves in the TMT sector in Korea.

The Mobile World Conference kicked off today in Barcelona and much is expected out of many of the worlds top companies. Today, the presentation by Korean giant LG on their LTE, or Long Term Evolution, technology demonstrated once again the innovative nature of this company.

This technology is in the process of being standardized for the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), and is what will probably be applied for the next generation of handsets in the near future. LG presented some specs: the download speed for videos is 60mbps, and 40mbps for uploads, on anything from HD videos to other types. This is 60 and 80 times faster than HSDPA for downloads and uploads respectively.

The presentation showed some UGC videos, as well as HD content. This was similar to last years presentation, but in only one year, the download speed has been tripled and upload speed doubled. This is just one more way in which LG shows their technological strength.

On February 17th, Korean company Gretech, will broadcast the Star Invitational games through GomTV. The Star Invitationals are a Starcraft e-sports tournament hosted here in Korea. The tournament is sponsored by LG, Intel and Gretech, and will be broadcast live in English as well. This along with a fully functional website with game and player info in order to give foreign viewers a better understanding about the game.

Gretech is a very interesting company, that’s main businesses are internet services, software, and information appliances. They are better known for GomTV which is turning into a full media video service which has mainly catered to the tastes of the domestic market. They are now attempting to spread the craze for e-sports to other countries in and give a glimpse into Korea.