Several events have taken place since we uploaded our last post about Korea Game Watch, our new business branch for Korean online games. The first of all is G-Star 2010, the largest game exhibition and trade show in Korea. We were there to meet some small, mid-sized game studios and foreign publishers interested in Korean games. Overall, G-Star 2010 was a big success, drawing over 280,000 visitors from all over the world – that is 40,000 people more than last year’s G-Star, a 9% increase. In addition, according to KOCCA (Korea Creative Contents Agency), a total of 166 deals were secured in this year’s show, and the total amount adds up to USD 198 million, exceeding last year’s record of USD 28 million by a large margin. Here are some photos of G-Star 2010 taken at the B2B fair.

A long line of booths in the B2B area; In this year’s G-Star, 316 game-related businesses participated from 22 different counties.

 KOCCA also opened up a booth of its own in order to promote and provide support for games from small and mid-sized studios in Korea. For your information, the booth is named “Global Game Herb Center, a Joint Information Center”

More pictures and information regarding our trip to G-Star 2010 can be found here on our Korea Game Watch site:

1)      G-Star 2010 ends in record-breaking success

2)      G-Star’s Big Fours – Blade & Soul, TERA, ArcheAge, and Diablo 3

Another big event was Korea Game Watch’s very first seminar, “Strategies for Korean Online Games Entering Europe” held on November 23^rd at Seoul Partners House. The seminar was hosted in joint with ICO Partners (CEO: Thomas Bidaux), our UK-based partner consultancy that specializes in arranging European partnerships for online gaming business. The seminar invited Korea-based game studios and related business agencies to offer insights and guidelines on entering the European online game market, an untapped market for many online game developers in Korea.

The three-hour long seminar consisted mainly of analyses of the European market and the market’s characteristics. There were also case studies of Korean online games that became successful role models in Europe and those that failed to appeal to the European audience. Overall, the seminar ended with fruitful results and spurred up KGW’s motivation for more research and activity. Korea Game Watch also managed to receive much press attention as many game webzine reporters and newspaper journalists attended the seminar as well. Here is a link to our post on Korea Game Watch that recapitulates the seminar: Reflecting on Korea Game Watch’s very first seminar. More information on ICO Partners is also available on SlideShare: ICO Partners: Building Your Business in Europe.

With the wave of iPad fever, many eyes are on the eBook business. In Korea, competition amongst the four major online ebook stores – Yes24, Interpark, Kyobo, and Aladdin – have been heating up at full throttle.

Currently, Yes24 holds the No.1 spot in Korea’s online bookstores, according to market shares.

Yes24’s sales transactions have gone up 19.3% to $115.5 million since the previous year. It also holds 30%  of Korea’s ePub (electronic publication) shares, which had been jointly developed last year - by Yes24, Libro, Bandinlunis, YPbooks, and two publishering companies Hangilasa and Minumsa - to secure eBooks for the fast growing eReader market.

Yes24 has three strategies for their eBook business which are: ‘openness and collaboration’ between Yes24’s eBook contents and eReader producers, the attempt to give online customers the comfort of actual bookstore experiences, and the establishment of a new platform with eBook publishers for future development plans.

‘Openness’ and ‘collaboration’ means that Yes24 is looking to make its eBooks available for purchase on as many  eReaders (hardware devices for eBook contents) as possible, rather than investing in creating its own eReader device, as Amazon did with ‘Kindle’ and Interpark with ‘Biscuit’(which are currently troubled by the launch of the tablet PC-iPad). Yes 24’s eBooks are already available on eReaders such as ‘PAGEOne’ by NextPapyrus and the ‘Samsung SNE-60’. Further, it is also in negotiation with other eReaders such as Iriver’s ‘Story’ and Bookcubenetwork’s ‘Bookcube’ .

Yes24 online bookstore also pursues to provide customers with some of the benefits and comforts of actual bookstores. It has made Yes24’s searchbar data convenient and easily to browse, and further made the first 20pages free of charge so that people could skim through the first few pages before deciding upon a purchase as they often do in actual bookstores. On the other hand, this could also give online users a chance to get accustomed to or give them a taste of what it is like to read pages of an eBook off a screen. Moreover, unlike most other online bookstores that give excessive discounts, which can sometimes increase sale but in turn reduce profits, Yes24 has positioned its competitiveness in quality services such as its one-day delivery promise.

Yes24 is further planning to develop a platform to support eBook publishers, perhaps to turn around the serious lack of bestseller ebooks, which are the cash cows for ebook business. Amazon’s Kindle had been particularly successful by putting a lot of focus on new and popular books which became the bestselling ebooks. We can expect Yes24 to be making such developments in the future and overcome merely being an “eBook factory”.

KT has announced on the 13th that it has commercialized Korea’s first 3D Building Management System (BMS) in collaboration with KSIC (Korea Spatial Information & Communication, a SME specializing in SW).

This 3D BMS project can be called “Smart Building,” one of KT’s S.M.ART 6 sectors. As mentioned in recent posts, SMART is one of the three integrative B2B strategy that KT, LGT, and SKT had set out, in order to step beyond its saturated Telco market. (The other sectors of ‘Smart 6′ include Smart Enterprise, Smart SOHO/SMB, Smart Government, Smart Zone, and Smart Green.)

 
‘KT Smart Tower’ control room, operating agents working with the 3D BMS

The BMS is computer-based maintenance system that controls and monitors the building’s mechanical and electrical equipment, which is a critical component in managing the building’s energy demand. With the help of KSIC, the gathered database of a building facility is turned into a 3D GIS(Geographic Information System). Now with real-time 3D video feeds of the building facilities, building managers can more effectively maintain the building throughout its lifecycle.

With 3D BMs, not only is real-time monitoring of individual facilities possible, but the wiring and plumbing system, which are not usually visible to the naked eye, can also be identified. Hence, immediate detection and correction of problems will be made possible, which can efficiently reduce accidents and safety hazards that occur within building facilities.

Currently, the 3D BMS solution is being tested in KT’s Smart Tower, a 12 storey building with 5 basement floors located in Gwacheon, Kyunggi-do, which is also apart of KT’s smart building business.
KT is planning to set out its BIM solution as the flagship of the smart building business future, with the IT-Construction synergy effect between Korea’s U-city business (building cities managed entirely by IT infrastructure) and the Smart BMS business.

Moreover, the Korean government has recently been promoting to further the 3D BMS solution into preempting the market in Building Information Modeling (BIM) for public buildings. BIM is a process that involves generating and managing real-time, three-dimensional building modeling data to increase productivity in building design and construction. However, there are yet to be buildings based on BIM solutions in Korea for now.