TV war looms as Samsung, LG head to IFA this week

South Korean tech rivals Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics are heading to Berlin this week to show off their latest home appliances, including flagship TVs, during the IFA trade show that kicks off Friday (local time). Keen interest is being paid to whether Samsung will showcase its latest OLED TVs during the annual gathering. After a nearly nine-year hiatus, Samsung started rolling out OLED TVs early this year, but no high-profile promotional event has been held, raising speculation abou

Aug. 29, 2022

Lotte grants W14b to KAIST for R&D

Lotte Group, South Korea’s fifth largest conglomerate, has decided to donate 14 billion won ($10.4 million) to the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology for various research and development efforts, officials said Monday. The announcement came about half a year after Lotte Group Chairman Shin Dong-bin met KAIST President Lee Kwang-hyung at the university in Daejeon, South Chungcheong Province, in February. According to the officials, Lotte Group’s 10 subsidiaries inc

Aug. 29, 2022

[Weekender] Sleep-deprived Korea

Whether chasing a lifestyle of low sleep and high output or due to the sleep deprivation synonymous with parenthood, many South Koreans are sleep-deprived. For Kim Yu-ri, a nurse in her 30s with two children, sleep has long been a luxury. Raising a 3-year-old and 1-year-old while commuting two hours daily from home in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, to Jamsil in Seoul, her days are already overpacked. “I think seven hours of sleep at night is what I really need, but it never seems to be a po

Aug. 27, 2022

Postech chip professor wins Merck Award

Professor Noh Yong-Young of Postech won an annual award given by Merck Korea in recognition of his innovative research into the development of semiconducting materials for backplane thin-film transistor technology of organic light-emitting diode displays. His research, Merck Korea says, could contribute to the commercialization of backplane p-type thin-film transistors for high-performance OLED displays if further developed. The Merck Young Scientist Award went to professor Kang Suk-ku for prop

Aug. 25, 2022

Allink offers new NFT experience to Samsung New Galaxy NFT holders

Allink, an NFC tag-based information transfer solution company, has partnered up with Samsung Electrionics, the company said Thursday. Allink provided a non-fungible token solution that enables mobile phones to transfer information to various terminals by tapping the phone on the NFC tag. With this solution, New Galaxy NFT holders can have access to in-store benefits on their Thetadrop wallet by tapping on Allink’s tag at Samsung Digital Plaza, Shilla Duty-Free Shop, Eland Cruise, and Sh

Aug. 25, 2022

Samsung, Gates Foundation complete Reinvent the Toilet project

Samsung Electronics said Thursday it celebrated the completion of the Reinvent the Toilet project that has been conducted over the past three years in collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation launched the “RT” project in 2011 with an aim to generate innovative solutions that can protect people and communities from human waste-borne pathogens and help underdeveloped countries deliver more inclusive sanitation services that reach the poorest co

Aug. 25, 2022

Samsung SDS to join NIST’s post-quantum cryptography project

Samsung SDS said Thursday it is joining a post-quantum cryptography project led by a cybersecurity center at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US, along with a slew of global tech firms like Amazon Web Service, Cisco and Microsoft. The project, called Migration to PQC or post-quantum cryptography, aims to replace the current cryptographic algorithms, especially public-key cryptography, to better protect digital information in the era of quantum computing. Once access

Aug. 25, 2022

Dokdo unlabeled on Apple Maps in 22 countries

Apple Maps, iPhone’s built-in map application, was found to have no labeling of the Dokdo islets in over 20 countries across the world, a South Korean professor claimed on Thursday. Seo Kyoung-duk, a general education professor at Sungshin Women’s University, wrote in a post on his social media accounts that iPhone’s built-in map application in 22 countries had no recognition of South Korea’s easternmost islets, citing his social media followers as sources. The list of

Aug. 25, 2022

K-content tweets increase 546% over 10 years

The amount of tweets related to Korean content has grown 546 percent over the past 10 years, according to Twitter. “K-content’s growth on Twitter follows the explosive growth pattern of K-pop,” said Kim Yeong-jeong, Twitter’s head of global K-pop and K-contents partnership, Tuesday at the Content Marketing Summit 2022 held at the InterContinental Hotel in Seoul. “Twitter‘s strength, which allowed K-pop to expand its reach over the past few years, is expect

Aug. 24, 2022

LG to launch AI ethics group for better transparency

LG Group said Wednesday it is launching a new artificial intelligence ethics group later this year with an aim to build more responsible AI systems and their deployment across all LG companies. Ahead of its official launch, LG AI Research, the group's AI research hub, recently set up a task force to be charged with educating LG employees to better understand AI ethics and evaluating ethical risks related to privacy, bias and fairness before product development. The upcoming ethics group

Aug. 24, 2022

LG Innotek’s thermoelectric system gets green tech certificate

Electronic component manufacturer LG Innotek said Tuesday that its key material for thermoelectric generators, which allow vessels to reuse waste heat and cut carbon emissions, has won a green technology certificate by the government. Powered by the nano-polycrystalline semiconductor material developed by LG Innotek, the thermoelectric system uses the heat flux due to temperature differences within the semiconductor to generate electrical energy, according to the company. Its nano-polycristal

Aug. 23, 2022

LG Display to release mid-sized OLED panels for gaming monitors

South Korean flat-panel display manufacturer LG Display is set to launch mid-sized organic light emitting diode panels designed for gaming monitors, according to the company Tuesday. “LG Display will release a new flat-panel display using OLED technology by the end of this year, at a size of over 20 inches and no larger than 30 inches,” an LG Display spokesperson told The Korea Herald, adding the company has yet to determine which plant -- among one in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, or o

Aug. 23, 2022

Nearly one-third TVs sold worldwide are from Samsung

Samsung Electronics continued its winning streak in global TV sales, selling nearly one-third of TVs across the world in the first half, according to market tracker Omdia on Tuesday. In the first six months of this year, 92.6 million units of TVs, worth $475 million, were sold globally. The sales figure was down 6.6 percent compared to a year ago. Omdia cited the Russia-Ukraine war, protracted lockdowns in China’s major cities and inflation fears as the key reasons behind the slowing T

Aug. 23, 2022

Battery material firm L&F to spend W650b on expansion in Daegu

South Korean cathode active material supplier L&F is poised to invest 650 billion won ($483.1 million) in the next two years in a new line of production in Daegu, a filing showed Monday. Once the construction is complete, tentatively by August 2024, the new factory of L&F in Dalseong County, around 240 kilometers southeast of Seoul, will produce nickel-rich cathode active materials for batteries made of nickel, cobalt, manganese and aluminum, with their nickel content comprising at lea

Aug. 22, 2022

Celltrion establishes R&D office in Boston

Celltrion has opened a research and development office in Boston to speed up its new drug development efforts in the US while seeking and boosting cooperation with other firms, company officials said Monday. According to company officials, the South Korean biopharmaceutical giant completed the establishment of the Boston office earlier this year. The new US office has been exploring the biotechnology industry’s trends while gathering information on startups and pipelines with investment

Aug. 22, 2022

Naver becomes 1st Korean IT firm to join RE100

Naver has become the first South Korean information technology company to join the global RE100 renewable energy initiative to achieve carbon neutrality, the firm said Monday. The RE100 initiative, which is led by the Climate Group in partnership with CDP -- formerly known as Carbon Disclosure Project -- commits members to using 100 percent renewable electricity. Naver said it plans to initiate its “2040 Carbon Negative” roadmap, which was established last year, to meet the goal

Aug. 22, 2022

Samsung to offer free repairs of over 90,000 defective washing machines

South Korean consumer electronics manufacturer Samsung Electronics has begun to voluntarily offer free repairs of its defective front-load washing machines whose doors are prone to explosion for Korean consumers, according to consumer watchdogs on Monday. The organizations, the Korea Consumer Agency and Korean Agency for Technology and Standards, urged customers who bought three models of Samsung’s Bespoke Grande AI washers to “immediately request a repair” of glass doors to

Aug. 22, 2022

Samsung to expand Bespoke lineup in Europe

Samsung Electronics said Monday it is unveiling a wider lineup of its Bespoke home appliances at the upcoming IFA trade show in Germany in a renewed sales push in the European market. The Bespoke brand, launched in 2019, has revamped Samsung’s home appliance strategy. Its unique modular concept allows users to customize the material, color, size and door configurations of home appliances. Its flagship refrigerator has seen almost 2 million unit sales worldwide since its debut in 2019,

Aug. 22, 2022

Samsung chief's visit to chip plant signals spending boost

Samsung Electronics‘ de facto leader Lee Jae-yong’s visit to the groundbreaking ceremony of its 20-trillion-won ($14.97 billion) research and development center in the southern suburb of Seoul signals a spending boost as part of its “supergap strategy.” Lee told some 100 staff and executives at the ceremony held at Giheung Campus -- the birthplace of Samsung‘s semiconductor business four decades ago -- that Samsung employees should “maintain its tradition of

Aug. 21, 2022

[Weekender] The mundane job of teaching AI about the real world

  Tech evangelists say artificial intelligence and robots will one day liberate humans from simple and repetitive physical or cognitive tasks.  But before we are all freed from the tedium of such chores, AI first needs an army of patient workers to teach it the subtleties of the real world, such as how to differentiate between a cat and a dog.  Known as data labelers or data annotators, these workers handle large amounts of raw data, made up of images, videos or audio record

Aug. 20, 2022