The number of people demanding US tech giant Apple enable its Find My app in Korea surpassed 6,500 on Monday on the National Assembly’s petition website, a week after the movement started there on July 22. Find My allows users to track the locations of their Apple devices. If a lost device is nearby, it plays a sound. If users mark a devices lost, it locks or erases personal information. South Korea is the only country where Find My does not work, which has led online petitioners to accuse

Industry July 29, 2024

While raw materials and rare metals are becoming increasingly significant to the South Korean economy, experts suggest Asia’s fourth-largest economy expand its cooperation on future energy and key mineral sources with Mongolia. Jung Tae-yong, a professor at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of International Studies, and Kang Sung-jin, an economics professor at Korea University, held a roundtable meeting last week to explore Mongolia’s growth potential and Korea’s busine

Industry July 28, 2024

Competition between global tech rivals Samsung Electronics and Apple for domination of the burgeoning digital health care market heats up as elderly populations grow rapidly in many parts of the world. Samsung considers digital health care as a future growth engine. The strategy is to put health management app Samsung Health at the forefront and use the Galaxy Watch series as a pivotal element, particularly highlighting its sleep management feature. Last week, the Korean tech giant unveiled the

Technology July 19, 2024

Preorders for Samsung Electronics’ new foldable smartphones have topped 910,000 units in South Korea, a decline from 1.02 million preorders for their predecessors last year, according to the tech giant on Friday. Ahead of the official release of the Galaxy Z Flip6 and Fold6 on July 24, Samsung accepted preorders for the new phones for a week until Thursday in Korea. Despite a nearly 10 percent decline from last year, consumers in their 20s and 30s – Samsung’s target audience &n

Technology July 19, 2024

LG Electronics said Thursday it has set a goal of achieving over 1 trillion won ($724 million) in sales in the smart factory solutions business by 2030, by integrating artificial intelligence and digital transformation technologies as well as manufacturing and production data. “Despite it being the inaugural year of operation, substantial progress has already been made,” said Song Si-yong, a smart factory business division leader of LG PRI (Production Engineering Research Institute),

Technology July 18, 2024

US tech giant Google has recently discontinued offering real-time popular searches in Korea, a feature long banned by its Korean rivals such as Naver and Daum due to the possibility of manipulating public opinion. “We have decided to remove the feature from Google Search in Korea. The feature is no longer available here,” Google Korea said in a statement Wednesday. No further elaboration on the reason and timing of the suspension was given. Naver and Daum suspended their popular sear

Technology July 17, 2024

SK Telecom, South Korea's largest wireless carrier by membership, said Tuesday that it has signed a contract to invest $200 million in Smart Global Holdings, a US company specializing in data center integration solutions. Under the terms of the agreement, SKT will acquire 200,000 preferred shares and secure about 10 percent ownership through conversion to common stock. This marks the telecom giant’s largest investment in the artificial intelligence sector. With this investment, the am

Technology July 16, 2024

Amid Samsung Electronics’ leadership as a foldable phone pioneer, its Chinese rivals appear to be racing to shrink the size of their new phones. Last week in Paris, Samsung unveiled its new foldable phones the Galaxy Z Fold6 and Flip6, touting them as the slimmer and lighter phones to be powered by its new artificial intelligence features, called Galaxy AI. Just a few days after Samsung's highly-publicized Unpacked event, China’s Honor launched its version Friday, saying the new

Technology July 15, 2024

Samsung Electronics’ latest foldable phones -- the Galaxy Z Flip6 and Z Fold6 -- were unveiled at the summer edition of the Galaxy Unpacked 2024 event in Paris on Wednesday, surprising the audience with slimmer and lighter designs. The Korea Herald had a chance to try out the new foldable lineup the day after the unveiling event in Korea. The tech giant’s first artificial intelligence-powered foldable phones are easy to hold and fun to play with, but the more you use them, the more t

Technology July 11, 2024

Samsung Electronics unveiled its new slimmer and lighter foldable phones -- the Galaxy Z Flip6 and Z Fold6 -- in Paris on Wednesday, betting big on the Olympics fever brewing in the French capital. As the venue for the biggest product launch in the latter half of this year, the Korean tech giant chose the iconic Louvre Museum, inviting some 1,000 journalists and industry people from around the globe. “Samsung Electronics has been leading the foldable market through continuous innovation si

Technology July 10, 2024

JobKorea, a job search platform, said Monday it has launched a separate job search app specifically for foreign national residents, Klik, an acronym for "kick-start life in Korea." This service is intended for residents of foreign nationality in South Korea to find jobs and for domestic companies to recruit foreign national employees, according to the platform. The app can be translated into 28 languages, including English, French, Chinese, Japanese, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian

Industry July 8, 2024

LG Electronics said Friday it expected its second-quarter earnings to climb more than 60 percent from a year earlier on robust sales of its main home appliance products and balanced qualitative growth of its business-to-business sector. LG estimated that its operating profit for the April-June period came in at 1.19 trillion won ($863.2 million), up 61.2 percent from a year ago, according to the company’s earnings guidance. The home appliance maker’s earnings guidance for the April-J

Technology July 5, 2024

Samsung Electronics predicted Friday that its operating profit in the April-June period would rebound to exceed 10 trillion won ($7.3 billion), driven by a recovery in demand for memory chips and rising prices on the back of the expansion of the artificial intelligence market. Samsung's second-quarter operating profit is estimated to hit 10.4 trillion won, up 1,452.2 percent from a year ago, according to the company’s earnings guidance. The figure far exceeded the 8.23 trillion won consens

Technology July 5, 2024

Negotiations over Naver’s sale of a stake in its joint venture with Japan’s SoftBank are expected to be prolonged, with no immediate breakthrough in sight. Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon on Tuesday said the Korean portal giant had no immediate intention to sell its stake in LY Corp., the operator of Japan’s popular messenger Line. Naver and SoftBank each own 50 percent of A Holdings, which controls almost 65 percent of shares in LY Corp. Asked about the possible change in its ownershi

Industry July 4, 2024

Top executives of Naver and Nvidia met in the US last week and their key agenda was securing “sovereign AI.” Sovereign AI refers to a nation’s capabilities to autonomously develop and produce artificial intelligence models using its own infrastructure, data, workforce and business network. Tech firms have put greater value on the concept as it allows AI models to be more advanced by incorporating cultures, languages and values specific to each region. “Naver and Nvidia wi

Technology July 3, 2024