It’s no news that LG Display competes with Samsung for the title of the world’s largest LCD maker. At the same time, LG is also seeking to expand its manufacturing lines to meet heavy demands for their tablets and smartphones. Meanwhile, Samsung will invest more in the home appliance industry such as fridges and robot vacuum cleaners. This can be seen as their attempt at strengthening their home appliances portfolio that is considerably weak compared to LG’s.

In the recent International Consumer Electronics Show (ICES) that was held this Monday, LG expressed their interest in business alliance, namely, a “Smart TV Alliance” by securing new partners. Smart TV Alliance is an industry body complete with involvements from LG Electronics, Philips, Qualcomm, and Toshiba just to name a few.

beSUCCESS investigates how LG will spend its 19 billion USD investment.

미국 라스베가스는 지금 현재 ‘CES(국제 최대 가전 박람회) 2013’의 열기로 뜨겁습니다. 올해 CES의 주인공인 삼성, LG, Sony 등의 대기업 스포트라이트에 가려진 숨겨진 보물, 게임분야의 핫(hot)한 하드웨어들을 소개합니다.

beSUCCESS covers weekly news in Korea, 9 Jan.

Sony has arguably beaten Samsung and LG (and everyone else) by combining the two biggest TV technology developments in one amazing TV set at the World’s biggest consumer electronics show in Las Vegas.

54Million Smart TVs were sold in 2012. but many consumers were non-fussed with the usability of many of the new features and globally only about 60% of internet ready TVs were ever connected (only 10% regularly connected in Europe). Can Samsung attract better usability reviews with its new products?

In November 2012, 55% of the companies that have not used a cloud service said that they plan to use it within 18 months. Desktop virtualization has been the number 1 interest of Korean companies for 2 consecutive years. Which tells us that there will be a definite expansion of cloud services within the Korean companies this year. Although the figures seem meek compared to 79% (Australian companies seem to be very enthusiastic), this could mean more potential for Korea, as we will be able to see that such virtual environments globally sued and acknowledged.

Several big names have exited Korea in the last few years (CarreFour, Walmart, Motorola, RIM, HTC, Goldman Sachs, to mention a few), but can Korean consumers be blamed for the failure of foreign companies to attract and retain market share, as some have suggested?

Apple’s iphone 5 fails to hit the target in arch rival Samsung’s home country, South Korea.

Samsung sold its millionth Galaxy Note II in Korea just over 90 days after its launch, in September. This means that Galaxy Note II’s domestic and global sales now reached 5 million units. Let’s compare this with Galaxy Note 1. In its early phase sales, it took Samsung 10 months to reach 10 million sales. We expect that Galaxy Note II will achieve the same feat in 4-5 months given the current…

What are the key words for IT Korea 2013? What are some of the key words for the IT market in Korea for this year? According to Gartner, and The National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA), the 10 key words for 2013 are: The beSUCCESS team thinks that mobile platform wars, enterprise app stores, cloud computing, and intellectual property rights are the main key words in 2013. beSUCCESS will be writing more…

With the year 2012 behind us, beSUCCESS analyses 4 hottest issues in Korea for the first week of 2013. Censorship in SNS services The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family (yes, such a ministry does exist in Korea)  passed a new bill that protects youths from cyber bullying. They passed a bill that disables them from using swear words of slang on their KakaoTalk and other SNS services. Due to the demand that…

Despite 54 million SMART TV sales in 2012 less than a third of consumers connect to the internet each week. blame has been levelled against manufacturers for not simplifying usage enough, and connectivity with preipherals (game consols, DVD players, etc) still drives non-TV specific engagement. Does LG have the answer?

With ‘Gangnam Style’ ranked #1 search term across 5+ countries (you might be surprised to find your country name in there!), Korea continues to amaze the world. beSUCCESS investigates and analyzed the hottest trends in Korea, 2012.

beSUCCESS caught up with Bernard Moon to learn more about the mentorship process at the Sparklabs accelerator. Bernard is Co-founder & CEO of Vidquik, a web conferencing & sales solutions platform. Previously he has worked with the Lunsford Group, GoingOn Networks and iRG, a leading boutique investment bank in Asia, where he focused on TMT companies.

We are honored that Jessica Alba, alongside serial entrepreneur and co-founder of The Honest Company, Brian Lee, will be travelling to Seoul to speak at beLAUNCH, May 1st-2nd, 2013.

In early December, the major Korean telcos launched Joyn, a mobile messenger service which would allow subscribers to message, call and send files to other users. This could enhance the market entry cost greatly and make it difficult for small IT startups in Korea.

Currently, Samsung Electronics is investing huge amounts of resources for the TIZEN expansion across the world. Already, the mobile OS ‘BADA’ platform is being synchronized to the TIZEN format, and considering the experience with BADA smartphones, selling around 20 million worldwide, it seems that Samsung’s decision will allow Samsung’s Galaxy smartphone series to be increasingly independent by decreasing the dependence on Google and others.

The JOBS Act, signed by President Obama in April 2012 has legalized Equity Crowdfunding. The laws around the act are being finalized and then the flood gates will be opened to crowd-funded equity investment in startups. The world awaits!