Language limits Korea’s start-ups

2014-02-18 15:54

Language limits Korea’s start-ups

‘Internet yields more benefits than social cost’
By Kim Yoo-chul
Risk aversion and language barriers are the two biggest obstacles limiting start-ups in Korea and hindering the organic growth of the online and technology industries in Korea, according to a Google vice president.
“Language is one obvious limitation. Korean businesses need to deal with markets in which Korean is not normally spoken,” Google Chief Internet Evangelist and Vice President Vinton Cerf said in a written interview with The Korea Times.
“Also, businesses need to develop applications that are of interest on a global scale, not only domestically. It may be that venture capital is not available for potentially risky Internet-based start-ups.”
Cerf is known as a co-inventor of the Internet. While a student at Stanford University in the 1970s, he and Robert Kahn invented the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol or TCP/IP.
The guru said that entrepreneurship is coming whether or not companies take on challenges and risks to achieve creative results. He pointed out that culture isn’t the only factor in the emergence and growth of businesses.
“One does not know whether culture is a factor, but in some cultures, risk taking and the possibility of failure are strong inhibitors of new business formation and growth. A business failure in some countries is a permanent mark against the entrepreneur,” he stated.
Google is teaming up with the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning to jointly manage the so-called Global K-Startup programs, which aim to help Korean start-ups generate creative business ideas, in line with the government’s push to power up initiatives for content and software.
The Google executive, who acknowledges his role as an evangelist, stressed that the effects of ongoing efforts by some governments to control the Internet will be short-lived.
“Punishment by a government isn’t necessarily a deterrent. I think that governments will be hard pressed to control the flow of information as cryptography and anonymity become increasingly commonplace. The government may be able to figure out who you are and punish you for unacceptable behavior, but I am optimistic that the human desire to share information will outlast repressive governments,” he said.
Cerf also disapproves of efforts to establish organizations that protect industries and Internet users from cyber hacking and other misconduct, although some industry analysts and even governments have favored such controversial plans.
“One should not think in terms of an organization but, rather, a web of relationships among various players in the Internet ecosystem, who have a common interest in stopping or prosecuting unacceptable behavior in cyberspace,” he said.
“This goes well beyond the Internet to the full panoply of digital activity we lump together into the term cyberspace that includes digital storage devices, computers, mobiles, tablets, Internet-enabled television, etc. Bilateral and multilateral treaties as well as informal information sharing may provide a framework for improving cyber-safety.”
Benefit of the Internet
Regarding the highly debated issue of whether or not the Internet yields more benefits than social costs, he still believes that the Internet’s benefits outweigh the social costs.
“I certainly believe that the benefits conferred by the spread of the Internet outweigh the hazards, but privacy is a very big issue, as is safety. Both of these deserve a lot more attention from the technical and legal perspectives. We also need to think about our own behavior online,” responded the executive.
Regarding debate surrounding the “right to be forgotten,” that is, the right of users to delete their data online in order to protect their privacy, Cerf answered: “Preservation is hard if the software that knows how to interpret the data is no longer available. The Internet remembers things you wish it would forget and forgets things you might wish to be preserved. I think the ‘right to be forgotten’ is a misguided notion because it does not work in other media.”
“While you may be able to throw away your own books, you are not in a position to throw away your neighbor’s. Nor should you be able to arbitrarily whisk away another person’s digital records except, for example, if the party agrees to this.”
The trend toward greater connectedness and convergence among devices, which is central to the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT), facilitates the varied but organized evolution of the Internet, stressed the Google executive.
“As the IoT becomes commonplace, we will carry devices that discover the presence of large format displays, video cameras, microphones, keyboards and other interactive devices so that they can be incorporated in real time into a networked environment. Spoken commands and hand gestures will become additional tools for interacting with the Internet and with devices in our personal spaces,” Cerf told The Korea Times.
Accordingly, he has no doubt that people will be accustomed to checking personal information, particularly health and medical information, on the Internet via wearable devices developed by consumer electronics companies.
“I think personal health monitoring will become much more common. Continuous sensing of our vital signs will provide a baseline from which to detect potential problems early,” he said.
“DNA sequencing will be inexpensive and become a part of our health diagnosis and treatment processes. Aggregate data will allow for analysis of health trends and potential hazards such as epidemics as early as possible. We may succeed in forming virtual clinical trials simply by observing the response of large populations to specific medications.”