By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
The competition between Naver (www.naver.com) and Daum (www.daum.net) in the Internet industry has been as lopsided as a Pyongyang election.
Daum, the distant runner-up, hopes it will have more of a fighting chance in mobile Web services, although Naver doesn't plan to surrender an ounce of its supremacy.
NHN, the operator of Naver, recently announced a comprehensive plan to improve its mobile offerings by converting more of its Web services to be available on data-enabled mobile phones, and Naver will be offering mobile versions of its location-based services, including digital maps, and search-word rankings starting later this month.
From May, the company will begin providing its e-mail, search, news, blogs and ``Cafe Web communities'' to mobile phones, along with restaurant reviews, cartoons and online dictionaries. Naver's Web search and ``Open Cast'' blog subscription services will also be available on handsets. Stock updates, movies and ``Knowledge Search,'' Naver's popular question-and-answer search service that allows users to edit search results, will be provided on handsets starting in June.
The company will establish a separate Web portal (m.naver.com) in May to manage its mobile services.
Aiming to boost its mobile offerings, NHN acquired Me2Day (me2day.net), a pioneer in mobile-based social networking services, and Wingbus (www.wingbus.com), a traveling information site, earlier this year.
Naver doubles as the country's most dominant search engine, controlling more than 75 percent of all queries, and the ultimate online media destination, gathering massive traffic for its news, entertainment and database of user-generated content.
By providing seamless services between desktop computers and handsets, NHN is looking to leverage its dominance in the emerging mobile Internet market.
``To outsiders, we may have seemed quiet on the mobile front, but now you'll get to see a lot more activities,'' said Lee Ram, who heads NHN's portal business division, adding that the technologies and content of Me2Day and Wingbus account for a critical part of the company's mobile aspirations.
``The idea is to make more of Naver's popular Web services available on mobile-phones, and eventually make the handheld devices as valuable as personal computers to the user. We believe the larger part of the growth will come from social networking sites and other personalized services, although securing a wealth of services and handsets to choose from would be key to the competition between us and our competitors,'' she said, saying that Naver will work closely with wireless operators to provide its services to more handsets.
NHN has yet to decide on a business model for its mobile services, although creating advertisement revenue is clearly the obvious goal.
Naver's mobile offensive is obviously watched with apprehension from Daum, which had committed to mobile services earlier than its archrival.
The No.2 Web portal had declared its intention to come first in mobile Web services, and was the first to reprogram its digital photomap services and user-generated online videos for use on handsets, along with the basic functions of e-mail, search, news and blogs.
The company is currently providing the latest version of its ``full-browsing'' mobile services to the users of LG Telecom's wireless data services, ``Oz,'' and also to Apple's iPod Touch users.
Daum, which has been operating a separate Web page for its mobile services (m.daum.net) since January, has particularly high hopes for its photographic maps, which blows competitors out of the water in terms of resolution and interactive features.
Although Daum expects that the quality of maps and other location-based services will make a significant difference in the mobile race, the possibility of Naver extending its desktop dominance remains a significant concern.
SK Communications, the operator of No.3 portal Nate (www.nate.com) and popular social networking service Cyworld (www.cyworld.com), is also strengthening its mobile services. The company is a unit of SK Telecom, the country's biggest mobile telephony operator, with a market share of more than 50 percent, and upping its mobile offerings is obviously a critical business strategy.
SK Communications' plan for mobile services is centered around user-generated content such as blogs, as the company expects to launched a mobile version of its ``Egloos'' blogging services soon and also allow ``voice blogging'' on handsets. The company revealed a mobile version of Cyworld in November last year.
Yahoo! Korea (www.yahoo.co.kr) is also providing a mobile-based search service dubbed ``Yahoo One-Search.''
With mobile Web services becoming conventional, speed and the diversity of services are becoming more important factors in the competition.
Daum clearly has an edge over its rivals in terms of quickness. The company claims it takes only two or three seconds for its mobile Web pages to fully load on handset screens, compared to the pages of Naver and other competitors who feel fortunate about loading within 10 seconds.
NHN's Lee, however, said the company would show progress on the speed front soon as it ``optimizes'' its mobile services for the busy May period.
The strengthened interest by Internet companies in mobile services comes at a time when more and more Koreans are switching to data-enabled handsets.
According to industry figures, there are about 500,000 Koreans using ``smart'' phones, or those that allow Internet surfing, multimedia features and other data services, PDAs and other mobile Internet devices such as iPod Touch.
The mobile Internet population is expected to grow quickly in a country that is one of the world's most advanced wireless markets. According to mobile operators, the country's third-generation (3G) telephony customers recently exceeded the 20 million mark, with SK Telecom and KTF combining for 18.7 million customers and LG Telecom getting 1.4 million subscribers to Oz.
And the Korean government's recent decision to lift its WIPI (wireless Internet platform for interoperability) software requirements for data-enabled handsets is also expected to fuel the popularity of the advanced mobile phones due to the larger influx of products from foreign electronics makers.
Sony-Ericsson, HTC and Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of the iconic Blackberry smart phones, have already released their products here and waiting in the wings are Nokia and Apple.