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Kakaotalk stickers download1/1/2023 By 2020, the government predicts, it will be 1,000 times faster - so fast you could download a feature-length movie in approximately one second. To maintain South Korea’s lead, the country’s Science Ministry recently announced a $1.5 billion initiative to upgrade Korea’s mobile infrastructure. Such healthy competition in Korea keeps the cost of access low. South Korea also eased regulations on service providers to ensure that consumers would have a multitude of choices - in marked contrast to America, where a handful of cable and telecommunications monopolies dominate the market. Back in 1995, the government began a 10-year plan to build out the country’s broadband infrastructure and, through a series of public programs, to teach Koreans what they could do with it. Seoul is blanketed with free Wi-Fi that offers the world’s fastest Internet speeds - twice as fast as the average American’s. Much of this was made possible by two decades of enormous public investment. The office is in the trendy district of Gangnam - yes, that Gangnam - which is already home to a growing cluster of mobile start-ups and a handful of technology incubators to mentor them. In May, Google opened a campus in Seoul, its first in Asia. Last fall, Goldman Sachs led a round of investment in Woowa Brothers and its delivery service. An early-stage American venture firm called 500 Startups recently spun off a small fund called 500 Kimchi, which focuses exclusively on South Korea. American investors are beginning to catch on, and venture capital is starting to flow west, across the Pacific. But Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is in a sense the Valley’s closest rival. While Silicon Valley is the largest and most enduring locus of tech innovation, a number of cities around the planet are nipping at its heels: Tel Aviv, Berlin, Bangalore. “When I go back to the U.S., it feels like the Dark Ages,” he said. But in Seoul, even subway straphangers can stream movies on their phones, deep beneath the ground. “But I was blown away because Korea is three or four years ahead.” Back home, Kim said, people celebrate when a public park gets Wi-Fi. “When I was in S.F., we called it the mobile capital of the world,” he said. The job was great - but living in Seoul was nothing less than a revelation. Then, five months ago, he accepted an offer to work for Woowa Brothers, a South Korean company that runs a food-delivery start-up called Baedal Minjok. After graduating in 2006, he found work in the industry, at Zynga, and LinkedIn. Raised in Piedmont, an affluent suburb of Oakland, Kim was in college during the rise of Facebook, and he watched in amazement as tech start-ups transformed the world around him. Like most young people in the Bay Area, Mike Kim grew up believing that the future of technology was being forged in Silicon Valley.
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