So then, it’s goodbye to Korea… the Ball is moving on today, and there’s just enough time to write a fond farewell to a country we have really enjoyed visiting. I will miss Korea very much – the people have been generous, hospitable, and I’ve loved their enthusiasm for all things football-related.

I’ll be cheering for you on Saturday…

Plan our travels, that’s what. Phil and I have finally got our tickets home – we head back to Europe on the 4th of July… to Paris. All the flights to the UK are booked out until the 9th July, and we both decided it would be better to get out of Japan early. Paris was our only option.

The Ball leaves for Tokyo tomorrow evening – we still live in the vain hope of finding a couple of tickets for the England v. Brazil game. Yeah, I know, fat chance… but whatever happens, it’ll be great just to be close to the action…

“We learnt that it’s not the winning that counts. Wherever you go, playing football can be used to improve diplomatic relations and promote peace.”
- an ex North Korean footballer talking about his team at the World Cup in England in 1966

But the winning sure does feel good…

Koreans have taken to the streets in their thousands to celebrate their victory over Italy… and the delight that is so plainly written across their faces is equally delightful to behold. I’ve just got back from dancing down an eight lane highway in the middle of town with the crowds… beers and soju being thrust into my hands whenever they weren’t high-fiving passers-by…

Unbelievable!

Phil told me, when he got back from his wander around the city, that he’d met an American out celebrating who turned to him and said… that he had never realised that football could be like this. I know exactly what he means, as I had an almost identical feeling at France ’98; my first experience of football fans that I didn’t feel threatened by – but more than that, though – my first experience of fans who celebrated a beautiful game in a beautiful way.

Unbelievable!

Today was Korea’s day, and they made the most of it. Their team snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, with pin-up lad who missed the early penalty scoring the golden goal in extra time to send the game reviewers a narrative hook from heaven. He deserves all the product endorsements that he can get.

Unbelievable!

Te Hamin Gwo!

click here or on the image above to download the MPEG movie clip

In fairness to the Italians, though, I thought they were on the wrong end of a lot of poor refereeing decisions, and unlucky to lose the game. On the other hand, some of the players have to learn to stay on their feet or else they’ll continue to lose the ref’s sympathy time and time again. They are all great players, but do themselves a great injustice with their melodrama.

Oh pilsen Korea!

click here to download the MPEG movie clip

Unbelievable!

I have only one thing left to say:

IT’S UNBELIEVABLE!

But today I’m going to say it over and over again… just so I don’t forget…

Unbelievable!

Dancing for joy

click here to download the MPEG movie clip

Unbelievable!

Unbelievable!

The atmosphere in Seoul is electrifying again tonight, with seemingly the entire population working themselves into a frenzy in anticipation of tonight’s big match – everyone is uniformly dressed in “Be the Reds” t-shirts (despite the team playing in pink) and starting on the soju early. We were going to go to City Hall to see the game, but then realised that we’d only be able to see the crowds – who have been gathering there since lunchtime…

Every vantage point will by now be taken, so unless we were lucky enough to find a convenient rooftop like last time, we’d actually see nothing of the match. So we’re going to hang out and watch the game on the big screen here at the guesthouse instead, and head out later… depending on the result, of course.

The guesthouse watches itself on TV

Much merriment earlier today as the guesthouse was featured in the pre-match coverage on MBC. Han, the ever-helpful and smiling manager, had the lead role in the report, which showed the scenes of jubiliation here during the game against Portugal. Top moments included Rubens, a most humorous Brazilian supporter (see you in Shizuoka, mate!) dancing across the screen when the Koreans scored, and Phil singing “pilsen Korea” with Han at the final whistle.

Be the Fuschia Pinks!

Our guesthouse is currently full of Irish, who have descended on the place in force to support their team. Before the game, as they prepared for the confrontation with Spain, all was smiles and optimism…

‘The Arklow Jesters’ ‘n’ Phil ‘n’ I

My sympathies go out to them and their spirited team, who more than exceeded my expectations in the absence of a certain Mr. Keane. I really thought they could win the game in extra time – they certainly began to outplay Spain… but it was not to be.

Three nil to the Engerlund!

Jeepers creepers, how good is it back home? Ex-pat bar in Korea booted along good and proper. English songs a plenty and a victory for our boys.

We’re not going home

click here to download the MPEG movie clip

Not only did another defender stick one in the bag o’ onions, well… with a little assistance from the Danish keeper, but Owen opens his World Cup score sheet and… jeepers, bleeding creepers… HESKEY slipped one in! The Danes though, had little in response.

Bring on the Brazileros.

Happy Jubilee ma’am (thanks to Limpfish for the use of this image)

I am cheered though by reports from England of mass St. George support and hope for a lancing of the Denmark dragon, which would mean we’d have to get over to Japan for the next game.

Can anyone send photos which we could put up here from Blighty? It’d be beautiful to have a little home representation.

Michael, I dare you, stick a hat-trick in.

The World Cup matches are screened in the subway trains

Since we’re here running a multimedia weblog, I thought I’d take the opportunity to see what was going on in the digital world here in Korea. This is a report of my discoveries so far.

Kim Dae-jung wasn’t kidding. Korea has made huge efforts to make this World Cup the most technically proficient to date. In the process, Korea itself is being networked like no other country I have seen. Mobile phones work in the subway system, the games are shown live on monitors in the trains, half the population have broadband access (for US$18 per month – read this in England and weep), and the cabbies look like cyborgs plugged in to GPS systems, mobile phone conferencing and translation services. And that’s just for starters…

Everyday Life

Everyone in Korea, except the very young and the very old, has a mobile phone. The phone that we rented has a connection speed three times faster than a dial-up modem, it has a colour screen with animations and games, free email and web-browsing facilities, as well as live World Cup updates and an accommodation-finding service. However, in the manner of all great-looking tech, it works to a point – in this case, it sadly won’t receive SMS messages from my mum in the UK.

The internet cafes have blazingly quick T1 connections. As an example of how fast they are, I downloaded the entire Quicktime package in under ten seconds. That’s more than a megabyte per second – and I was using a line shared between a cafe that was full of people playing network games and browsing the web. Playing games for about a dollar an hour seems to be a very popular pastime for Korean youth – I guess the cafes are subsidised to get them in, in the hope they will learn more useful technical stuff by osmosis.

Prototyping Community Networking

In Hwang-Dun village, about 200km north-east of Seoul, I was shown around a model of how the Korean government and businesses see the networking technologies working in rural areas. Hwang-Dun is one of twenty villages which has been selected for “cyber-village” status, involving considerable inward investment of IT and training to see in what ways the villagers could benefit from internet technologies.

Down on the Cucumber Farm

Wireless networking down on the farm

ADSL only works within about 3-4km of the local telephone exchange. For remotely located farmsteads which lie beyond this limit, the project had installed an 802.1x wireless network called Nespot. This is the same technology that Apple uses in its Airport range of wireless networking products, with the difference that Nespot provides access to all network services, including the internet, rather than just allowing one to wander about the house with a wireless laptop.

For the cucumber and tomato farmer whose laptop is pictured above, this meant that he could conduct a significant part of his business by email and via his website. He had to travel far less into town to sell his products since customers could order from him directly, and he was able to cut out a middleman in the process… helping his profit margins.

Steam Bun Bakery

Making steam buns

In the village itself, I found the same web-enabled business practices being adopted by a steam bun bakery. The village was chosen for the prototype scheme in part because it is famous throughout Korea for these delicious sweet red bean filled buns.

The buns are still made by hand

The bakery still makes its product in the traditional way, but the way it does its business has been almost completely revolutionised by the scheme. Sitting right next to the women rolling the buns and bean paste together in the bakery is a computer – from which the staff run their website, checking customers orders as they are placed through their website, and confirming deliveries for the following day.

The bakery computer

The buns are delivered nationwide, and seem to be in high demand. The bakery claims that its turnover has doubled since the introduction of the website. I was impressed by the level of support that was given to these small businesses to allow them to get their e-business off the ground. Without intensive training and a lot of technical help, I doubt that they would have been able to make the conversion to these working practices.

The steam buns disappear like hot cakes

The local businesses were obviously benefitting from the technology, but I wondered what was in it for the corporations that had spent such a lot of money on the project. the usual options ran through my mind – publicity, goodwill, research and development of appropriate software, but then another thought occurred to me.

Korean cities are overcrowded in the extreme, and fewer and fewer people stay in the countryside. My best guess is that the government are keen to find ways to persuade people to remain in rural areas, in order to ease the population pressure on the cities. By installing networking technologies, they are able to show people that they will be able to access much the same kinds of services enjoyed by urban dwellers, and that they will in future be able to communicate more easily with their friends and families in other remote locations.

Prototype Products

Back in Seoul, KT, who organised the tour to the village, showed off the kinds of new communications devices that are just around the corner for the Korean people – and by extension, for the rest of the world…

Video Phones

Once touted as the killer app of the telephony world, and featured in just about every sci-fi flick since the dawn of cinema, video-phones are here already…

Connecting…

The Korean multimedia phone network is gradually spreading across Seoul (see this previous article) and yet it seems not to be popular, except amongst marketing folk and boffin-types. I stood for an hour watching the public phones, and not once did someone actually make a video call. Here in the demo room, however, KT were keen to show that they did in fact work.

The call in progress

These phones were evidently made for Koreans, since the two Portuguese guys using it had the tops of their heads cut off for most of the time as the cameras pointed further down to the height of the average Korean (ironically, the photo above shows the opposite phenomenon) I’m still not sure of the benefits of being seen during a call… anyone care to persuade me it’s a good thing?

Portable WMP

Portable Windows Media Player

For those of you who can’t live without your videos – here’s a prototype mobile WMP running MPEG4. The proprietary Microsoft MPEG4, that is – which conforms to few of the actual MPEG standards. Get product lock-in if you wish… I’ll be avoiding this one myself.

Code Square Phones

Now this one I like a lot… it’s a phone with a little camera in the hinge which faces outwards. It is designed to read colour squares which can be displayed anywhere. They are unique identifiers (a bit like a web address) and by pointing the phone at the little squares you can receive information in text form, as pictures or even video.

Code squares can be on websites

Code squares can be on paper

When your phone has registered the colour square, it automatically downloads whatever content it is that the colour square refers to, be it a video (as in the example in the image below), website, image, phone number or any required information.

The phone shows the associated video.

Cool as…

Mobile Video Phones

In the same way that I am yet to be persuaded by ordinary videophones, I still remain uncertain of the benefits of adding pictures to a mobile phone call. The image just seems like redundant information – and may even, in some cases, be a disadvantage to the user. I’m thinking of the disabled, the disfigured and the hung-over for starters, let alone delving into race and gender issues.

A pair of mobile videophones…

Or an expensive mirror?

But the technology works, at least.

Mobile Phone Digicam

I quite liked this one too:

A phone with built-in digital camera

Me on the screen, proving it works

I’m all in favour of gadgets that combine as many different media in to a single device as possible. I love my Sony digital video camera for that reason – it doubles as the stills camera that has provided the pictures for this website, as well as taking remarkable quality video. I’d have liked this swivel-phone even better if it had stored the photos on a remote server rather than on the phone itself, but maybe that’s one for the upgrade.

Mobile Commerce

Two kinds of commercial interactions were on display. First was a drinks machine that you played a little jingle to from your phone. Each jingle was a fixed amount of money, and you could download extra jingles to be added to your phonebill. Seemed ridiculously easy to hack to me, and I predict that this one never makes it out of the R and D labs.

Tunes for drinks

The other interaction was of the ATM flavour, a service that I’m sure gets marketing managers salivating at the thought of being able to tap into those bloated banking sector budgets:

Your mobile phone as cashpoint card

The screen of the phone is passed over a reader in the ATM, allowing the holder to withdraw a certain amount of money. Simple enough, it would seem, but required yet more PIN numbers to download new barcodes for the phone. Can someone please figure out a way of reducing the number of PINs that I have to remember? I even forgot my own mobile phone number today, not having been asked for it for a while. If I have to remember yet another PIN, I’ll scream.

Both of the mobile commerce ideas showed how keen people are to develop such products, but the technical problems I witnessed as the demonstrators struggled to get the things work also reminded me of how fragile such systems are. They look great on the glossy brochure with the colour washed smiling corporate types looking in control of the technology, but real life tends to be a lot more messy.

As for me, if I can just figure out how to access the numbers of the missed calls on my mobile phone, I’ll be a happy chap. I hate not knowing whose calls I’ve missed.

FIFA must be as pleased as the supporters – three countries where football is still in its infancy are through to the second round. Can’t be bad for the competition. Or the advertising revenue, either, come to that…

I thought all the qualifications were well deserved – the Portuguese played negative football in the first half, and paid the price – though I struggle to remember a team so effectively shooting themselves in the proverbial foot. Poland were as good as their word, and helped the Koreans relax by scoring two early goals… effectively guaranteeing Korean qualification. And then Korea did the Amercans a favour by putting them through. Gotta love the irony.

Seoul is booting off at the moment – Koreans celebrating like they’ve won the cup. Which, of course they haven’t. But it hardly matters – they’ve played entertaining football and I applaud their style. Even if they get no further in the competition, they’ve proved that Asian football can no longer be dismissed as second-rate. I rest my case with the Korean goal today. Bergkamp and Gascoigne eat your hearts out.

More media action for the FLH team today, with CNN whisking the two of us off to Seoul stadium for an on-camera chat with host Tim Lister. Unfortunately, yet again we couldn’t get into the stadium, so the producer decided that we’d film on the grass in front of it.

Would it become a battle of the acronyms?

The view we faced, looking strangely tame now it’s been and gone

In fact it turned out to be the most relaxed interview I’ve experienced on this bizarre trip of ours – Tim Lister, Phil and myself lounging about on the grass in front of the stadium, shooting the breeze about the trip, the idea of the Ball and the Irish and England teams’ prospects. I could get used to this life. Well, maybe…

Another interview – this time with a Korean language national daily paper – scheduled for tomorrow. If there’s no rest for the wicked, how bad must we be?