Telecom Lead @ Mobile World Congress 2013: SK Telecom CTO Byun Jae-woan has shared technology roadmap for Korea’s largest telecom operator.

CTO Byun — addressing a press conference in Barcelona today — said: “We will develop HMI (Human-to-Machine Interface) technology, video recognition/analysis technology and big data analysis technology for the company’s future growth businesses.”

Established in 1984, SK Telecom has more than 26 million subscribers, commanding more than 50 percent market share. R&D is a strong focus area for the mobile operator that unveiled smart learning robot Atti at the ongoing Mobile World Congress 2013. It is in talks with global companies on partnerships and sales of Atti in overseas markets. Atti is scheduled to be released in the first half of 2013.

SK Telecom — with KRW 16.301 trillion in revenue in 2012 — is taking on several global operators to spread its wings in Asia and other global markets.

For instance, SK Telecom is currently co-developing educational contents and curriculum using educational robots for kids with the Department of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences at Utah State University.

In fact, several Asian telecom operators — Maxis, Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications and India’s state-run telecom giant BSNL — are well behind in technology innovation.

SK Telecom’s smart learning robot Atti, currently being exhibited at MWC 2013, is embedded with core HMI technologies including voice recognition technology and sentence analysis technology.

The company plans to focus on developing more sophisticated video technologies and use them to create diverse intelligent video solutions/services such as video surveillance.

SK Telecom will use Big Data to understand customers’ usage patterns and gain business insight, to offer enhanced service quality, launch effective marketing campaigns, and design viable business models.

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It has recently designated its three new growth businesses, namely Healthcare, Solution and Media, to lead the upcoming era of ICT convergence.

To support its enterprise business plan, SK Telecom is conducting research and development in new diagnostic products, including diagnostic reagent, as well as ICT-based medical diagnostic device platforms.

Moreover, the company is also making efforts to develop new types of healthcare services including one that provides personalized treatment through bio-data analysis.

SK Telecom — which launched LTE services in July 2011 — is developing 3D-based Smart Guide, an in-building navigation service, and Biz SNS Solution that can be utilized for enterprise marketing.

Furthermore, the company will continue to offer differentiated solutions based on fixed/wireless cloud infrastructure and data analytics to enhance productivity of its enterprise customers and propel its own growth.

SK Telecom is also developing an Android-based set-top box that can be linked with smartphones. The set-top box will allow users to operate various applications on the TV screen and use the Internet for searching and browsing.

In addition, the company completed development of Mobile Smart Node, a technology the dramatically reduces content download time by streamlining the content delivery route on wireless network, in January 2013.

In the long-term, SK Telecom plans to develop IPTV technology based on HTML 5 in order to overcome limitations imposed by different operation systems and platforms.

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