SEOUL, March 24 (Korea Bizwire) — Imported car owners in their twenties are increasingly fixing their own cars amidst a growing controversy over car importers overpricing imported car parts and repair costs. According to the online retailer Auction, the sales of imported car parts through the website from February 19 to March 18 increased 32 [...]
SEOUL, March 24 (Korea Bizwire) — The Korea National Council of Consumer Organizations has sent a letter of inquiry to the OECD to investigate Tesco-owned supermarket Homeplus over allegations that the company sold customers’ private information to insurance firms, according to a statement on March 23. The council claimed that Homeplus and its parent company Tesco [...]
SEOUL, March 24 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s tech giant Samsung Electronics said Tuesday it plans to pre-install applications and services provided by Microsoft on the soon-to-be-released Galaxy S6, as well as other Android-powered mobile devices. Under the plan, Samsung said it will “bring Microsoft mobile productivity services to more consumers and business customers” by installing [...]
SEOUL, March 23 (Korea Bizwire) – Korean scientists have developed a voice-to-text conversion technology that can automatically transcribe the voice of callers seamlessly to texts in Korean. The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute of Korea (ETRI) announced on March 22 that it had successfully developed the Natural Language Recognition software. As financial institutions and other corporations [...]
SEOUL, March 23 (Korea Bizwire) – Motorists in Korea most frequently call the emergency service provided by their insurance company when their car battery is dead or when they need a jump-start. According to the Korea Consumer Agency, which recently surveyed 1,000 drivers who subscribed to a roadside assistance service offered by an insurance firm, [...]
SEOUL, March 23 (Korea Bizwire) — A 2.5-meter-tall tree made from 5,000 PET bottles and waste wood, adorned with messages from Seoul children dreaming of a clean environment, was installed at Seoul Plaza on March 22. The sculpture was made by artist Kim Woo-jin as part of Seoul’s promotional events for the ICLEI World Congress 2015, which [...]
SEOUL, March 23 (Korea Bizwire) — Wine tasting buffets offered by hotels are gaining popularity in Korea. The Grand Intercontinental Seoul Parnas’s lounge and bar are holding a ‘Grand Happy Hour’, where visitors can taste a variety of wine with a buffet, weekdays from 6:30pm to 9:00pm, for 60,000 won. The hotel offers unlimited wine. [...]
SEOUL, March 23 (Korea Bizwire) — Korea’s noodle consumption is the highest in the world, according to a report by Bloomberg and Euro Monitor published on March 22. Koreans consumed an average of 9.7 kilograms of noodles per individual in 2014, excluding pasta. Japan ranked second on the list with an average consumption of 9.4 [...]
SEOUL, March 23 (Korea Bizwire) — The Seoul city government is planning to aggressively manage the local population of wild dogs, which have become a safety threat, said officials on March 22. The wild dogs, estimated to number in the hundreds in Seoul, are assumed to be descendants of pets abandoned three to four generations [...]
SEOUL, March 23 (Korea Bizwire) — A special financial service that converts a variable rate loan into a fixed rate loan will be launched by 16 Korean banks on March 24, as part of the Korean government’s efforts to mitigate household debt. However, each branch is expected to offer the service to an average of only [...]