The car service Uber has agreed to limit prices during emergencies, natural disasters or other unusual market disruptions consistent with New York’s law against price gouging, the company and state attorney general said Tuesday.Uber, which uses a mobile application to connect riders with vehicles for hire, has its rates rise and fall with demand, but it has been criticized for “surge pricing” that’s sometimes exponentially higher than base fares. Prices usually increase on weekdays during rush h

Merck, a leading company for top-quality high-tech products in the pharmaceutical and chemical sectors, has acquired Peer+, a Dutch specialist for smart window technology, as of July 1, Merck Korea said Tuesday. With the acquisition of its long-standing cooperation partner Peer+, Merck will be able to further advance the development of the future-oriented market for liquid crystal windows, and also help bolster its position as a technology and innovation leader for liquid crystal materials. Merc

Samsung Electronics Co., the world's biggest technology firm by revenue, estimated its second-quarter operating profit at a sharply lower than expected 7.2 trillion won (US$7.11 billion) on Tuesday amid a slowdown in its smartphone business.The preliminary estimate represents a 24.4 percent fall from the operating profit of 9.53 trillion won a year earlier, the company said in a regulatory filing. The figure also marks a 15 percent crash from the operating profit of 8.49 trillion won posted duri

South Korea’s top mobile carrier, SK Telecom Co., said Monday it has forged ties with Sweden-based Ericsson to jointly conduct studies on the fifth-generation network, which has drawn the attention of the global telecom industry. SK Telecom and Ericcson will focus on the study of ultra-wideband and low-latency technology used for remote driving, gigabyte-level data transmission, converging time division duplex and frequency division duplex, the mobile carrier said. The 5G network is expected to

Samsung Electronics will likely see its profit decrease in the April-June period due to the sluggish performance of its flagship smartphone business, analysts said on Monday, a day before the firm is to announce its earnings guidance. The tech giant was expected to see its operating profit drop below 8 trillion won ($7.9 billion). Some, such as IM Investment and Securities, forecast the figure to be around 7.5 trillion won. “The worsening performance is mainly due to decreasing consumer loyalty

South Korea’s major tech players have expanded the battery capacities of their flagship smartphones over the past years, data showed Monday, as they engaged in a fierce competition over wider displays and faster networks.Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s No. 1 maker of handsets, saw its battery capacity of the Galaxy 5S model reach 2,800 mAh, up 87 percent from the 1,500 mAh posted by the Galaxy S smartphone released in June 2010.The improvement was also observed in phablets, a cross between

Kakao Corp., the operator of Kakao Talk ― the most widely-used mobile messaging service in South Korea ― is embroiled in a dispute over mobile gift-giving services with several e-commerce firms. On Friday, SK Planet and two other firms said it lodged a complaint with the Fair Trade Commission against Kakao for abusing its dominant market position in the mobile gift exchanging market. This week, Kakao terminated contracts with the three firms that had been offering mobile gift certificates throug

OCSiAl, a leading manufacturer of graphene tubes, said Thursday it would start expanding its business into the Asian carbon nanotube market beginning in Korea. In line with such efforts, it signed a memorandum of understanding with a Korean carbon nano composite maker, Applied Carbon Nano Technology, on the sidelines of a nano technology conference held Wednesday through Friday in Seoul.Under the deal, which is estimated to be worth $200,000, OCSiAl will supply a total of 100 kg of Tuball, a sin

Microsoft said it is scrambling Outlook email messages in transit to thwart spying by governments and others.Toughened encryption at Outlook and Microsoft OneDrive online “cloud” data storage service came less than a month after the technology titan got low marks in a Google ranking of such defenses against online snooping.“We are in the midst of a comprehensive engineering effort to strengthen encryption across our networks and services,” Microsoft vice president of trustworthy computing securi