Korea is a “fast” country. Everything is quick and speedy, with one exception: The regulatory framework. By and large, laws and regulations fall way behind technological development in the market. Startup companies’ first encounter is regulatory red tape. How ill-matched for a country that excels in information and communication technology. The tricky part is, these regulations have legitimate objectives. In particular, they are intended to mitigate risks, known and unknown. The default answer i

That obsolete smartphone stashed away in a drawer or closet may not look like a national security risk, but the Trump administration is contemplating treating it as one.Unscrupulous Chinese recyclers and manufacturers could transform old phones into “counterfeit goods that may enter the United States’ military and civilian electronics supply chain,” according to a draft rule. To prevent that from happening, the Department of Commerce proposes to severely restrict the export of used electronics.I

I’ve been asked time and again how, being Jewish, I could choose to live in Berlin, of all places. The 80th anniversary of an event known in modern Germany under the unwieldy German-Russian name Novemberpogrome, is a good day to attempt an answer.The English-speaking world refers to it as Kristallnacht. The word Reichskristallnacht was first heard in 1939 from Nazi functionary Wilhelm Boerger to describe the events of Nov. 9, 1938, when Nazi storm troopers throughout Germany and Austria staged a

What would the ghosts of 1918 -- not just the soldiers who were slaughtered in the trenches of World War I, but the statesmen who failed to make a durable peace afterward -- tell politicians a century later about the perilous world we inhabit today? America just finished a snarling, bitterly divisive election, and we’re all puzzling over how to interpret the results. President Trump, meanwhile, headed for Paris last weekend to commemorate the armistice of what historian Margaret MacMillan has ca

On Wednesday, after years of rumors and speculation, Samsung finally presented a smartphone with a foldable display that it plans to start selling next year. At the risk of sounding like a wide-eyed teenager, I consider this a potentially disruptive innovation on the scale of the iPhone -- if the manufacturers can handle it right.The technology has been more or less ripe for a while: The organic light-emitting compounds and the circuitry that delivers electric charges to them can be printed onto

Countries often devote public funds to promoting exports of their own goods and services. But devoting resources to promote imports -- as China is doing with its inaugural International Import Expo, which just opened in Shanghai -- is truly rare.The annual Import Expo, which will be part of China’s overall import promotion strategy, has attracted thousands of companies worldwide with the promise of large orders from Chinese firms, including the state-owned enterprises that the government has tas