October 22, 2007

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA-John B. Hynes III probably has no set ranking of the visits made here since Gale International embraced its $25 billion master-planned city project on 1,500 acres of reclaimed Incheon waterfront. But in concluding the 59th sojourn from his native Boston since 2001, a tired Hynes tells GlobeSt.com the latest trek to New Songdo City was worth the jet lag.

"We made some really good progress this time," says the veteran developer. Gale and minority partner POSCO E&C (70/30) unveiled commitments with corporate powerhouses Korean Air Lines and United Technologies Corp. to advance the building sustainability movement, and announced a series of projects that will see 5.5 million sf of commercial construction underway by the end of 2008. The events are linked, Hynes explains, allowing Songdo to live up to a bold environmental mantra that has already earned the 100 million-sf mixed-use concept a berth as a pilot project of the USGBC. Memorandums of understanding were signed setting LEED Silver as a baseline standard on buildings going forward.

"That's never been done before anywhere," Hynes says. "It's our contribution to 21st century design and development." The results could be far reaching, he suggests, given New Songdo's claim as the largest private real estate venture in the world. A Korean Air and Inha University partnership is joining UTC and Gale/POSCO to build a research facility for studying and promoting "green" ideas, products and technologies. A part of the Songdo International Business District-the city's commercial core-the Sustainable International Business Center will host an annual conference aimed at further positioning Songdo IBD as "the center of environmental initiatives in Northeast Asia."

Besides Stanley Gale, chairman of the New York City-based real estate investment and development firm, the signing ceremony was attended by current US Korean Ambassador Alexander Vershbow and former Ambassador Thomas Hubbard, chairman of the Gale International Advisory Board. Korean Air affiliate Hanjin Group was represented by Chairman Yang-Ho Cho. Hartford-based UTC showed its commitment by dispatching CEO George David. "The SIBC is an extraordinary opportunity to demonstrate on an urban scale what can be accomplished," David said in his remarks.

UTC and Hanjin are valuable allies, says Hynes, praising both for being on the sustainability front lines. Through subsidiaries such as Carrier, Hamilton Sundstrand, Otis Elevators and Sikorsky, UTC has pioneered energy saving products and systems ranging from elevators that regenerate electric power to zero-emission buses using fuel cells. For the third year in a row, UTC was named among the 100 most sustainable corporations at the 2008 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "Wasted energy is a big concern to them," Hynes says of his new partners.

Hartford-based UTC is already entrenched in Korea, employing 3,400 people in 17 cities, and the pedigree of the $50 billion conglomerate helps validate Songdo, adds Hynes. "To get a Fortune 100 company to step up like they did is big news," he says. "It proves that we have been able to take the project to a new level of credibility and shows that it is really going to get done." A centerpiece is UTC's backing of the U-Life Northeast Asia Headquarters, which will be the first LEED Platinum-rated building in Korea. A joint venture of Gale, POSCO E&C and tech firm LG CNS, U-Life NAH will serve as the computer nerve center of Songdo IBD. The headquarters will feature public exhibit areas showcasing sustainable and high-tech innovations in the new city.

With the sustainability goals now in place, Songdo can ramp up production of new office space and other elements, part of a need to convince skeptical prospects that the utopian urban vision is happening, with a grand opening slated for late 2009 and final completion by 2014. "We've had a number companies who are extremely interested, but they have held back to see whether we can perform," Hynes relays. In that respect, it seems tenants are no different in Korea than Boston, he says, with commitments for commercial space often hard to come by in both markets until construction commences. For that reason, Gale has been proactive in Hynes' hometown as well as it proved in building a 36-story office tower with more than a million sf now fully leased to State Street Bank Corp. Gale is now pursuing two other major Boston projects, including another blank-slate master-planned complex on the city's once gritty waterfront.

In addition to UTC and Hanjin's financial heft, Songdo's popular residential element should generate up to $300 million in income that the developers will use to leverage $1 billion in new construction, of which three million to four million will break ground next year. A total of seven million sf of fresh commercial construction is included in the latest round announced by the new partnership, including one property being fashioned after Rockefeller Center. Presently, about three million sf of office space is underway in the Songdo IBD. That space is partly leased, including one building housing POSCO's operations.

October 5, 2005

The U-Life South Korea plans to spend $25 billion on New Songdo, the world's largest "ubiquitous city," with computers linking home life and life on its streets. Construction, 40 miles from Seoul, is to be done in 2014.

IMAGINE public recycling bins that use radio-frequency identification technology to credit recyclers every time they toss in a bottle; pressure-sensitive floors in the homes of older people that can detect the impact of a fall and immediately contact help; cellphones that store health records and can be used to pay for prescriptions.

These are among the services dreamed up by industrial-design students at California State University, Long Beach, for possible use in New Songdo City, a large "ubiquitous city" being built in South Korea.

A ubiquitous city is where all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental and the like) share data, and computers are built into the houses, streets and office buildings. New Songdo, located on a man-made island of nearly 1,500 acres off the Incheon coast about 40 miles from Seoul, is rising from the ground up as a U-city.

Although there are other U-city efforts in South Korea, officials see New Songdo as one apart. "New Songdo will be the first to fully adapt the U-city concept, not only in Korea but in the world," said Mike An via an e-mail message. Mr. An is the chief project manager of the Incheon Free Economic Zone Authority, the government agency overseeing the project.

In the West, ubiquitous computing is a controversial idea that raises privacy concerns and the specter of a surveillance society. (They'll know whether I recycled my Coke bottle?!) But in Asia the concept is viewed as an opportunity to show off technological prowess and attract foreign investment.

"Korea has gathered the world's attention with its CDMA and mobile technologies," Mr. An wrote, referring to digital cellular standards. "Now we need to prepare ourselves for the next market," which he said was radio-frequency identification, or RFID, and for U-cities. South Korea's Ministry of Information and Communication has earmarked $297 million to build an RFID research center in New Songdo. Fulfilling this ambition, to a large degree, resides with John Kim, a 35-year-old Korean-American who leads New Songdo's U-city planning. Mr. Kim is vice president for strategy at New Songdo City Development, a joint venture of the Gale Company, an American developer, and POSCO E&C, a subsidiary of South Korea's giant steel company.

Mr. Kim, formerly a design leader at Yahoo, said the city's high-tech infrastructure will be a giant test bed for new technologies, and the city itself will exemplify a digital way of life, what he calls "U-life."

"U-life will become its own brand, its own lifestyle," Mr. Kim said. It all starts with a resident's smart-card house key. "The same key can be used to get on the subway, pay a parking meter, see a movie, borrow a free public bicycle and so on. It'll be anonymous, won't be linked to your identity, and if lost you can quickly cancel the card and reset your door lock."

Residents will enjoy "full videoconferencing calls between neighbors, video on demand and wireless access to their digital content and property from anywhere in Songdo," he said.

Whether it lives up to its billing as an exportable city of the future - its critics fear another planned-city disappointment like Brazil's capital, Brasilia - New Songdo will most likely be a chance to study the large-scale use of RFID, smart cards and sensor-based devices even as Western societies lag in this next wave of computing.

"There are really no comparable comprehensive frameworks for ubiquitous computing," said Anthony Townsend, a research director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif., and a former Fulbright scholar in Seoul. "U-city is a uniquely Korean idea."

New Songdo, a free-enterprise zone where English will be the lingua franca, is often called the largest private real-estate development in the world. When completed in 2014, it is estimated that this $25 billion project will be home to 65,000 people and that 300,000 will work there. Amenities will include an aquarium, golf course, American-managed hospital and preparatory schools, a central park (like New York's), a system of canals (like Venice's) and pocket parks (like Savannah's), a self-described patchwork of elements gleaned from other cities. People from Seoul and other crowded South Korean cities are already applying for apartments, and planners are counting on luring attractive businesses.

The technology infrastructure will be built and managed by Songdo U-Life, a partnership of New Songdo City Development and the South Korean network integrator LG CNS, which is recruiting foreign information-technology companies as partners. "This is a profit-generating model, unlike other U-city projects," Mr. Kim said. "Songdo U-Life will charge building owners for facilities management and act as a gateway to services. Our partners will test market services that require, say, wireless data access everywhere or a common ID system, without having to build anything themselves." More philosophically, "New Songdo sounds like it will be one big Petri dish for understanding how people want to use technology," said B. J. Fogg, the director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. If so, it is an experiment much easier to do in Asia than in the West. "Much of this technology was developed in U.S. research labs, but there are fewer social and regulatory obstacles to implementing them in Korea," said Mr. Townsend, who consulted on Seoul's own U-city plan, known as Digital Media City. "There is an historical expectation of less privacy. Korea is willing to put off the hard questions to take the early lead and set standards." Two things Mr. Kim insists on are that U-life will not be used to test "junk" and that the digital services will be designed around people's needs rather than around the technology. "We'll be doing marketing and ethnographic research, digging deeper," he said. As part of that research, Mr. Kim asked the Cal State students to submit ideas for U-life. While New Songdo's publicity material states that it seeks to avoid the "stressful flaws that compromise" existing cities, Mr. Townsend says he doubts that it will be able to emulate the creative energy of, say, Seoul. "Will it really be a place where people want to experiment?" he asked. South Korea perceives an economic imperative in the answer. "Korea has a very strong I.T. industry, but our other economic sectors are not so good," said Geunho Lee, a senior research fellow at the Korea U-City Forum, a public-private group involved in supporting U-city projects across the country. "We need to test the business validity of these services in order to generate new value and economic growth."

The ability to do such vast market testing is enviable, said Dr. Fogg, of Stanford. "This is a competitive advantage for the Koreans," he said. "They will know before anyone else what flies." "But I foresee that many services will fail," he added. "That's the nature of experimentation. They should be prepared for the frailties of human nature to emerge."

June 14, 2005

INCHEON, South Korea and NEW YORK, June 14 /PRNewswire/ -- New Songdo City Development, LLC (NSC), a joint venture between U.S. based The Gale Company, one of the world's largest privately held commercial real estate companies, and Korea's POSCO E&C, a subsidiary of Korea's giant steel company, announced today that it had signed an MOU with LG CNS to establish "Songdo U-Life, LLC," a joint venture which will play a key role in constructing a U-city in New Songdo City, Incheon, South Korea.

A unique "U-City," or ubiquitous city, a futuristic city where households, schools, offices, streets and buildings are connected through a seamless IT infrastructure, is to be created starting this year, in New Songdo City, Incheon, South Korea.

The signing ceremony was held at the New Songdo City Marketing Center in Incheon with the participation of NSC President and CEO, John B. Hynes, III and LG CNS CEO Byung-Chul Jung, among others. At the ceremony NSC and LG CNS agreed to establish "Songdo U-Life, LLC" with the goal of realizing an unprecedented large-scale, cutting-edge ubiquitous computing environment.

The scope of the project will be approximately $1 billion U.S., until 2014, to construct and manage a ubiquitous computing infrastructure in the new city's households, schools, hospitals, and government offices, improving quality of life for residents and providing a highly-advanced digital environment for tenant companies.

Songdo U-Life, LLC will introduce a city development model that takes into account the overall process of constructing and operating a ubiquitous computing environment. Through organic connections to a central control center in charge of the integrated management and monitoring of diverse services, a wide range of services including facilities management, IT service, security and healthcare will be provided on a one-stop basis.

As telecom systems will be built from the ground up, redundant systems are eliminated, thus reducing overall costs to residents. In this way, residents can experience a ubiquitous computing environment at very reasonable prices.

As an integrated facilities management service provider, Songdo U-Life, LLC will provide ongoing maintenance services even after the ubiquitous computing infrastructure is in place. Songdo U-Life, LLC will create a consortium of IT companies including telecommunications companies, IT equipment providers, and Internet service providers. It offers a business model that can be exported, as its expansion guidelines are easy to achieve in the new city development market both at home and abroad. Songdo U-Life, LLC plans to attract investors by forming a consortium comprised mainly of service partners, while developing additional profit models through its operation. This new joint venture is expected to help attract not only the interest of global IT companies, but also anchor tenants for the International Business District.

Unlike other U-city projects, the U-Life business model also has the distinction of being a profit-generating model. It is not focused solely on the technological aspects; rather, it is a well-considered and viable business model. Additionally, a portion of the revenue generated will be invested into public projects that will benefit the citizens of Songdo.

The Songdo U-Life project will create employment and will act as a driving force to attract global IT companies to New Songdo City. It will contribute to positioning Korea as a true IT power in the rapidly changing economic environment of Northeast Asia.

The CEO of LG CNS, Byung-Chul Jung, said, "The project to be pursued by Songdo U-Life, LLC in Songdo's International Business District is the establishment of a completely new city from the ground up. The ubiquitous computing environment to be offered by LG CNS and NSC is a complete business model, which combines a solid infrastructure and a future-oriented management service, and we plan to establish this model as Korea's new IT product in the global market.

NSC President John B. Hynes, III said, "A number of companies will participate in creating the necessary IT infrastructure, developing the contents and systems for the Songdo U-Life Project. The project will serve as a way to attract multinational corporations and foreign investment." He added, "We are pleased to be working with LG CNS, an IT service provider which boasts forward-looking initiatives and outcomes in new business models integrating IT and existing industries, based on its IT technology which has led Korea's informatization on the government and corporate level. The NSC Board of Directors has given John Kim, Vice President of Strategy, the mandate to lead the joint venture initiative, and I am confident that his prior work experience in Silicon Valley will serve him well in this new endeavor."

Examples of services to be provided by U-Life

Residents
Major services

• - Integrated facility management
  
• - Concierge-type IT service
  
• - Security
  
• - Healthcare
  
  Major facilities
  
• - Wired and wireless integrated network
  
• - Digital home system
  
• - Intelligent building system
  U-Life Service Providers
• - U-Life portal system
  
• - Facility management system
  
• - Integrated payment system
  
• - Data center
  
• - Digital information system
  
• - U-healthcare system
  
• - U-education system
  
• - Smart card system
  
  New Songdo City

  New Songdo City, "The Gateway to Northeast Asia," has been designated a Free Economic Zone, which provides significant tax incentives for corporations and residents. The International Business District (IBD) of New Songdo City is being built on 1,500 acres of reclaimed land along Incheon's waterfront at a cost of $20 billion. The IBD, which broke ground November, 2004, will eventually include fifty million square feet of office space, thirty million square feet of residential space, ten million square feet of retail, five million square feet of hotel space and ten million square feet of public space. Every conceivable cultural, recreational and technological amenity will be available including a world class hospital, a Central Park and a Jack Nicklaus golf course. Two international K-12 preparatory schools are being developed in conjunction with HAG, Milton Academy and ISS.

  LG CNS

  LG CNS is Korea's top information technology service provider, leading the way in the informatization of companies and the government. Based on its vast experience and advanced technology, it has strategically fostered the U-Life project which requires concentration of capabilities for high-tech city projects, including an intelligent transport system (ITS), intelligent building system (IBS), home networks and smart card systems.