Naver is investing $84.6 million (100 billion KRW) in future technologies such as robotics, Smart Home 411, electric cars, and others for 5 years hereafter.
CTO Song Chang Hyun of Naver appeared as a speaker for keynote speech at ‘DEVIEW’, which is a conference that was held at KOEX on the 14th for South Korean developers, and introduce project ‘BLUE’. Research subjects for project ‘Blue’ are ‘Robotics’, ‘Mobility’, and ‘Smart Home’, and its major goal is to establish new connected platform that also includes hardware (HW) that is related to real life.
“Laboratory for Naver technologies ‘Naver labs’ will work on converging software (SW) and HW that is related to real life, which are Naver’s strength in future technologies’ through project ‘BLUE’.” said CTO Song.
Naver’s ultimate goal in this project is to converge HW in daily lives with applied technology level and developers’ abilities such as deep learning, which is based on large-sized data that Naver has been accumulating, and establish Connected Platform that will enable global users to get convenience in daily lives. It is as Naver has declared expansion of its R&D to not only SW but also HW as well.
Naver is first investing $33.8 million (40 billion KRW) into robotics and it is going to develop its project along with Professor Dennis Hong, who is worldly-known robot engineer. It also said that it will be pushing for cooperation with domestic and foreign major universities and great scholars in related fields by also investing $33.8 million in mobility field such as Smart Cars, electric cars, and others. It also decided to invest $8.5 million separately in Smart Home 411 and other areas.
Not only did Naver labs decided to make South Korean technology scholars with top universities in foreign countries, but it also decided to establish a network where it can share related information such as trend of all sorts of technologies, employment, and others with researchers in those foreign countries.
“We are going to continue with innovated new technologies in global markets by cooperating with domestic and foreign research institutions and businesses that are in variety of HW fields such as mobility, robotics, Smart Home, and others. Due to this, we are planning to actively hire excellent talented people in South Korea and foreign countries.” said CTO Song.
Naver labs, which was established in 2011, succeeded in researching and developing sticker curation engine that was applied in Line Messenger, calling, translation, voice recognition, synthesized engine, deep learning technology, and others.
‘DEVIEW2015’ conference, which is held for the 8th time, was preceded with exhibition and announcement related to new trends such as robots, Big Data 78, search, tech startups, and others while about 2000 domestic and foreign developers were in attendance.
Staff Reporter Lee, Kyungmin | kmlee@etnews.com