Calling for
2nd IT Boom
- Around 500 attend the event where 28 were presented with honor plaques for contribution to IT industry

The Ministry of Information and Communication held its 10-year founding anniversary as well as the New Year' reception on Jan.28 at the Lotte Hotel with the participation of people from related organizations led by MIC Minister Chin Dae-je.
Among the dignitaries present at the event were Deputy Prime Minister and Science-Technology Minister Oh Myung and former MIC ministers including Ahn Byung-yop, Namgoong Suk, Bae Soon-hoon and Kang Bong-kyun, among others. A number of lawmakers belonging to the National Assembly Science Technology Information and Communication Committee were also present at the annual event including Reps. Hong Chang-sun, Lee Jong-gol, Byun Jae-il, and Yom Dong-yon, all members of the ruling Uri Party and Reps.Suh Sang-ki, Shim Jae-yop, Kim Suk-joon, and Chin Young, all belonging to the opposition Grand National Party.
Business leaders included Cho Jong-nam, vice chairman of SK Telecom, Nam Joong-soo, president of KTF, Nam Yong, president of LG Telecom, Chung Hong-sik, president of Dacom, and Park Jong-woong, president of Powercom, among others.
Minister Chin, in his commemorative speech, said large and small firms, the government and the private sector should get together to set off the second IT boom in the country.
Deputy Prime Minister Oh, in his speech, said those 560,000 people in the IT industry worked hard with sweat to make the country to be a leading IT country that the world has been watching and asked them to lead a way to find a way out of the economic doldrums and put it back on track of growth by doing their best.
IT839 Strategy, a large-scale development scheme drawn up by the Ministry of Information and Communication is expected to trigger IT production worth 498 trillion won in 2008.
The state-funded Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute(ETRI) on Jan.14 made the rosy prediction for IT839, laid out last year. The ministry worked out the plan to find the nation's new growth engines in newly emerging areas such as digital TVs, radio tags and sophisticated robots.
The three digits in the name represents eight services, three infrastructures and nine equipment fields with high upside potential.
The ETRI projected that high-tech output would reach 289 trillion won in this year and 341 trillion won next year. The institute also added that the figure is likely to further balloon to 419 trillion won in 2007, 572 trillion won in 2009 and 642 trillion won in 2010. In line with such explosive growth rates, the IT field is projected to account for 13.3 percent of the nation's total industrial output this year, 17.2 percent in 2007 and 21.8 percent in 2010.
South Korean scientists have developed new-concept software that can pinpoint specific genes that cause various diseases, including cancers, by analyzing DNA chips. ETRI said Jan.17 its researchers headed by informatics team leader Park Seon-hee, made the breakthrough technology. "By studying actual clinical data in DNA chips, we established an architecture that can screen disease-causing genes through the analysis of the deluge of data in the chips," Park said.
She said the software tailored to search the exact gene regulatory region will help other scientists track problematic genes patients by inputting their experimental data inside DNA chips.
"Finding the specific genes that trigger diseases is the first step in genetic therapy. It is similar to identifying the target before hunting it down," she explained. Gene therapy is an emerging technique for correcting the genes that are responsible for disease by replacing, augmenting or eliminating the missing or defective genes.
Genes, the basic physical and functional units of therapy, are the sequences of bases that encode instructions on how to produce proteins.
Although genes receive the most attention, proteins perform most of life's functions and many genetic disorders actually occur when the gene-encoded proteins fall to function normally. nw