Google will set up an engineering center in Seoul, Korea on Oct. 10th. with the korean government. By signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU), the korean government supports $2m to set up R&D center of Google. And Google investigates at least $10m on the facility over the next two years. The korean government helps abroad enterprises to establish R&D center to import high technologies out of country.

You can read this news from Seoul to host $10 mil. Google R&D center(KoreaTimes), Google to set up local R&D center(KoreaHerald) and Google moves into South Korea(vunet).

For this agreement, Dr. Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice president of engineering visited in Korea. It was known that Google’s Korean lab will employ more than 130 researchers, but it’s not confirmed by Google. Google currently has a small Korean sales office at which around 10 employees handle the firm’s local online advertisement business. Most of Google’s Korean language services are created and maintained by engineers at its US headquarters.

Korean reporters expected Google’s thought for korean market, but Dr. Alan Eustace didn’t explain detail plans for technical projects and business outlines. So most of them were very disappointed on press conference. Google has very weak market shares against local portal sites in Korea, but the investing news of global search giant shocked korean IT market. Some of people thought Google want to establish only engineering center not regularized invasion for korean.

Gigaom prospected Google seems to test video services in Korea related of recent acquisition of Youtube. In fact, it has been grown the user-generated video market in Korea.

Photos were brought from ITViewpoint