Where The Hell Am I?: liquor

Friday, October 16, 2009

Counterfeit Whiskey Detectors in Korean Cell Phones

A wee bit of a mistake happened over at The Next Web Asia blog. My editor posted this piece but somehow linked to the source and is unable to fix it.

Just so that this is forever exhiled to the back page never to be found again, I'm posting it here.

The Next Web Asia is a new blog in The Next Wave family of blogs. It just went live this week. You can check out my contributions here (well, for the article below, as I explained, you can't due to a mistake.)

Counterfeit Whiskey Detectors in Korean Cell Phones

If you keep up with mobile phone technology, it’s pretty well-known that South Korea is high on the list of the most advanced nations. There is massive competition between the three carriers: SK Telecom, KTF, and LG Telecom. That keeps the industry innovating to leech customers away from the competition. That benefits the consumer. You can get a signal just about anywhere including when you’re up on the ski slopes or underground in the subway. The phones are sturdy, functional and, in many cases, multilingual. Plus, your average Korean citizen is very used to using the extended features from text messages to banking.

If you’ve been to or lived in Korea for any amount of time, you know that it’s a drinking culture. It’s expected that when your boss says “let’s go have dinner and drinks” to the staff that they go and that they drink, to excess (if the boss drinks to excess). Like many vibrant economies, there is also a love of status objects, including expensive brand name liquors.

That means you’ve got a group of people more than willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money for their expensive booze. In response, there is an industry of fake brand name liquor that has developed to rip these people off.

The problem for the South Korean government is that people taken in by this fraud aren’t paying the taxes levied on genuine brand name bottles of booze. To solve this problem, the South Korean National Tax Service is adding another level of functionality to the Korean cell phone. They’re going to have detectors that can verify whether a bottle of expensive whiskey is legit or not. The detectors are scheduled to be put into use this month. I think it’s pretty clever to craft the solution around a piece of technology that everyone in Korea uses.
This is how the detectors will solve this problem:

The plan is to attach RFID chips that contain production history data to whiskey bottles, so that anyone with a cellphone can use a plug-in scanner (which is to be stored in major bars and pubs) to see if the costly bottle of liquor he is about to order is real or bogus. National Tax Services is rolling this out to make sure they are collecting liquor taxes to the fullest. They are starting with 2 million bottles of whiskey.

Now I’m not sure who exactly gets busted here. I’m assuming it’s got to be the establishment or the liquor distributor. If someone knows what’s supposed to happen when a fake bottle is detected, let me know.

News release from the Hankyoreh (한겨레) website (in Korean): “너 가짜양주지?” 휴대전화로 판별

Source: Web 2.0 Asia

(yes, the code is still buggy...skip the "read more" link)

Constipated? Have a Beer ...With Fiber!

Hite's exfeel-s photographed on an unidentified toliet (picture lifted from ZenKimchi)

Update: July 25, 2007 @ 1:08pm

A review of said fibrous beer from ZenKimchi himself: S-Hite it's Hite-S

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Here is a great picture of Hite's exfeel-s beer. This is a new low calorie beer that has fiber. This is one step down from the low calorie Hite Exfeel. Yes, I said fiber. Here is the slogan:

Stylish Beer With Fiber

It's marketed as a beer that has dietary fiber to help you loose weight. However, folks can get a little stopped up in the Land of the Morning Calm.

This is true. I once worked at a camp where what they fed the kids was horrible. The camp was run by young people who, well, had not a clue about nutrition. So it was rice, meat, sodas, candy, yogurt, sweet breads and goodness knows what else but nothing healthy with fiber. We tried to tell them this couldn't be sustained over three weeks, but who were we? Clearly, just silly foreigners.

I can't blame it all on the camp, however, they WE'RE the ones responsible for the students. However, we were on a college campus and the meals were being provided by the school's cafeteria. You'd think the people there would have brought up the fact that what they were serving wasn't a healthy diet. However, clearly, being paid was the objective and sod actually providing healthy meals. Well, after a week or so a kid had to be taken to the local hospital to be, um, unstopped up.

If this is happening with children, then you know adults have this problem too. The solution: beer with fiber! I mean who would actually want to eat, um, veggies and grains? What about a balanced diet and exercise to loose weight? Nah...beer. Beer with fiber! That's the ticket. (Sorry, I just can't turn the sarcasm off this morning.)

Anyway, only if paid enough money and being already quite drunk would I try this. However, maybe some of the braver souls over at RateBeer.com will. I'll update this blog if they do.

ZenKimchi's blog from a few days back: Beer That Makes You Poo and MORE

Oh, The Chosun Ilbo has an article highlighting products to suit consumers’ wishes. This includes items such as a Hite beer (called “S”) that has extra dietary fiber. They claim that it’s to help people lose weight. But we all know how it will accomplish the task.

And it’s too much of the stars aligning just right that they are planning to call it “S,” as in “S Hite.”

So now, literally, “Hite makes you shite.”

...

Oh, Korea just cracks me up sometimes.

I'll stick with my Hoegaarden for now (it's about the best white beer you can find at most bars here) or the Shepherd Neame Bishops Finger (can you believe my former vicar turned me on to this brew? I love that story.)