is U-biquitous.. (big industry is testing the new systems for their own civilians..)
www.nytimes.com/2005/10/05...onnell.html
"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.