From TechCentral:

China’s first novel delivered through SMS (short message service) is being made into a film that will also be delivered to cellphones and on the Internet, state media said Sunday.

The Taiwan-based company Bestis Technologies has bought the film rights to Outside the Fortress Besieged, a 4,200-character, 60-chapter novel that has been sent out to mobile subscribers in short installments, Xinhua news agency said.

South Korean mobile operator SK Telecom previewed a file-sharing application for cell phones this week that will let users swap files, including ring tones, music and videos over its 3G (third-generation) network.

The application will create a peer-to-peer network among SK Telecom’s subscribers, allowing them to freely swap files such as pictures, ring tones, music or video files, said Lee Jou Young, a developer at IXO Logic, one of two companies developing the application for SK Telecom.

Users will also be able to access files stored on PCs, he said.

At present, the application doesn’t include any functions that are designed to protect against copyright infringement or to manage a subscriber’s right to use copyrighted material, Lee said.

“We’re not thinking about that type of problem,” he said.

Wow. A country where the tech industry doesn’t ask the content industry for permission to innovate. Imagine that.

Time to start learning Korean…

Watching TV on your phone seems to be a hit in Korea:

The leading company in movie services is KTF Co., Ltd., Korea’s second largest service provider. The company commenced its service called “Fimm” (First in Mobile Multimedia) in May 2002 and attracted 3.405 million users as of May 2004. Its rival, SK Telecom, the top service provider in Korea, developed “June,” its movie contents service developed exclusively for 1xEV-DO, and obtained more than 2.645 million users.

The firms say that particularly popular contents are terrestrial TV programs encoded for mobile phones. “Such contents account for 40% of our total movie contents sales,” according to KTF media contents team senior Sohn Chang Hwa.