The move is a major one for LivingSocial in many ways, establishing for the Washington, D.C., start-up a major beachhead in a key Asian country.

It is also the biggest of the nine acquisitions LivingSocial has made over the past year.

Ticket Monster’s name might well refer to the scary growth it has been experiencing. In the past year, Ticket Monster (known popularly in South Korea as TMon) has grown rapidly from virtually no revenues in May 2010, when it was founded, to $24 million last month.

It has more than 600 employees and offers roughly 60 deals a day to South Koreans. The company, which purchased Malaysia’s Integrated Methods in June, had also been preparing for an initial public offering.

For LivingSocial, which is the second-largest deals provider after Groupon, TMon will provide a critical home base in Asia, which has been historically difficult to enter for U.S.-based companies.

As Groupon has demonstrated, it can be both challenging and costly. LivingSocial is expected to follow Groupon and file for an IPO. Groupon runs its own division in South Korea.

So far, LivingSocial operates in a handful of Asian countries, including the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia, through acquisitions of Ensogo and DealKeren earlier this year. Once the deal is approved by South Korean regulators, LivingSocial will operate in 23 countries in total.

The similarities between TMon and LivingSocial are easy to spot.

In addition to daily deals, TMon has also rolled out specific niches targeting families, events and travel, as well as offering instant deals, which can be purchased and used in the same day. It also sells a variety of products, from books to handbags to other fashion goods, through flash sales.

Its general e-commerce capabilities may have also appealed to Amazon, one of LivingSocial’s major investors.

“They have been studying their favorite U.S.-based company for a bit now,” LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy joked.

More seriously, he added that LivingSocial has been having conversations with TMon for awhile.

“We like the team and how fast they’ve been able to innovate and grow beyond one business line into multiple business lines. They’ve done a lot of the same things we would have asked them to do,” he said.

Ticket Monster CEO Daniel Shin, who is a bit of an Internet star in South Korea, said the company has been modeled after both LivingSocial and Groupon.

“Obviously, we take a lot of best practices from around the world,” said Shin, who moved to the U.S. from South Korea when he was nine and returned in January as one of the company’s founders. “We started last May, and both LivingSocial and Groupon started earlier than that, so any learnings we could take away from them, we did.”

Shin declined to name Groupon as one of the other bidders, but said Ticket Monster was “contacted by a lot of different parties.”

The company raised $11 million in capital from Insight Venture Partners of New York and South Korea’s Stonebridge Capital.

O’Shaughnessy said it will likely continue to make acquistions as it expands globally.

“We’ve been pretty aggressive on that front,” he said.

Photo Credit: Ticket Monster.

This morning, agents from Seoul’s Metropolitan Police Agency (SMPA) descended on Google’s Yeoksam-dong offices as part of an investigation into whether the company has been illegally collecting consumer location data through its mobile ad platform.

“The raid was carried out to confirm the allegations that Google’s AdMob platform was used to collect data on individuals’ locations,” an SMPA official told The Korea Times.

This is the second time Google’s Seoul offices have been raided on suspicion of privacy violations in the past year. Last August the SMPA seized dozens of hard drives and documents related to the company’s Street View service, which was later determined to have violated South Korea’s law protecting telecommunications privacy.

[Image credit: Flickr/toughkidcst]

SK Telecom and KT, the country’s top carriers, have been forced to suspend online sales of the device after offering it for less than a week. The reason: Overwhelming demand.

“Our iPad 2 inventory has been depleted and we apologize for failing to provide enough supplies due to the product’s global supply shortages,” SK Telecom said in a note posted to its Web site.

Not much of a surprise, really, given the widespread stock-outs that followed the iPad 2′s launch and its generally constrained supply. As COO Tim Cook said during Apple’s first quarter earnings call in April, “The iPad has the mother of all backlogs, but we’re working very hard to get [it] out to customers as quickly as we can.”

But what if you’re a company who doesn’t always sell directly to your customer, but rather relies on a reseller who stands between you and the end customer? That’s a different dynamic entirely. And it may seem like an insignificant detail until you consider that there are more than $2 trillion worth of goods sold annually through indirect business-to-business sales relationships.

Companies tend to call these “channel sales,” or use some variation of that phrase to describe this aspect of their business. And it brings with it a level of complexity that’s different from conventional direct sales.

And as Mark Geene, the CEO of Channelinsight tells me, it’s a sector of sales that has yet to benefit from the kind of productivity gains that Salesforce.com and SAP have brought to direct sales. The company has created a cloud-based service that does two things: First it aggregates live data, including inventory and point-of-sale data provided by a network of some 5,000 business-to-business resellers, distributors and retailers. Then it combines that with some screening and analytics tools that can run either as a standalone application or as an add-on to Salesforce.com. You can see who bought your stuff, who the end customer was, whether or not incentives or other programs are working, and whether or not they have inventory in the right places given demand trends.

“Indirect sales have been sort of the stepchild of salesforce automation,” Geene told me. “It hasn’t benefited at all from the kinds of things that Salesforce and SAP have been doing.” Managing indirect sales is often a rather labor-intensive process involving a lot of time looking at spreadsheets. Channelinsight’s play is to automate that process.

It must be working. Customers include printer manufacturer Lexmark and the chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia, both of which sell a great deal into the channel, as well as the German industrial giant Siemens. That sounds like momentum.

Channelinsight just closed a $10 million Series C round led by Rho Ventures, with participation from Sevin Rosen Funds, Sequel Venture Partners and Vendanta Capital. Its total venture funding so far is $21 million. Paul Bartlett, a Rho Ventures Partner, is on Channelinsight’s board.

“Our expertise is in identifying and investing in companies that redefine the status quo,” Bartlett said in a statment. “Channelinsight fits this profile by reinventing the way channel sales are managed, saving companies millions of dollars in the process.”

Separately, Channelinsight said it added Ram Gupta, the former CEO of Cast Iron Systems, which IBM acquired last year, to its board of directors.

Geene is a former Oracle vice president who ran its mid-west sales, and has held senior management jobs at Tenfold and Dorado Software.

He told me one big problem companies often run into with indirect sales is screening for regulatory compliance–in particular the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which covers, among other things, bribery.

You may remember that last month IBM settled allegations by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it paid bribes to officials in China and South Korea during a period beginning in 1998 and ending in 2009. IBM never admitted to any wrongdoing, though as the SEC noted, the purpose of the payments was to “secure the sale of IBM products through IBM-Korea and LG-IBM’s business partners.” Hewlett-Packard had its own headache with bribery allegations in Russia last year.

This is the sort of thing that Channelinsight can help a company watch for, Geene said. “This is a big issue for any company that works with partners,” he said. “We screen every transaction that gets processed on our system, looking for red flags.” It also looks for instances where products might be sold indirectly via partners to countries that are subject to trade embargoes. This sort of screening is something that companies have till now generally had to manage manually with some sort of custom solution.

NHN Corp.–the owner of Naver, South Korea’s biggest Internet search engine by revenue–and Daum Communications Corp. called for the antitrust regulator to investigate their claims that Google is restricting local mobile service providers and Android smartphone manufacturers from preloading some mobile search window applications, including their own, on smartphones.

The companies also asked the regulator whether such a restriction constituted an unfair business practice.

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J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz figures Apple could rake in as much as $6 billion from CDMA iPhone sales through Verizon, and half that through carrier partners overseas, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.

“We expect the iPhone’s relative growth to moderate over time, but in the next 18-24 months, we see incremental growth opportunities in both Asia- Pacific and the U.S., specifically in CDMA-based networks,” he writes. “Apple just began to penetrate this opportunity with its Verizon iPhone launch in February, and we think that the incremental CDMA market penetration can be a multi-year phenomenon for the company.”

I’d say so, considering there are some 564 million CDMA subscribers worldwide, of which Verizon’s 95 million comprise just 17 percent. So where will Apple bring the CDMA iPhone next? Moskowitz thinks the company will focus its efforts where CDMA adoption rates are highest: China, India, Japan, and South Korea. And, in all likelihood, it’s probably close to hammering at least a few of these deals out.

Apple is widely rumored to be negotiating a CDMA iPhone deal with China Telecom. It’s also said to be in talks with Reliance and rival CDMA carrier Tata Teleservices in India. Assuming Apple finalizes some, if not all, of them in the next year, what kind of sales and revenue can we expect from them? Moskowitz expects Apple to sell 10 million CDMA iPhones through Verizon in calendar 2012 for $6 billion in revenues. Overseas, he expects the company to capture about 10 percent of the CDMA market in 2012, which would generate approximately $3 billion in revenue.

That’s a nice boost to Apple’s bottom line and to the iPhone’s growth trajectory, which may well continue to outpace that of the broader smartphone market–if Moskowitz’s numbers pan out.

[Image credits: iFixit and JP Morgan]

The official declined to say why SK Telecom, South Korea’s largest mobile carrier by revenue, might bid for Blockbuster, but the company has been seeking ways to broaden its business portfolio and tap new sources of growth overseas to overcome the limited opportunities to expand in one of the world’s most saturated and fiercely competitive telecom markets.

Market watchers were uncertain whether a successful bid would benefit SK Telecom, although some said that acquiring Blockbuster could provide a source of visual content for its mobile-service business.

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The purpose of the payments, the SEC said was to “secure the sale of IBM products through IBM-Korea and LG-IBM’s business partners,” referring to IBM units in South Korea and China. During the 1998 through 2003 it says IBM paid about $207,000 in bribes to officials of the South Korean government in cash, gifts, and travel and entertainment expenses and free computers. And from 2004 through early 2009 it “engaged in a widespread practice of providing overseas trips, entertainment and improper gifts to Chinese government officials.” The misconduct in China involved as many as 100 employees of IBM China, the SEC said. The actions constitute a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, the SEC says.

The payments described sound like they come straight out of a bad screenplay. In 1998, the SEC says, a territory manager for IBM-Korea met the head of operations for a South Korean government agency and gave him a shopping bag full for 20 million Korean won or about $19,000. Over time the same official received payments totaling about 80 million won or about $76,000 by 2001. What did IBM supposedly get in return? Designation as a preferred supplier for mainframe computers, and an agreement to place orders at higher prices.

In China, the SEC says IBM-China employees created what it describes as “slush funds” with local travel agencies that were used to pay the travel expense incurred by local government officials. Other slush funds, it says, were created with business partners to provide cash payments and gifts like cameras and notebook computers. The SEC says it found 114 instances where IBM-China employees and a travel agency created fake invoices to match approved travel requests but for trips that had nothing to do with legitimate business purposes. The trips were accounted for as “training services” on IBM-China’s books.

IBM just sent me the following statement: “IBM has agreed to settle an enforcement action with the US Securities and Exchange Commission relating to activities by employees of IBM Korea and IBM China during the period from 1998 through 2009. IBM insists on the highest ethical standards in the conduct of its business and requires all employees to follow its policies and procedures for conducting business.”

After reminding the nation that “South Korean homes now have greater Internet access than we do,” he went on to call for a national wireless broadband network.

Within the next five years, we’ll make it possible for businesses to deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless coverage to 98 percent of all Americans. This isn’t just about–(applause)–this isn’t about faster Internet or fewer dropped calls. It’s about connecting every part of America to the digital age. It’s about a rural community in Iowa or Alabama where farmers and small business owners will be able to sell their products all over the world. It’s about a firefighter who can download the design of a burning building onto a handheld device; a student who can take classes with a digital textbook; or a patient who can have face-to-face video chats with her doctor.

It’s the latest attempt by Obama to try to solve the difficult problem of broadband penetration in America. In many places, most of them rural areas with low population density, cable and telco companies can’t make back the investments required to build out network infrastructure, and so they don’t build at all. As I’ve said here before, for Americans in those places, the options for participating in the digital culture the rest of us take for granted are few, and it often means the difference between participating and not in so much of the daily discourse that occurs online.

Part of the answer lies in taking back some radio spectrum that’s used for other things. In June, Obama signed a memorandum calling for the freeing up of certain radio frequency spectrum in the 500 MHz range. This is a block of spectrum largely owned by TV broadcasters for free over-the-air TV transmission. Broadcasters have been under pressure–and so far they are resisting–to voluntarily give those licenses up so that the spectrum can be re-auctioned off.

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, essentially telegraphed that this is going to be the commission’s major policy priority in comments at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month. He has said he’d like to offer broadcasters incentives to give up their spectrum, but this would require a new law passed by Congress, and those in Congress have their own ideas about how this should be done. You can expect a lot of debate about this in Washington this year, but probably not a lot of progress.