Greetings from Korea, land of  innovation in chips and ‘cinos (as in cappuccino, frappucino, and now the exciting new sweet-potato-cino). I confess I didn’t venture to try this; my time in Asia this week is more focused on the innovations in the emergence of Anywhere than in beverages.

Due to the advanced state of play in Korea and Japan in mobile technology, I have been lucky to get a taste of some exciting developments. More on those insights later. Sometimes, however, the lessons you learn as an analyst may not be the ones that were intended. Several visits to technology R&D centers around Seoul today provide a great example.

Here’s the scene: you arrive at the gatehouse of the campus, and there you register your laptop, cellphone, portable storage drives, music player, and any other technology you happen to have with you and are foolish enough to produce at the counter. (One gentleman registered a large curved piece of smooth black plastic sheathed in bubble-wrap.) Once all the serial numbers are dutifully recorded manually on carbon forms (after a gentle but protracted debate about which of the many long numbers on the base of your PC is the device’s serial number), a beautifully dressed and exceedingly polite hostess then begins the laborious process of applying security stickers to your laptop.

Each orifice of your device – representing potential egress of the company’s proprietary IP, or ingress of some malevolent threat – is taped over. Small ports get small stickers, CD bays get larger stickers. Thus baptized, your laptop is returned and you proceed to your meetings. In theory, you will present it for re-inspection on your departure, allowing the hostesses to verify, very politely, that none of the stickers now says “VOID”, indicating that you disturbed it during your visit.

I say in theory, because in point of fact my own laptop was never examined when I left, nor was the USB drive that had been equally carefully packaged in a special plastic bag with a similar security seal. As with many security procedures, it doesn’t take much to render them toothless; the best concepts can fail in imperfect implementation.

Throughout today’s sticker application, I kept trying to visualize how we will put stickers on all the devices and things that could harm us in the Anywhere Network of the future. As the network expands and devices that use it proliferate, we are sowing the seeds of a massive new security problem; see my interview with Ken Silva here.

I’m wishing I’d tried the sweet-potato-cino. Maybe on my next visit.