After a lot of travel which resulted in slow blogging I have some important news regarding LIFT Asia. We have a location, a theme, a format, and partners!

^{Picture from a recent trip to Jeju University}

• JEJU
it will be Jeju. We decided to hold the conference on the island because it is really the most beautiful place there is (you will like the view on the pacific from the rest area, breath taking). It is one hour from Seoul - so we will ask you to travel a bit more - but it is worth it.

• BEYOND BORING BROWSERS
We want to have a main theme for the event, and we want to ask a simple question: what happens beyond the browser? Where will the next revolutions come from? Robots? Mobile? Ubiquitous computing? Virtual worlds? We will explore many of these fields with diverse points of views from all over the world, with a focus on Asian speakers of course. Robert Scoble, Jan Chipchase and Dan Dubno have already saved the dates and will be with us.

• FORMAT
We pushed the date one day (4-6 instead of 3-5 of Sept.) because we want to use less week-days and facilitate the life of those who will have to take some time off to attend. We will have seven sessions, an open afternoon (dedicated to workshops, discussions, demos, etc...), two evenings and time for cultural activities as there are tons of things to see on the island.

• PARTNERS
We already have five partners! The Jeju University, Jeju Knowledge Industry Promotion Agency, Daum of course, and the geneva based WattWatt and Alptic who will travel to the other side of the world with us to make the conference happen.

Mike Walsh is the author of 'Futuretainment' and runs Tomorrow, an Asia focused digital media research business.

This is a review of a talk he gave on Digital Media Consumers in Asia at the recent O'Reilly Etech conference:
http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/2008/03/futuretainment_the_as...

There is more information and videos here:
www.TheTomorrowCompany.com/keynotes.html

Just a wee bit concerned that the themes mentioned, and the speakers named so far, could very easily talk only about the world as seen from Europe and the US - that is, that the conference could be in Asia, and yet not reflect Asia. Asian consumers are driving industries like gaming, building new models like QQ Gold, etc, which will soon be influencing the West if they're not already. At the same time, Asian governments are pioneering the art of fine-grained control and censorship, Asian dissidents are using cyber-protest, and online group bullying and group-think are more evident and widespread than in the West.... or so it seems...

I love all the themes you've mentioned so far; perhaps they'll be covering the topics I mentioned, but I didn't see that there was any specifically Asian content, so just thought I'd flag it up!

Cheers,

Emlyn

After a lot of travel which resulted in slow blogging I have some important news regarding LIFT Asia. We have a location, a theme, a format, and partners!

^{Picture from a recent trip to Jeju University}

• JEJU
it will be Jeju. We decided to hold the conference on the island because it is really the most beautiful place there is (you will like the view on the pacific from the rest area, breath taking). It is one hour from Seoul - so we will ask you to travel a bit more - but it is worth it.

• BEYOND BORING BROWSERS
We want to have a main theme for the event, and we want to ask a simple question: what happens beyond the browser? Where will the next revolutions come from? Robots? Mobile? Ubiquitous computing? Virtual worlds? We will explore many of these fields with diverse points of views from all over the world, with a focus on Asian speakers of course. Robert Scoble, Jan Chipchase and Dan Dubno have already saved the dates and will be with us.

• FORMAT
We pushed the date one day (4-6 instead of 3-5 of Sept.) because we want to use less week-days and facilitate the life of those who will have to take some time off to attend. We will have seven sessions, an open afternoon (dedicated to workshops, discussions, demos, etc...), two evenings and time for cultural activities as there are tons of things to see on the island.

• PARTNERS
We already have five partners! The Jeju University, Jeju Knowledge Industry Promotion Agency, Daum of course, and the geneva based WattWatt and Alptic who will travel to the other side of the world with us to make the conference happen.

Marc spends his time between academic work (China and technology), consulting (telecommunication) and pro bono activities. He talks about "Mobile In Asia" and explains how, for the first time in history, a technology is more used in the developing world than in the developed world.

Gen Kanai is the head of Mozilla in Japan. He talks about open source in Asia, and the perception that Asia is contributing less to open source projects than other parts of the world.

3 persons, 3 stories of Asia and telecommunication

Researcher Marc Laperrouza first opened our view of telecommunication in Asia, leaving aside USA’s conception about it. He assured now days there are 2.5 billion of mobile phone users in the world, and that this number will soon surpass the one of computers, this because it is obviously cheaper and the applications are increasing very fast.
China was his main topic, and while talking about it, he expressed several points about how this country in specific has become mobile-phone dependant, here he brought out information like 2 of the biggest mobile operators being Chinese, or that 33 million short messages are sent each month, or the concern of the government for not keeping aside of the technology. He also assured that future on mobile technology would actually be the countryside.

After this it was Heewon Kim’s turn, who focused in the networked society (mainly teenagers) and the changes it has had in Korea, witch has changed from having a community culture to a more individual one.

As example she referred to CYWORLD, this is a website where people can put personal stuff in and personalize it as they want, at first it sounded kind of normal, but when we got to know that around the 78% of the population see their site every day became a little more serious. This website happens to be the most recurrent, but there are a lot more of this kind, that give an auto-satisfaction to users in their everyday life, and an almost synchronized communication between friends in real-time life.

And to close we got Gen Kanai to talk about open sources and the development of Mozilla in Asia. Who’s basic question was why didn’t Asians contributed with open sources?
The fact is Asian people use open source very much but they don't contribute because of 3 main barriers: culture, language and education.

Why we invited Heewon to LIFT
She is Korean, doing anthropological research on how Asians use certain technologies (social software, virtual worlds). Her knowledge of these local markets is invaluable to us. It helps us understand what is happening there. Asia is to many of us a mysterious place where we do not really know how to apprehend things because of language/cultural barriers.

What is Heewon going to talk about?
As a speaker in the glimpse of Asia track, Heewon Kim will address trends and in particular with respect to how teenagers use social software in Korea.

Official biography
Heewon Kim is a researcher at the Center for Youth and Cultural Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, specializing in social software and online environments. Before working at Yonsei, she worked as a researcher for several companies such as Daum Communications and NCSOFT.
See Heewon's LIFT Profile to learn more about her enlightening work.

Why we invited Marc
Marc is a man of many talents who wears several hats. We are interested in Marc's observations as a Senior Research Associate at Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral Lausanne (EPFL) specialized in Telecommunication in Asia.

What is Marc going to talk about?
Marc will share with us his perspective on the latest Asian trends in Telecommunication. Many of us in Europe are clueless about this.

Official biography
Marc is currently working as a post-doc at the EPFL - Management of Network Industries (MIR). His research focuses on the coherence between institutional and technological governance in infrastructures. Marc obtained his PhD on China's telecommunication reforms from the London School of Economics' Information Systems Department.

Learn more about Marc on his LIFT Profile.

Bruce Sterling's presentation at LIFT evening Korea on Industrial Products And Ubiquity. Bruce talks about sustainable design, recycling, total life-cycle management, tags, radio-frequency identity, search engines, locative media, computer fabricators, industrial design, user records, metadata. web commerce and ubiquitous computing in the service of sustainability.