Alexa Andrzejewski of Adaptive Path compiled some of the best ideas she has heard at Lift Asia in a blog post. She wrote a nice recap of the most important things that have been said:

[...] ON VISUALIZATION: By capturing and visualizing multiple streams of real-time data, we are able to show what IS happening rather than what WAS happening, prompting questions we didn’t know we had. (Stamen)

ON THE PROBLEMS WITH CASH: With cash-based systems, it’s the poorest people, those who take little bits from the ATM at the time, who bear the highest transaction costs. (David Birch) [...]

ON SUSTAINABILITY: What if devices were made to be worn IN not out, feel like an investment that’s made to last, age gracefully and have timeless features? (Raphael Grignani) [...]

ON ROBOTS: If we have a limited vision of what robots should be, our ability to create robots will be limited. The debate about humanoid vs. non-humanoid robots is moot — there’s room in the taxonomy for all kinds of robots. The most evolutionary robots will be “Homo Robotus:” Robots that are a part of a person, amplifying the person’s body and mind. (Bruno Bonnell)

ON ENVISIONING THE FUTURE: The ability to create unconstrained visions of the future lives within us all. To tap into it, we must escape from the fetters of legacies, assumptions and technology-driven innovation. We must return to the wonderful world of make believe. (From my talk on “Experiencing the Future Through Make Believe” during the Open Afternoon)

Link

You can now ask for a Lift09 press pass if you are a journalist or blogger, and try to win one of the twenty free students ticket if you are lucky enough to still be at the university (i.e. away from the gloomy economical situation ;)

The first Lift Asia talks are here! We start with Bruce Sterling's though-provoking presentation that dealt with how virtual money systems are the financial services for the new urban poor.

Check the revamped and clearer video page, and subscribe to our videos feed (also available on iTunes) to have the latest Lift talks delivered to your door!

Here we go again! The Lift09 homepage is up, and the theme is announced: where did the future go? Where are the flying cars and home robots we were promised a few decades ago? What can we learn from these unfulfilled promises, and what has really changed?

We can already proudly announce that the legendary Vint Cerf, considered by many to be the "father of the internet", will be with us alongside a bunch of great speakers and artists. Grab one of the 50 super early bird tickets before it's too late, and see you in Geneva in February!

The Talk2Man guys did a really cool video capturing the ambiance of the conference. It's in Korean but if you could not attend check it our nevertheless, it will give oyu an idea of what happened 2 weeks ago in Jeju!

Talk2Man Episode #11_talk2man in LIFT ASIA08 Part_1 from Talk2Man on Vimeo.

Dear Lifters,
I need a home-base in Geneva and am looking for a cohab / room / studio / small flat, ideally from +/- Nov. 1st
- centrally located, not too noisy
- ideally unfurnished & temporary unlimited
- charming (& old building) style

If you know of something or can give me any hints please let me know, thank you very much :)
sylvie@liftconference.com

As you know LIFT has an alliance with the organizers of PICNIC, one of the most inspiring European event which brings together and disseminates the ideas and knowledge of the world's best creators and innovators. PICNIC spotlights cutting-edge products and services at the intersection of media, technology, arts and entertainment, and brings together entrepreneurs, investors, creators as well as scientists, and other industry leaders.

At PICNIC you can do more than pick up new ideas and network with your peers. Save the world.. Create a new service.. Experience new tools... Find a business partner.. Admire the arts.. Get inspired..And of course party with Europe's digital elite.

The main theme of PICNIC08 is "Collaborative Creativity" in its many guises. PICNIC will look at new and connected forms of intelligence and creativity, from the fields of entertainment, science, the arts and business. Speakers include Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Charles Leadbeater, Stefano Marzano and more. Take a look at the PICNIC site for more details: picnic08.com

Members of the Lift community can register for a discounted PICNIC 08 ticket. Use code 271815 when registering via picnicnetwork.org/tickets and you will receive an immediate discount of 10% on the regular entry price of any ticket.

Note: The conference starts on the 24th and I will be speaking or moderating a panel there. Not sure yet, just like Lift PICNIC is a moving thing and it changes very fast. But I'll be there!

We had two photographers who took "official" photos of Lift Asia 08: Laurent Bolli of Bread and butter (the cool design boutique who also handled the Lift branding and production) and Amy Killoren. Both are uploading their photos to flickr and you can see them on flickr.com/photos/liftconference

So far there are two sets: one with general pictures of the ambiance, and one with pictures of the participants. More is coming soon, Laurent still had hundreds of pictures he is working on.

And there are hundreds of pictures made by the participants and tagged lift asia 08 on flickr.com/photos/tags/liftasia08.

If you do not live in a cave you have probably heard of that one of the most ambitious science project ever has been turned on this week by the CERN. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is getting ready to recreate the conditions that existed one second after the big band. Why? What are we looking for? What might be discovered?

Check Brian Cox's Lift07 speech to get some answers! He's a rock start turned scientist, and gave one of the best Lift speech ever.

For more videos liftconference.com/videos as usual. The Lift Asia talks are coming in 10 days normally, I saw some previews and they look really good!

Hanna Cho's note from the session about the "Virtual Money" at LIFT Asia. The first speaker, David Birch, an economist gave his perspective on the future of digital currency, he was followed by science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling.

So, let's start with Hanna's notes about David Birch's presentation:

"The economy is going cashless. Big technological changes mean big changes in the way money works. To understand the future of money, it's useful to look at the "paleo-future" of money; one example is Edward Bellamy's conceptualizations of things like the first 'credit card'.

Looking forward, we need to understand the way real-life cash works, and what its implications are. Cash imposes the highest transaction costs on the poorest people. Cash costs too much.

For example, think about a 5 pound banknote. Where are those 5 pounds? The note is really an interest-free loan to the British gov't. Hence, the go'vt is happy when the notes are in circulation. Hence, the person who issues the currency, is quite vested in the protection of the printing and circulation of that money. So when we consider that 2/3rds of USD are never going to be repatriated, other US Govt is understandably quite happy. But now, it's changing as euros are replacing dollars as dominant currency of use.

Regional examples in Asia and Africa are illuminating when we think about the future of virtual money. In Asia, there are over 40million mobile wallet users. this has accomplished the important task of opening a mental space for the possibility of using technologies like this, and demonstrating that consumers have no problem using their mobiles instead of money and plastic.

In Latin America, shops have replaced banks as the place where monetary transactions take place.

In Africa, we see that, given the opportunity to use the phone instead of traditional cash modes, people will. Indeed, sending each other, or oneself Kenyan shillings by SMS is extremely commonplace now. Mobile phone minutes become the mode of transferring cash.

So all of this makes me think, an interesting experiment might be to give people completely free choice in how and what kind of currency they utilize, it could inject liquidity and produce

Calling these things real vs. virtual gives me real problems. For example, if the gold standard hasn't been used since 1932, why is it 'virtual' to use WoW gold? What's the difference? This also underlines how the future of money is conceptualized in quite a lazy manner.

It's complicated to sort these different options and currency exchanges as humans, but if we were to leave it up to our mobile phones, it would be less so. To be sure, there are no universals but there is one constant throughout these different regions - the mobile phone. So, we need to think about the mobile when talking about virtual money.

Overall, there are going to be winners and losers when we talk about virtual money.

The Winners are easy to spot. They are: Economic growth / Reduced crime /Reduced tax evasion / Banks AND *Poor people - they'd be the biggest winners. in a country like Kenya, getting a SIM enables cashless banking, and access to lowered transaction costs to poor people. the sheer security of that cashlessness cannot be overemphasized.

Losers:
This is harder to say. But definitely the Government. The money you earn from printing money is significant. So moving towards virtual money is something that the government is understandably less than enthusiastic about right now."

Then science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling took the floor (as a "resident big thinker at LIFT" as described by moderator Bruno Giussani):

"I like to write a lot about ubiquitous computing and I know that Korea is one of the big places for ubiquitous computing. But I got very interested in cellular phones, because I think they are the application of Ubiquitous Computing that isn't science fiction. But today, I want to talk about the poor world. 2 kinds of poverty. 1) people with no money 2) people who can't make money. Type 2 has no cure.

There used to be material poverty, with peasants and farming and land. That was the old poverty. Now we have 21st century poverty. This new poverty is urban. The peasants of the old are leaving and moving into cities. More than 1/2 of the world live in cities; the fastest growing cities are the poorest; Lagos, Mumbai, Sao Paolo.

But the poor have cellphones. People used to talk about the computer divide. The haves and have nots; the computer wealthy and the computer poor. there is no cellphone divide. it doesn't exist. people are surprised, even alarmed at how eager poor are to have cellphones. in india, the user base is expanding 6million a month. that's just an account. and families can use 1 account. illiterate people use cellphones. The poor in these cities, therefore, are not the old kind of poor. Like the rest of their urban counterparts, they're sophisticated.

In terms of virtual money, I think we're seeing the invention of an anti-bank, or even anti-money. Who is it that doesn't like cash?

The people this really matters to is the new urban poor; they are the stakeholders in the post-cash economy. There are 100s of millions of them, and they are young. What does this mean to Koreans? You're not a poor country. you're a rich sophisticated country. you're in the rich person's club, the OECD, etc. what you're interested in the uber broadband ubiquity money maybe with Cyworld spending money. but i suspect the country's contribution will be to north korea, which is full of poor people.

There is a a stark electronic contrast between North and South Korea. Will North Korea collapse? Yes. Their atomic bombs will collapse, and the regime will expand. When it collapses, who will go into NK? The Chinese? Russians? Japanese? The USA? No.

So I reason, if NK collapses, South Korea owns it. It's SK's problem. I know this doesn't sound very encouraging. if we see today's headlines, there's a currency crisis, etc. where will SK find the economic strength to bail out NK? Well, you're going to have to come up with an inventive post-collapse poverty solution. it's not going to be with existing money systems.

As soon as the regime collapses, North Koreans will get cellphones. And they will go to cities. RIght now, North Koreans are held in place. Unrestrained, they will go to your cities. You're going to have poor North Koreans in your cities.

Communist economy's are radically different to capitalist economies. There is very little there that is useful. It's actually actively BAD. You can't reform it; you just have to replace it. What has to happen in NK is going to be what happened here in South Korea since the 1950s. In NK will have to be one of the most rapid bootstraps.

Something radical and unheard of has to take place in order to absorb a society that is so backward and oppressed. Failure to think this through is going to result in shocked economies; So, South Korea must come up with a solution for this poverty. An electronic Korean solution for poverty.

This won't happen tomorrow; but this has to start being thought about, "What if my user was North Korean?" If you can solve this problem, it will have universal applications. Now, why do i think South Korea will do it? Because you've already done it - by taking a bleeding and torn society and turned it into a sophisticated and exciting society. Thank you."