Bruce Sterling, science-fiction and tech journalist - and Lift's "big thinker in residence" - talks about the implications of money digitization. His though-provoking presentation deals with how virtual money systems are the financial services for the new urban poor.

"When you are working on cell phones, when you are working on the web, when you are working on electronic money and payment systems, you need to think: What if my user is a North-Korean"

How would I do this differently if I knew my user was from Pyongyang, that his regime had collapsed, that his economy had collapsed, he was completely bewildered, and he had never seen a cell phone or a computer in his life, and I intended to make him a productive and happy fellow citizen in ten years, what kind of technology would I give that person, what kind of trading system, economic system?”

After Octopus sashimi and rotten pink fish, I had live shrimps yesterday night as this video will show.

If you travel to Lift Asia be sure to ask a Korean friend to take you to a sashimi place, it is a really unique experience you will never forget, plus it is good and healthy!

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

Heewon Kim addresses the trends in web usage in South Korea, and focuses in particular on how teenagers use social software in the world's most wired country.

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.

Adam opening opened the conference with a great talk about how cities are now becoming read/write environments rather than de-socialized zones with everybody isolated in a tech bubble (iPod, mobile phone).

An energetic, visual journey in tomorrow's urban environments.

Yoo Suk Yeon is showing what she is doing as both an architect and a researcher, trying to build physical spaces for a population that is getting more and more connected and virtual everyday. She had the most beautiful and intriguing slides we have seen in a while!

Yoo Suk talks in both Korean and English.

Jake Song - a superstar yet down to earth and open Korean programmer - shared his long experience of building online worlds, first in 2D (Lineage, Ultima Online) then in 3D (Lineage 2, World of Warcraft). His talk resembled a how-to build the perfect virtual world, and my favorite slide was the one that said "try to build a weird enough world so users feel like they are somewhere else, but simple enough that people can still use common sense".

This talk was given in Korean and translated live in English for the conference participants. Unfortunately we could not record the English audio.

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.