What makes LIFT so much more that a meeting for techno-visionaries? As a perfect metaphor for Web 2.0, LIFT has succeeded in creating a new community made up of those of us who want to stay in tune with the world & to connect.

I came away from LIFT 07 and LIFT08 with the certainty that the Geneva get-together is not only a thrilling platform for the discovery and confrontation of new concepts, but is also fast emerging as a spearhead for a “New Switzerland”, a place that creates and attracts bold minds.

Laurent Haug – your imagination, zeal and zest are the driving forces of this venture. By merging with the daring inventiveness of Cristiana Bolli Freitas and Laurent Bolli, together you have allowed creativity to flourish, a formidable component to a gathering which might otherwise have been just ... another conference.

Sylvie, David, Sonia, Nicholas(s), Marc-Olivier, Mathias and so many others whose thoughtful dedication brought it all together, you too deserve our thanks!

The greatest compliment we can offer you is to consider that we are all now part of the vibrant community that you have created. Vive le LIFT! And say hello to all our new South Korean friends when you are there…

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.