The Times is reporting on an English study that found “the average digital music player carries 1,770 songs [with] 48 per cent of the collection copied illegally. The proportion of illegally downloaded tracks rises to 61 per cent among 14 to 17-year-olds.” (Link)

What the study does not mention is the usage of these tracks, and it should be considered. Downloading is free - despite of course being illegal - and a common behavior is to download many tunes one never listens to. Saying something like “the music industry is losing 48% of its revenues to downloads” would be a mistake. There is a grey zone here, for things you download but would never have bought. David Weinberger came up with freechasing to define a similar phenomena. You could call that “download and forget”.

An encouraging sign shows up discretely towards the end of the article, with the British Music Rights agency finally talking about positive measures, like “developing new legal services that make breaking copyright unappealing”. That is the only solution. Just like when Steve Jobs made legal download cool and convenient at Starbucks (only in the US and only in Starbucks unfortunately). People will start using legal services as soon as it’s cooler to be legit. What’s happening in France, with Orange working on providing downloads of more than a million songs to mobile phones and home computers for €12 a month might be a step in that direction, at least if the service does not contain loopholes like losing all your tracks if you close your account, etc…

Interesting usage of Google earth in England, where “teenagers” spot cool pools using the freely available satellite pictures and coordinate uninvited swimming sessions. Pool owners have been on high alert and the police is trying to contact Google about adding a sure-to-change-everything sign warning that “using someone else’s pool is trespassing and therefore illegal”.

Teens begin by surfing Google Earth’s satellite images to find houses with swimming pools — or at least paddling pools. Once a target has been identified, sweaty swimmers then use Facebook to arrange an organised, but uninvited, pool-crash. […]

Owners of several plush poolside properties have already returned home to find teenagers taking a dip in their man-made lakes or their spoor: beer cans, dog-ends and vomit floating atop their once crystal-clear pools.

Link

Who saw that coming, the internet turning pools into a commong good :D

The US donation system to political parties is extremely transparent and allows for this kind of stats compiled by Mother Jones and showing the orientation of donations depending on occupation. While not exhaustive, these figures confirm some things that one can easily perceive in daily life, like the fact policemen seem to support right wing parties and teachers and journalists more moderate views.

Link

LIFT is again working hard to promote Swiss companies to the world, this time by organizing an Asian Venture Trip in partnership with Alpict. Six companies will be selected and receive assistance to organize meetings with potential partners and clients (with the help of Asiance, a Korean company assisting Europeans who want to expand their business in Asia). The selected entrepreneurs will also receive free tickets, flights and hotel to attend LIFT asia and present their company to the audience. Yes it is first class service.

Join us and you will be able to experience octopus sashimi and all the rest!

Gartner thinks multicore and hybrid processors, social networks and social software, ubiquitous computing and augmented reality are among the top 10 trends one should keep an eye on for the next 4 years. The report predicts a radical transformation in the responsibility of IT directors. From being responsible for running servers smoothly, they shall become those who will have to identify key technologies and their impact on the business.

Chief Information Officers (CIOs) who see their jobs as “keeping the data centre running, business continuity planning and finding new technology toys to show to people” will not survive. Instead, they will have to think beyond the constraints of conventional, in order to identify the technologies that might be in widespread use a few years from now.

Gartner recommends that CIOs establish a formal mechanism for evaluating emerging trends and technologies […] and give [their teams] time to spend researching new ideas and innovations, especially those that are being driven by consumer and Web 2.0 technologies.

“The CIO then needs to act as a conduit from the business to the technology. He or she needs to see how it might be possible to use these technologies to solve a problem the business has identified,”

Link

Will we see a rise of CIOs attending the next LIFT?

The meeting industry is showing interest for LIFT and the probably quite original and different way we run the conference. This translated into an invitation to speak at the 47th ICCA Congress & Exhibition set to happen in Victoria, Canada this November. It will be very interesting for me - a conference organizer by accident - to share ideas and experiences with those running the world’s biggest congresses.

I also joined the panel of judges of the EIBTM WorldWide Technology Watch , a yearly contest dedicated to “discovering the latest technological innovations that will have a positive impact on meetings, events, incentive travel, conferences and exhibitions”. If you created a technology that can make conference organizers’ life simpler head to the competition’s entry form.

LIFT is now entering a new phase, with our first large scale Asian event set to happen in September in South Korea. We re-invented the conference website to make navigation more simple, and integrate the fact that multiple events will now appear at the same time.

Amazing speakers have confirmed their presence (full programme), with a mix of the best ever presenters we have had at LIFT over the years (Scoble, Sterling, Greenfield, Chipchase, Bonnell) and of new speakers like Takeshi Natsuno (inventor of the world famous iMode), Soo-in Yang (founder of The Living), the one and only Dan Dubno, or Christian Lindholm (the guy who inspired LIFT back at Reboot7)

I hope you like the site’s background which is a picture of a Korean version of Heidi Sylvie found in a flee market in Bern. A nice symbol for a Swiss conference going to Korea in a joint effort with legendary entrepreneur Jaewoong Lee and local luminaries like Channy Yun or Jinwoo Choi.

Save your seat now - attendance is limited to 400 persons with a price starting at 250$ for startups/students/NGOs.

It took four hours to sell out Canada’s first grandma diner. Wish I could join all the Spark crowd and try the Baklava and Spanakopita! Globalization is amazing when it allows ideas to circulate across borders like this.

Microsoft’s problems are more and more obvious to the media, the BBC even talking of Redmond’s survival strategy. Can “Windows touch” save the day? Can new interfaces make up for years of ignorance towards customer needs? It worked for Nintendo and Apple, let’s see how IT directors react to a new Windows allowing users to “shrink photos, trace routes on maps, paint pictures or ‘play the piano’.”

Seeing all these dummy trademarked product names shows that one of the most fundamentally wrong thing at Microsoft still won’t change, and that might be the real problem.

Marc LAperouza on the online aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake:

The State Council (China’s top executive agency) launched an online mourning campaign: as part of three day mourning period related to the earthquake, ALL websites were ordered to take down entertainment and game sections and to redirect to ones dedicated to commemorating earthquake victims.

Link

The online world has a role to play in the mourning process, being such an effective conversation tool, now the chinese seem to take this concept to a whole new level.

In Korea, newspapers turn to online forums for quotes and opinions after a drama, calling people by their nicknames, which creates a weird mix of lightness and gravity when one reads “lovebug23 thinks that death could have been avoided”.

Makes me wonder if there is such a thing as mourning spam.