Our focus is turning to Korea as Lift Asia is now only ten weeks away. We are working hard to make the conference more interesting and accessible than ever, two mandatory conditions to convince some of you to come with us in that unreasonable adventure.

The courageous who followed us lived one very special moments, when a handful of foreigners share a unique experience at the other side of the planet. As travelers know something unique happens this situation, connections are easier, have a special flavor.

Let me point to a few things here, as coming to Korea is easier, cheaper, and more relevant that you might think.

• Plane tickets are cheap if you book early, below 700chf as I write this!
• We are also making a huge effort on conference tickets, currently costing less than 200€!
• If you work for a startup, join Alpict’s Asia venture trip. More info on the Lift blog.
• BlogTalk happens just before Lift, so you can attend 2 conferences in four days!
• Lift Asia’s program will rock, articulated around the theme of “serious fun”. I can guarantee you will see unique people and ideas, like the SPC-101c robot of Jury Han’s fabulous outdoor multiplayer mobile games.

Now it is time for me to take a few days off, before hitting the road again and attend TED Global. After Oxford I will fly back to Korea, to continue testing the local food, and work on my guide skills for when the Lift delegation lands in Seoul.

Wow. The odds were against us. Most people thoughts I was really crazy when I took the decision to do a Lift in Asia. It has certainly been the most challenging and dangerous project I have ever done, and three days before the event I was still having nightmares of being alone in the room with the speakers. But Asia is like that. It is a place where things work out differently, where you get 200 registrants in two days. And all the hard work and sleepless nights are nothing compared to the satisfaction and pride of having done what was probably our best ever conference here under the sun of Jeju Island.

We had 400 participants, some of the best social events we have ever hosted, at least 10 speeches that will certainly get thousands of views once they will be online (in 7-10 days I hope), and some completely magical moments like lifters playing the games of Jury Han with their phones during a session, Bruno Bonnel singing german songs on stage to prove the french had invented Karaoke (sorry Bruno, my fault ;), Tomoaki Masuga’s robot enteraining the crowd with its amazing acting, Sarah Marquis telling us the story of her walks, etc, etc, etc. I have so many memories that I will need a bit of time to digest all this. I will take a few days off, fly back to Europe, and start working on Lift09 as soon as my body is done recovering from this adventure.

Here is an interesting article talking about the state of the video games market in Korea, and the effects of gaming in society. This market is set to undergo MASSIVE change in the coming years, with offline gaming losing ground to social/group/online gaming:

The Korea Herald: Unlocking the positive potential of video games

According to […] the official report of the Korean game industry, […] revenues totaled 5.14 trillion won in 2007, a 31 percent drop from 7.45 trillion won in 2006. The sharp drop was caused by the drastic shrink of the arcade game sector, whose revenue plummeted from 3.3 trillion won in 2006 to a mere 87 billion won in 2007 [Korea, where a market size can be divided 40 in a year…].

In contrast, online games enjoyed solid revenue growth of 26 percent, from 1.78 trillion won in 2006 to 2.24 trillion won in 2007. Mobile games posted healthy growth of 5 percent, with income totaling 252 billion won in 2007.

(((Video games create more self-efficacy…)))

Regarding the positive effect of computer games on personal behavior, […] playing online games enhances users’ “self-efficacy” and leadership. Self-efficacy is an educational psychology term that means capability in performing actions needed to attain certain goals. It is critical to distinguish between self-esteem and self-efficacy. Self-esteem is a sense of sense-worth or self-respect, whereas self-efficacy is one’s ability to produce effects. […]

(((…and teach you how to be a “leader”)))

When people become a leader in games they learn how to manage and control a number of team members. Those leaders actually perform a similar role as they would in reality in terms of organizational management and strategic challenges. Whether it is online or offline, the way we cooperate as a team to solve a problem basically shares the same modes of activity. […] higher game leadership actually presented higher offline leadership, leading us to the conclusion that “virtual leaders are real leaders.”

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!

Tim Johnson found 19 “graphic depiction of cultural differences between Germans and Chinese”.

1) Complaints (or suggestions)

2) lifestyle

3) punctuality

4) human network

5) attitudes toward anger

6) standing in line

7) ego

8) streets on Sundays

9) parties

10) in restaurants (decibels)

11) standard of aesthetic beauty (tan level)

12) problem solving

13) three meals a day (hot or cold)

14) transportation preferences (1970 and present)

15) daily life

16) time of showers

17) mood and weather

18) view of superiors

19) children

Amazingly insightful and true. Link

As I try to come up with a theme for the first Asian edition of LIFT, I am somehow getting a strong intuition that we are leaving the revolutionary phase of the Web industry, and about to enter a more boring and less innovative period (Bruce Sterling won’t disagree with me). A number of weak signals seem to be announcing the end the cycle of hyper innovation that marked what will one day be remembered as the early days of the web, or the 1994 - 2006 period.

At Kinnernet, I jokingly told Thomas Mygdal that the Silicon Valley is facing Detroit-a-zation. What were once innovative and agile startups are increasingly becoming pachyderms hampered by overgrowth, internal politics and shareholders pressure. The big CEOs - once mavericks celebrated and envied by the whole business community - are becoming bus drivers. Eric Schmid’s days probably look more and more like the ones of Marcel Ospel or Carlos Ghosn, and with each hour passing Google’s organization inches closer to the IBM model rather than the edonistic company proned by the Zentral Intelligenz Agentur. Web companies employees have too much work, need to stay later than their bosses, have to raise their profiles to get good reviews, etc.

While in Korea, I systematically asked my interlocutors what they thought were today’s “hot” topics. Their answers: ubiquitous computing, urban technologies, robotic toys, green technologies, open source objects, etc. The web? “It was interesting seven years ago!”  It is now a commodity, and this has a deep impact on the industry and on its culture. What happened?

• The rise of incremental innovation
  Incremental innovation has replaced fundamental innovation. We are not discovering new territories - like when Friendster, Google, or Hotmail were invented - but are developing the ones that have already been explored by others, bringing smaller improvements like a new interface, a new way to receive an information, a new mix of existing services. A striking example of this is social networks, where entrepreneurs are almost done exploring the different possibilities. It started with networks about the past (classmates, copains d’avant), then about the present (Facebook, MySpace), and now it is about the future (dopplr, mixin). Nothing revolutionary, just a lot of talented people busy not leaving any stone unturned in the same field, exploring a finite space.
• Maturity = less hunger
  The industry is more mature, which means many of us have something to lose. We all have a status, more conflicts of interest then ever (the web 2.0 world is skunk drunk on its own kool-aid), bigger egos. Time goes by, and most industry leaders are fifteen years older and nature made them more risk averse. Sneakers have been replaced by leather shoes, and the Johnny Cash rule (which says you are never as good as when hungry) is now playing against us.
• Early adopters became gatekeepers?
  Where is the new generation? Aren’t they interested, or is it that we don’t listen to them? Have we - the early adopters - become gate keepers? Every time I go to a web conference I am struck by the fact the average age of speakers is always around 40. What happened here? Do we really only have Kevin Rose, Matt Mullenweg and Mark Frauenfeld innovating under 25? Could it be that there is a whole layer of innovation we simply don’t look at?
• Excitement is building in other fields
  If you haven’t watched Bruno Bonnel and Rafi Haladjan’s talks you probably haven’t noticed, but robotic toys have a huge future. Mobile continues to rock Africa and Asia, green technologies are the hot topic in Sand Hill Road, new interfaces are opening up huge possibilities. It seems other fields are offering more exciting opportunities than the web!

I am sure I could come up with more reasons but let’s hear your opinion first. Do you feel like it is the end of a cycle? Why? Is the web just another industry where success depends more on having an MBA than a revolutionary idea and a taste for risk?

Update: ChangeWaves says the Infotech sector is not yet geriatric. We can resume normal breathing.

After four trips to the land of the morning calm, I finally started to get a feeling for how we should adapt the LIFT concept to this continent. I must admit I was getting a bit nervous and felt like the LIFT Asia project was not moving much. The main reason is that it is extremely hard to get feedback from the locals on the different questions I had. Can we do a three days conference here? Can people convince their boss to pay for the ticket? Can we hold open sessions managed by the communities? Will Asians travel to attend a conference?

^{My pictures of Seoul and Korea are on Flickr.}

I had - and still have - tons of questions I needed to find out about, but the local culture - which basically consists in never contradicting anyone - did not make my life easy and forced me to reformulate every question. The only way to get a true answer is to allow from the start the possibility of a diplomatic no.

For example, three days ago I visited the Raemian gallery to see a housing of the future exhibition created by Samsung and Microsoft. My friend Jean Morin was driving, and when we approached the gallery we quickly called our host to inquire about parking possibilities. We asked if we could leave the car in front of the building (because both of us are lazy and French). The answer was “yes of course no problem, but maybe the Police will take the car. The other solution is to use the parking lot further down the road”. Very elegant way of avoiding a negative answer.

So it takes time to get a strong intuition about anything in this country because relations are very subtle and different from the loud and clear feedback we get in Europe. Four 20′000km trips later, I finally have a strong feeling for what LIFT should be here. We will not replicate the Swiss event, but use the lessons learned over the past three editions to grow the Asian project.

We will start slow, with a two days conference featuring simple social events (i.e. fondue might be for next year), reduced community activities (I am thinking about keeping only open stage and discussions) and boasting a clear, interesting and easy-to-sell-to-your-boss theme. We will rely on strong local partners for all logistical, editorial and financial aspects. This should allow us to work around the various constraints we have (LIFT brand not yet known, lower salaries, less participatory culture, etc) and achieve our main goal: give lifters access to all the innovation and trends that are flourishing all around Asia. I got a demo of Naver (Korea’s leading portal) a few days ago, and it looked like Yahoo in 5 years, both from a service design and business model perspective. There are tons of ideas to be exchanged between Asia and the rest of the world, and this is what we’ll do.

I am heading to Seoul and Jeju Island for ten day to work on LIFT Asia. The BBC reports a tensed political situation but I hope it will be business as usual out there. This trip should be an occasion to try to pass level three in local food tasting. After octopus sashimi and rotten fish I was promised there was something even more… original waiting me for. Keep an eye on my YouTube account ;)

^{Taking off from Seoul Incheon airport}

If you are around Seoul send me an email! My phone works when I am at my hotel so sms if also fine.

I spoke earlier this week with Jim O’Reilly, co-author of Digital Korea, to prepare my upcoming trip to South Korea to work on LIFT Asia (3-4-5 sept. 08). This book shows how different and advanced Korean society is, and the argument developed in the book are supported by stats like these, found on the Cnet Asia blog:

• 63 percent of South Koreans make payments using their cell phones.
• The second most desired car is not a Ferrari but a “Solid Pro”, a virtual car from the online game Kart Rider.
• In 2006, 57 percent of South Korea’s music sales were digital compared with 10 percent in the US (source: IFPI January 2007).
• 37 percent of South Koreans download cell phone games (source: NIDA 2005)
• Over 30 percent of South Korean students send 100 text messages a day (source: Korea Times, February 9, 2006).
• Average amount of daily consumption of DMB digital TV on cell phones in South Korea was 129 minutes per day (source: MIC January 2007)
• 97 percent of South Koreans buy ringtones (source: NIDA September 2005).

Link

These stats show very clearly the opportunities that mobile brings to the table. Mobile payment, gaming, music, instant messaging, this is very we companies should invest their money and time these days, much more exciting (and lucrative) than the crowded web 2.0 space. And did you notice the 129 minutes spent watching TV? Further proof television’s death has probably been widely exaggerated.

These robes supposed to allow women to escape sexual predators in the streets of Tokyo are what I call serious urban wear. Amazing (and useful?).

Link