Posted: August 5th, 2009 | No Comments »
Don’t mess with Korean tourists :D I will keep that in mind next week when I’ll be in Seoul to prepare Lift Asia 09.
SOUTH KOREAN TOURISTS USE TAEKWANDO TO FLOOR ARMED ROBBER
(ANSA) – Rome, August 3 – A group of South Korean tourists honed their Taekwondo skills on an armed robber in Rome who ended up thanking police for rescuing him from a deathly beating, officials said on Monday.
“Thank you, I was being massacred,“ the 48-year-old unidentified Italian told Carabinieri police as they led him to Rome`s Regina Coeli prison.
The Koreans were touring the ancient Roman Theatre of Marcellus on Sunday afternoon when the man turned a knife on them and snatched a handbag. But before he could get away, one of the Koreans pounced on him, took his knife and floored him with some very deft strokes. Police said the man was decidedly very relieved to see them and “almost grateful“ to land in jail.
Link (thx Jaewoong)
Posted: July 28th, 2009 | No Comments »
Cross posted from the Lift blog, hoping to reach all the Swiss entrepreneurs who read my blog. The venture trip is a great initiative enabled by Alpict and allowing Swiss start-ups to reach the Korean market in ideal conditions. We do the legwork and open the right doors, the entrepreneur gets new clients and contacts.
Last year we organized a venture trip to Asia, helping Swiss start-ups (Poken, Arimaz, KeyLemon, Secu4, Lighthouse, Pixelux) develop and promote themselves on the Korean Market.
The venture trip resulted in more than half the start-ups developing strong ties with the country of the morning calm, some finding new clients, others new suppliers (especially if you work in electronics or robotics). All entrepreneurs gathered unique experience on how to do business in Asia, and met key actors of one of the world’s most interesting, homogeneous and innovative market on earth. Did you know Korea is beating exportation records right now, and that many think that the crisis is already over there?
So if you like the opportunity to meet potential clients, suppliers, partners, or investors, have us arrange the meetings and translators for you, and an opportunity to showcase your product and services at Lift Asia, submit your application. The deadline has been extended to accommodate the July vacationers :)
Look at the call for project and send us your application!
Posted: July 6th, 2009 | No Comments »
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.
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.
Posted: December 4th, 2008 | No Comments »
Gwanggyo is an entirely new self sufficient city to be completed by 2011 in Korea. 77’000 inhabitants will live in these hill shaped buildings that will offer terraces and outdoor life at each floor. Quite an amazing design project.
Link (thx Marco)
Posted: November 20th, 2008 | 2 Comments »
On a recent presentation at the EPFL about “the next ten years of the digital revolution” (slides) I explained that I think disconnection will be a key, with users pushing back technology to its true place to make it more effective. Korea (getting recognized as a laboratory for western society, and not only in my enthusiastic interviews ;) is as usual at the forefront, coming up with the Log Out Day that was organized on November 11.
Students of Seoul Women’s University in Gongreung-dong turn in their mobile phones on Log Out Day, November 11, designed by the university to free students from networks for a day.
Instead of using their mobile phones or Internet services, students hand-wrote postcards and sent them via regular mail.
A university official said the campaign was designed to give students the space to rediscover themselves after being lost in the flood of information that surrounds us every day.
Link
What I especially like is the radicalism of an initiative that required students to send postcards.
But how long will the world’s post services still accept postcards?
Posted: November 13th, 2008 | No Comments »
This is one of the presentation that struck me the most at this Lift Asia. What Jury does is really amazing, and opens up so many possibilities. Check it out, especially the demo she does around 2 minutes 50 seconds.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=7667600769302301416" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]
Posted: October 24th, 2008 | No Comments »
Seen on a chicken sandwich ordered at Seoul’s W Hotel:
Posted: October 23rd, 2008 | No Comments »
I am at MBC’s World Women’s Forum, a partner conference of Lift gathering women from around the world in the Korean capital around the theme of “Women as agents of change: building a diverse and sustainable future“. The event is attended by 95% of women, a refreshing change from the usually male dominated Korean society.
I gave a short talk about the changing landscape of the ICT industry that I see become less and less about technology and more and more about branding, content, empathy and design. This evolution creates unique opportunities for women who are “innately better suited than men to navigate the new global economy” and should, now more than ever, consider careers in fields like web, gaming, mobile, ubiquitous computing or urban technologies.
Women conferences are very different from what I am used to. One of the most striking thing is that presentations are much more personal and emotionally charged. Like when Moses Farrow told the story of a disabled Korean child being adopted by an american family. He is the son of an amazing lady who had 4 childs, adopted another 11, and remained deeply human and accessible though hard times and celebrity. Rory Kennedy also who moved the audience by showing the suffering of women and families around the globe.
The first day ended with a presentation by Daniel Altman, the Global Economics Columnist of the International Herald Tribune. He talked about the place of women in the global economy. When asked by a participant whether the current financial crises would have happened if the banks had been directed by women, he grinned and answered that “in terms of raw competencies, women rank higher than men. But the risk taking behaviors are the same across genders. But it certainly wouldn’t have been worse…” An idea for a more stable world?
Posted: October 8th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
“People’s Star” Jin-Sil Choi has been found dead in her Seoul house, after apparently losing face over rumors circulating on and offline. She was known to specially care about internet comments about her, often spending hours reading thousands of them.
This tragic incident exposes the failure of the recent identity system that the government put in place last year following a rash of suicides among anonymous and famous citizens.
The KCC [Korean Communication Commission] admits that the identity verification system has so far had a limited impact on curbing cyber bullying since its introduction in July last year, saying that the number of “malicious” messages reduced by only about 2 percent.
Link
Chang Kim – who sold his company to Google while he was on stage at Lift Asia (video coming soon, congrats Chang :) - tries to come up with a better solution, proposing the creation of social black/white lists.
If one of the defining characteristics of the Web 2.0 is socialness, why don’t we look at this problem through the lens of “social” as well? I think we should introduce what I call a “social whitelist” and “social blacklist.” (Hey, it’s the term that’s racist, not me.)
From our online relationship, we all interact with other identities, and there are some identities we know can be trusted. These good ID’s have been there for some time, with proven track record, and most of them have their own websites where they put their reputation and content on. Also, if I can trust this ID, I could perhaps also trust other ID’s that are being trusted by this particular ID. Now, if we can somehow aggregate and track these social trusts among online ID’s, we could perhaps have a society-wide online trust system sooner or later.
Link
My opinion is that technology can only go that far when it comes to solve this problem. There are no (should I say “less”?) suicides over Internet comments in Europe and the US because our culture puts less importance in losing face. Max Mosley or the Star Wars Kid are living proofs that, as the French put it, “ridiculous doesn’t kill”.
Posted: October 1st, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Bruce Sterling’s speech is the first to go online. He talks about how the poor are moving to cities, using mobile technologies (“there is no such thing as a mobile phone divide!”) to access services like payment. His talk – and especially the part where he advices South Koreans to prepare for an influx of poverty once the Northern regime collapses – has moved a large part of the audience, leaving a strange silence in the room as we came out for the break.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=2258898945526921067" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]
The videos will be added to the Lift talks page, but you can already find a few more by cheating on Google Video ;)
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