I caught quite a lot of heat when I organized a women and/in technologies panel at LIFT06 to raise questions about the fact that women seem to be fleeing the decision/building side of technology, while at the same time they now account for more than 50% of the online population. I still think it was a pertinent discussion to start even if the form could be debated.
The roots of the problem seem to be somewhere deep in our educational system, so the patches will need a couple of decades to have some effect. Patience?
The Institute for the Future blog has some figures about broadband penetration in the homes of various Korean cities, and Seoul has moved beyond 100% to 105.99%.
(thx for the link Marco Enrique C.)
Korea is beyond wired. In that context it is not surprising that my meetings with potential sponsors for LIFT are much simpler in Korea than in Switzerland…
I am very interested in innovations in the way we work – it might soon be a major track at a future LIFT and the topic of several video interviews – and came across this article explaining the downfalls of commuting:
“I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is. […] There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”
When war doesn’t allow lovers to meet in the streets, people of course turn to the internet!
For Ali and Noura, love blossomed in an Internet chat room. […]
But their relationship was doomed from the start: He lives in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood of east Baghdad; she is across the Tigris River in the city’s war-torn west. It was out of the question that they should ever meet.
I have been trying to invite someone to LIFT to talk about online dating (preferably in an unexpected country like Iraq or somewhere in Africa), if you know a relevant person please let me know.
I have been chipchasing1 a bit in Korea, a country that actually surprised me more than Japan. There is even less English speakers here, the streets feel like labyrinths, and sashimi is no salmon or tuna, it’s aphrodisiac shells and live octopus. Ten things I noticed:
• the Internet is deeply embedded in what we call the “old media”. After the Virginia Tech killing, the main newspapers had pages dedicated to online reactions in forums, quoting various people using their nicknames (“for bunny38, the shootings are an isolated act” etc…). And any time a TV reporter appears on television, his email address is printed next to his name.
• speaking of email, I noticed on many of the numerous business cards I received that some people put their private addresses instead of their company’s “official” address..I got some cards with addresses like “elove44@yahoo.co.kr” or “streamline98@hotmail.com”.
• sometimes in Europe you become paul.smith2@yourcompany.com because you have a homonym. Here in Korea the problem is a bit deeper, with millions of people called “lee” or “kim”. So you can easily become kim1242@yourcompany.com.
• Korea is one of those rare country where using Google is not an automatism. The Mountain View giant has not yet managed to effectively serve this cultural island, and most people still rely on local search engines.
• Korea is a Confucianist society, which means that social relations are regulated by age. Huge respect is due to the elders who don’t mind abusing their power a bit from time to time. I was sitting in the subway next to a 60 something guy. After ten minutes, he firmly tapped my thigh with his hand, asking me to uncross my legs. For some reason he didn’t like the way I was sitting. Hum.
• in a country that is so well organized you don’t expect that there is a very relative respect for red lights. Taxis will go through them – sometimes not even slowing down – almost 50% of the time. The older the driver, the more likely he won’t respect the road signals.
• speaking of taxis, most of them in Seoul have no clue of how the city is made, and don’t have a london-cabbie like hippocampus to know where the street you are looking for is. They simply fire their GPS and follow the instructions. In Paris there is a tough exam to become a driver. To be a taxi in Seoul, it seems all you have to do is know how to program your GPS.
• speaking of GPS, the Korean ones are slightly more evolved than ours. First, they are often embedded in phones. Second, they know at what speed you are going and the limit of the road you are currently on. The GPS will start bipping if you go over the speed limit. Also, some GPS seem to be playing ads from time to time.
• Korean sashimi is almost a scientific experience. I was warned by my hosts when they took me to a wonderful seaside restaurant in Jeju: “This is very different from Japanese sashimi”. And indeed it was different. I ate some mollusk I had no idea were ever created by mother nature. Out of ten dishes I probably could identify one or two (the oysters and the shrimps). Lovely experience! And I couldn’t even try the live octopus.
• In Korea, if you press the floor button twice in a lift it will 1) send the order 2) cancel the order. Lifts are sometimes like that, and it’s quite weird. You’re in the 12th floor, trying to go down to the lobby. Press once on “1” (ground floor is 1), the lift starts moving. Press another time. The lift stops, the doors not even opening to let you out. See below.
1chipchasing, or try to look at a remote country with the eyes of a technologically influenced ethnologist. From the english Jan Chipchase ;)
Behind all the apparent good intentions of the military junta (supposedly acting to oust a corrupted government), some disturbing things are slowly “dragging the country down” in the words of some Thai citizens I spoke to. Censorship is making a strong come back, the junta is reportedly planning large scale media manipulations to demonize former prime minister Thaksin against whom corruption charges are hard to find. And the new government is endangering previous efforts to turn Thailand into a Knowledge-Based Society by 2015 by cutting subventions to institutions like incubators or art centers.
Overall, there is a quietly pessimistic atmosphere over the country’s future, a shame for such a beautiful, young and full of potential nation.
For anybody who thinks that the French 35 hours (and the thousands of pages of regulation and laws that come with it) was a social progress, here is an idea coming from Netflix, a Silicon Valley company:
When it comes to vacation, Netflix has a simple policy: take as much as you’d like. Just make sure your work is done.
This is as smart a system as there is when it comes to knowledge workers.
• social pressure becomes the regulator, not a policy (unfair by design, as it is a standard applied to special cases). If you worked like a rockstar on a project, the colleagues will give you 4 weeks of break. If you take 3 weeks after a year of designing the coffee machine stocks management spreadsheet, forgiveness will be long to come. Abuser will be regulated by the workforce.
• allowing people to take time when they can is the best insurance they will work more when it is needed
• treating people as responsible beings is the best way to ensure loyalty and dedication
• and Netflix probably got on the top of the “companies geeks want to work for” with that trick, surpassing Google’s tired “20% of your time for your own project” proposition.
Smart move. Now I would only like to see how this system would fare in a company financially struggling. It could maybe backfire, with people burning out because it is socially unacceptable to take any break in such a situation.
Forbes released its annual Billionaires who’s who, and it’s as usual a fascinating look into the long term economic trends of this planet.
Russia moved in third place ahead of Germany, India surpassed Japan (time to update a few preconceived notions) and Spain added 10 new billionaires in what Forbes calls “the richest year ever in human history” (in monetary terms maybe, for the rest I am not sure).
The world’s richest are getting younger and richer with more Russians and Indians cropping up among the 946 people on Forbes magazine’s 2007 billionaires list unveiled Thursday.
The number of billionaires is 19 percent higher than last year when there were 793, and their total net worth grew 35 percent to $3.5 trillion, the magazine said.
The average billionaire’s age fell by two years to 62, and 60 percent started with very little. Two-thirds of those on the list were richer, with net worth up for nearly everyone in the top 50.
You can now help the poorest country in the world fight desertification, “the most threatening ecosystem change impacting livelihoods of the poor”, right from your desktop.
Tree-nation is a site that offers the possibility to plant a tree in a park in Niger. Starting at 10 euros, all trees will form a giant heart – visible from space – and give this whole operation just enough cheesiness to get on the night news.
A good idea, a social dimension (trees are used to start conversation between the donors), an easy process, prestigious endorsers, an angle for media coverage, and affordable prices. Tree Nation prefigures a new generation of humanitarian projects, bringing the world’s problems to our computers in a packaged, direct and effective way.
the elimination of intermediaries and the sucking in […] of the customer into the production/value chain […] entails a transfer of know-how from the producers to the consumers.
So as we democratize innovation, and transfer all this know-how to users/customers, we are going to create a two speed society, between those who can handle the technology, and those who can’t. The perverse effect being that those who can least afford to pay will be charged more as they will need to purchase service/help along with the products.
Sellers are increasingly counting on people’s growing capacities to lower their prices, outsourcing time consuming tasks to the customer. It should be a universally good news, but will it accentuate the divide between those able to participate in this direct economy, and those who can’t, for educational, economical or cultural reasons?
