[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/js6b31_p5cc" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
CNN used a pretty complex set of technologies to beam one of their field reporters to the election center. Quite amazing.
Hae-in – who is one of the members of the Lift team here in Korea – told me about “Navi Call Taxi”, a pretty cool service that women can use to be driven home safely. The concept is quite simple, even if I am afraid that we won’t see it anytime soon in Europe…
The service was created after an incident where two girls got murdered by a taxi driver in this normally super safe country.
The combination of geo-localization and telecommunication technologies with our daily life will produce millions of opportunities for new and useful services like this one. More information about this future in Lift Asia’s Networked city session on Friday morning with Jeffrey Huang, Adam Greenfield and Yang Soo-In.
Today number portability was announced by the Korean government. This move – sure to take another century in the west because it basically puts an end to the domination of historic operators – consists in allowing people to use Voice over IP (VoIP) at home with a legit phone number (instead of having to turn your computer, log into a service like Skype, and wear one of those horrible headsets).
Korea Times: Cheaper Web Phones to Debut Next Month
Telephone users from next month can switch to a cheaper Internet-based service without changing their numbers.
The government is expected to permit voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) subscribers to get access to number portability.
The policy could ignite explosive growth in the Internet telephony market given growing consumer frugality amid high inflation and the sluggish economy.
The change could reshape the telecommunication industry, with KT, which controls more than 90 percent of the fixed-line phone market, expected to lose business to smaller carriers.
KT pressured the Korean Communications Commission to delay the adoption of number portability, which had been slated for this month, saying the data systems of VoIP operators provide insufficient direction information for 119 emergency calls.
Nice try on the “VoIP doesn’t provide direction information for emergency calls”. It is probably true, but this had to happen one day. How come you can skype for free and not call free? Something had to give. The interface was the bottleneck and this is now over, VoIP will be super easy to use from now.
PS: and I hope you now trust me when I say that Korea is a laboratory of western society, a place where many innovations and changes happen 5 years earlier.
After the impact of mobile phone signals on the brain, scientists are studying our favorite companion’s effect on mental health, and the first reports paint a not so rosy picture.
New research suggests excessive use of mobile phones can hinder sleep, trigger fatigue and stress and cause mental problems like depression and lack of concentration. [...]
The correlation between phone use and mental state was shown by a study published in the Korean Journal of Epidemiology in 2005 and conducted by a team led by Prof. Kim Dong-hyun [...]. The team studied 501 high school students in four groups according to their cell phone use. Those who used them the least scored below 35 points on depression, while those who used the most scored above 51. The latter group also scored over 61 in terms of impulsive behavior. “We can’t generalize that cell phone use causes depression or impulsive behavior, but at least we proved there’s a connection,” Kim said.
Full article on Chosun (Korea’s biggest daily newspaper)
When I read these studies I sometimes feel like Steve Rubel who wonders if wireless radios could become the next tobacco… Are mobile phones really the largest biological experiment ever?
Further data on email interpretation (see previous post here).
It would be interesting to compare with face to face conversation.
There are only a few loose indicators of how good a conference program is. We have the satisfaction of the participants (who by definition get very divided on some presentations like this one), feedback from the speakers, and sometimes there is the pride of seeing something we scheduled one or two years ago become a globally hot topic.
After women in technology (for which I caught a lot of heat back in 2006, now a politically correct discussion), the digital divide at home seems to get a lot of attention after a Pew study that found 49% of Americans have “few tech assets”.
Time to look at our Digital Divide: Bringing it home panel video again, with Sugata Mitra, Lara Srivastava, Pukul Rana, Nathan Eagle and the guy who came up with the idea (you see I actually don’t deserve much credit ;), mister Galipeau.
The main reason behind doing a LIFT conference in South Korea is that we think this country is basically an opportunity for Europeans and Americans to have a preview of what their society might be in a near future. Most of the important technological trends start in Korea five years before they hit us. Think of citizen journalism (started by Ohmynews in 2000), social networking (Cyworld, 1999), or knowledge sharing websites (Naver Knowledge iN who became Yahoo Answers for us).
As Korea is, in the words of an Internet executive I met recently, “good at having ideas, bad at exporting them”, all this was so far a well kept secret. But the buzz is mounting, and at Stream07 almost all Asians were from South Korea. The press is also looking at the country of the morning calm with excitement. The latest article comes from CNN who published a story called “A day in the (digital) life of a South Korean boy“. Extracts:
This peek into the everyday life of an imaginary South Korean boy named Insoo Kim offers insight into what the life of youths in the rest of the world might be like in the near future. [...]
Insoo doesn’t even have to take the phone out of his pocket to send an SMS. He knows how to slide it open, which buttons to push how many times to reach the “Send SMS” menu option, compose the entire text message, and hit the send button — all without even looking at the phone. This is especially handy when he needs to send an SMS during class. [...]
Insoo has a difficult math problem as homework. He posts it up on Naver Knowledge iN, a popular online Q&A service with some 70 million entries. Within about 10 minutes of posting, someone chimes in with a good answer, and Insoo awards him with some “Knowledge Power” points — knowledge-based economy in action among 14-year-olds.
Interesting read that previews some of the things that are sure to hit us in the near future. How will you react when you will find ot your kids solve their math problems surfing on the knowledge-based economy? Time to ask yourself that question, anticipating might actually give you a small advantage for the day it will pop up in your life ;)
Here is the talk Bruce Sterling gave at Korea University last week about the Estonian Cyberwar.
In this eye-opening presentation, Bruce explains what happened to Estonia earlier this year when the country’s infrastructures got down following by a massive DDOS attack. He shares his theory that a Russian group of hackers called the Zhelatin gang might be behind the attacks, and were actually only flexing the muscles of the world’s largest and most powerful botnet.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-7558943156938354525" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]
Anybody who is involved in the infrastructure side of a large business should watch this. We’ve been warned.
Taewoo Danny Kim of TechnoKimchi is pointing to a Business 2.0 ranking of the 12 most wired cities in the world. Not surprisingly half of them are in Asia and no Swiss city cracked the list.
Bangalore is first, followed by Barcelona (surprise!) and Helsinki (re-surprise!). Seoul is 6th. No american city is ranked because it is a list for the courageous American white collars willing to risk their life eating live octopus and playing beer dominos abroad.
Dave Winer probably created a slight decrease in the number of participants to the US Green Card Lottery, breaking a few myth about Silicon Valley.
The truth is that the people of Silicon Valley toil to find security in money, never getting there, while avoiding the pleasures of life, including the mythological creativity, spinning on a treadmill, doing nothing but striving to make money, but it’s never enough.
“Here, the top 1 percent chases the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent chases the top one-one-hundredth of 1 percent.”
My own partial and subjective experience was that the valley itself (Palo Alto, Mountain View, etc..) is a social desert. Buildings separated by long and deprecated roads (it seems the infrastructures haven’t been refreshed since the 60s). But there is still something special, and the concentration of people and companies makes it a must for most young (and ambitious) entrepreneurs.
It is maybe time to move the valley somewhere else, just like the Koreans are moving their capital to a completely new site?
Contact:
Tel +41786966480
Email laurent@liftlab.com
Skype: laurenthaug
Profiles: LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook
Twitter: @laurenthaug
Licence:
Recent Comments