A GLIMPSE OF ASIA

3 persons, 3 stories of Asia and telecommunication

Researcher Marc Laperrouza first opened our view of telecommunication in Asia, leaving aside USA’s conception about it. He assured now days there are 2.5 billion of mobile phone users in the world, and that this number will soon surpass the one of computers, this because it is obviously cheaper and the applications are increasing very fast.
China was his main topic, and while talking about it, he expressed several points about how this country in specific has become mobile-phone dependant, here he brought out information like 2 of the biggest mobile operators being Chinese, or that 33 million short messages are sent each month, or the concern of the government for not keeping aside of the technology. He also assured that future on mobile technology would actually be the countryside.

After this it was Heewon Kim’s turn, who focused in the networked society (mainly teenagers) and the changes it has had in Korea, witch has changed from having a community culture to a more individual one.

As example she referred to CYWORLD, this is a website where people can put personal stuff in and personalize it as they want, at first it sounded kind of normal, but when we got to know that around the 78% of the population see their site every day became a little more serious. This website happens to be the most recurrent, but there are a lot more of this kind, that give an auto-satisfaction to users in their everyday life, and an almost synchronized communication between friends in real-time life.

And to close we got Gen Kanai to talk about open sources and the development of Mozilla in Asia. Who’s basic question was why didn’t Asians contributed with open sources?
The fact is Asian people use open source very much but they don't contribute because of 3 main barriers: culture, language and education.
He also talked about certain local solutions like to create open sources in their own language and more adapted to their needs, as they did in Buthan, witch happened to develop very well and got a lot of response of the people; but still it was not as “open” as those we have in English.
The final point was to agree Asia contributed in open sources but they needed a lot more efforts to do it.