asia

We have the pleasure to announce our next Lift Event in Korea, which will take place in April 2012 in Seoul. The Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, Presence Switzerland mandated us to curate a Lift event in Seoul, taking place prior to the 2012 Expo in Yeosu.

The Lift event, under the code name “Swiss-Korean Innovation Night” will feature the traditional Lift ingredients: disruptive ideas, inspiring projects, carefully prepared speeches from pioneers of their fields and entertaining social events in a beautifully designed space.

The mission of the Swiss-Korean Innovation Night

• Enhance ties between both countries in the long term by connecting Swiss and Korean innovators
• Explore fields of innovation where Switzerland can contribute most: Robotics, design, luxury 2.0, craftsmanship, med tech, social innovation and culture!
• Promote a future-oriented Switzerland driven by innovation, creativity, technology and design
• Celebrate innovation!

Take your chance: submit your project!

We are looking for innovative, surprising and entertaining Swiss and Korean projects. The objective of the event is to offer participants the opportunity to witness exclusive demos and explore surprising prototypes. The projects must be very visual, engaging and ideally interactive, as they will be featured in an exhibition.

Further criteria

• Your project, prototype or demo should be quite easy to transport
• Good storytelling: you should enjoy present your project to an audience of 200-300 persons in English or Korean
• We are looking for projects from the fields of robotics, interactive installations (VJs, performance, sensors, new interfaces etc), design, craftsmanship, med tech, luxury 2.0, social innovation and culture

Asia will be one of the topics explored at Lift11. Marc Laperrouza - a two time speaker and active member of our community - writes a blog on China titled Time to look east. Here is an intriguing project he spotted: the super bus, a vehicle that lets traffic flow while loading and unloading passengers.

For an etymological take on super - from latin “supra” meaning above - there is no need to go further than…Shenzhen, home of Hashi Future Parking Equipment.

What looks like a whale swallowing cars is in fact a project to maximize mobility on a given stretch. For now buses are “in competition” for space with cars. The super bus project aims to improve mobility (up to 30%) on a given stretch by superimposing a moving structure on top of the road.

On the one hand this may sound like a good idea given the level of road congestion in Chinese cities. On the other hand one can just imagine the chaos caused by an accident “under the bus”. We will soon be fixed as whether there is any future for the project as the superstructure will soon be tested on the outskirts of Beijing.

Here is a video presentation of the project officially titled 3D express coach:

Related links:
• Link to original post.
• Marc's talk on Mobile in Asia (Lift08).
• Time to look east, weekly column on Chinese innovation and technologies.

Hojun Song thinks kids will soon ask their parents to offer them satellites, and that an open source initiative could make it more affordable and realistic than you think. He is an artist and dreamer, and he might very well achieve his goal as early as next year, sending a satellite collecting data from the cosmos and transforming it into information artists could use back on earth. He will be speaking at Lift Asia in the "Networked objects, from wifi rabbits to ubiquitous cities" session alongside Rafi Haladjian, Adrian David Cheok and Julian Bleecker.

Jake Song - a superstar yet down to earth and open Korean programmer - shared his long experience of building online worlds, first in 2D (Lineage, Ultima Online) then in 3D (Lineage 2, World of Warcraft). His talk resembled a how-to build the perfect virtual world, and my favorite slide was the one that said "try to build a weird enough world so users feel like they are somewhere else, but simple enough that people can still use common sense".

Interview of Ida Daussy, a french woman TV star in Korea. A few words about her history in Korea, her career and her opinion about the country.

Interview of Rafi Haladjian, the father of the RfiD Rabbit "Nabaztag" French version.

Olivier Mouroux, co-fondateur de Asiance.com, une agence "facilitatrice" pour vous établir en Corée et en Asie. C'est également une agence de pub digitale bien établie ici. Présence à Lift et comment s'installer ici en Corée sont les principaux thèmes de cette interview.

As Web entrepreneur (from Infonet Digital Company), Richard explains why he attended this Lift Asia 2009 conference. He also gives us some tips for successful business in Korea.

Why you should come to the Lift Asia Conference? Few words and answers of Jean-Henry, reasons to come to Lift Asia Conference...

We have many new partners this year (I'll write a roundup soon) and one of them is Hong Kong based Charged magazine who contacted us following Lift Asia. Charged shares our focus on people, calling themselves "a celebration of creativity in the mobile age [...] about the people, companies and ideas behind the profound social changes of the mobile revolution. Charged is not about the technology, the devices, the networks, or the carriers. It’s about the way we live."

We have a two page ad in the ninth issue that is visible online free here! We are really happy to see more and more journalists joining the conference from around the world! After Nepal yesterday Hong Kong today, living in internet time is sometimes fascinating :)

Check Lift09's current partners, and contact us to support the conference! We offer great possibilities starting at 5'000chf for the supporter package which consists in 2 super tickets (or 3 normal tickets) and visibility on this site for your brand!