Japan

We have the pleasure to announce that a delegation of Google Business Development from China, Japan and India will accompany Lift12 speaker Nick Heller. To tap into their extraordinary wealth of knowledge we will organize a "Google Dating" during the Lift Fondue, on the evening of February 22nd.

This is a great chance for start-ups and entrepreneurs to exchange with the Google Venture Team during the Lift Fondue! To participate in the call send us an e-mail with a short description about your project and why you'd like to meet the Google Team to google-fondue@liftconference.com until February 14th.

Good luck!

This event is the hands-on part of the Urban Internet of Things Workshop that takes place in Tokyo, that same day as part of the Internet of Things 2010 conference. We will gather a bunch of hackers, programmers, designers, architects, and business people under the same roof to discuss about the future of our cities. We will explore through demos, hands-on workshops, pecha-kuchas and beers how new technologies can be leveraged to engage citizens to access and use real-time data from cities. Hopefully a lot of beer and a fantastic mix of creative and technical people will help in doing this.

More information

This event is part of the Lift@home program where members of our community self-organize their mini event.

Gen Kanai is the head of Mozilla in Japan. He talks about open source in Asia, and the perception that Asia is contributing less to open source projects than other parts of the world.

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.