Unfortunately, I missed Marc Lamperrouza's presentaton on the development of new technologies in China, but it's not every day that you get to see one of your former university professors that have made an impact on your present situation, so I bet I couldn't miss that!

One sure thing is that Asia is hyper-connected, especially Japan and Korea, followed by Taiwan, China and India, where digital and mobile technology development seems to be very dynamic. It is particularly interesting to hear from Ms. Heewon Kim how the technological cultures in Japan and Korea have evolved, promoting community communication over simple straight communication between A & B, and the practices of "self-branding" and "real-time intimacy" monitoring it has given rise to. At the same time, isn't it a bit worrying that people are letting others to know what they are doing at every moment of their life, including telling them whether they are available for socialization or not? I know that we are many to jump on the Facebook or MySpace bandwagon, but most of us newbies keep the level of status revelation quite low. Personally, I don't even take it seriously and often put nonsense in it or stuff that no one else but me can understand (like: Ariane is going da da da, which refers to something very specific, but you'd have to be a fan of GITS-Second GIG to know what this is).

Gen Kanai's presentation appears in the same frame of Asian glutony for new technology, as he shows that countries like Korea, Japan, India and China are major markets for such open-source softwares as Mozilla. However, despite being avid users of this type of technology, it seems that these populations don't participate very much into the innovation process. He identifies barriers at different levels. He sees language as one of the main obstacle, as these softwares are written in English, which is not massively mastered in these countries. Moreover, international cooperation tends to use a lingua franca to make it easier to communicate and nowaday, it is still English. Of course, as it is already visible on the Web (40% of the total number of Websites are in Chinese, 30% in Japanese, and only 20% in English), Chinese might become the next lingua franca! Then, cross your fingers, because it is much harder to learn than English! But that's not the case yet. Then, Kanai referred to other Asian critics stating that lack of meritocracy and capacity to think by themselves, which are the air and water needed to foster innovation.

I'm not sure I totally agree with this, as it seems to me that Asians are quite able to innovate in the field of technology, especially mobile and Internet devices. After all, some key media device of our daily lives that have had significant impact on the development of content and media industries come from Asia. The walkman was invented by Sony, a Japanese company, who also came up with the first popular videotape (Betamax), which was then supplented by VHS, developed by JVC (another Japanese company). I'm not even mentioning video consoles by Nintendo and Sony. Usually, new mobile widgets or applications are made available in Japan and Korea 2-3 years before they reach European and American shores. In my opinion, with the incredible dynamism of Asian higher-education institutions and research & development (public or private) centers, the balance of the future of high-tech is tilting heavily towards the east. As my father has been saying for 20 years now, his generation had the American dream, ours should have the Asian dream. But he always adds: don't forget Eastern Europe and Russia on your way to the extreme-East!