Just a wee bit concerned that the themes mentioned, and the speakers named so far, could very easily talk only about the world as seen from Europe and the US - that is, that the conference could be in Asia, and yet not reflect Asia. Asian consumers are driving industries like gaming, building new models like QQ Gold, etc, which will soon be influencing the West if they're not already. At the same time, Asian governments are pioneering the art of fine-grained control and censorship, Asian dissidents are using cyber-protest, and online group bullying and group-think are more evident and widespread than in the West.... or so it seems...

I love all the themes you've mentioned so far; perhaps they'll be covering the topics I mentioned, but I didn't see that there was any specifically Asian content, so just thought I'd flag it up!

Cheers,

Emlyn

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.