Monday, May 10, 2010

LIFT 10 Recap

Looking back, the three days at LIFT10 have been very inspiring. I have received a lot of diverse input, which clearly made me start thinking about topics I had not been dealing with before.

From a startup's point of view the Alp ICT Venture Night was rather interesting, after all it has only been two years when Dominik himself was standing on that stage and presenting Wuala. This year there were eight Swiss startups pitching: Fontself (your own font for Facebook or your blog), Sobees (a tool letting you track all your different social networks from one single place), HyperWeek (platform for companies and institutions to socialize thier content assets), SECU4 (their product BlueWatchDog is a personal alarm system protecting your valuables from theft and loss), Everdream Soft (Moonga, an online multiplayer game for iPhone and iPod touch), salsaDev (semantic search technology), IceCube2 Net (content management system), and last but not least our friends Atizo (open innovation - sign up if you have lots of ideas and want to contribute).

Since Wuala is also available in Chinese, Basile Zimmermann's talk on Technology and Cultural Differences in China made me think. Zimmermann discussed the cultural differences between China and the Western world, showing us what happens when cultural differences meet technology. Most Western services that have been localized to Chinese are usually not "very Chinese" in the end. For example: If you compare Google's logo with Baidu, you can see that the Google logo in English is much bigger than the Chinese name, while Baidu has the same size for English and for Chinese, thus treating both languages equally. Transferring this to Wuala, this would probably mean that we would have to have a Chinese logo.

As the LIFT conference is about the impact of new technologies, I would like to quote Jamais Cascio: The future is something we create, not something we have. We're making a new future, we can make it the one we want. And this knowledge should be shared.

Impressions from the conference can be found on Wuala.

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