Lift06 Blog blather 2, Geneva

Cell phone ads are not subtle, or small, in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China (July 2004)


New Flickr photos online, Feb. 2 day and fondue


Gluing down those thoughts

I like that little exercise where you run through some of the stuff from the day before you go to sleep, to kind of glue the new information to your brain. Here are some random things I remember from today's Lift06 conference without having to look at my notes. The stuff I'm gluing:

from Bruno Giussani -

• These days we all have real and artificial personnas, our offline and online lives (Me-thinks: Isn't this what celebrities have always had to deal with? They cope by getting PR managers, so maybe we'll all need personal PR trainers or managers for our online personnas. A new Internet industry?
• Paypal has more accounts than the largest bank in the world (Me-thinks: So why do I still dislike it and find it rinkydink? Maybe because the last time I was forced to talk to Paypal I put in Switzerland as my address and they insisted and continue to insist on talking to me in German - French or English or Italian are not options. How can you get so big and not figure out that one?
• China has 320 million (check that number) cell phone users (Me-thinks: Is that all?! A Chinese senior newspaper editor in Beijing told me last year that he was worried because in only two years the country had gone from no cells phones to almost everyone having one, or so it seemed. Can any country handle that rate of change, he wondered? I looked around and decided he was right: even compared to Europe, with heavy coverage, China is mad about cell phones and cell phones are mad about China.

from David Galipeau, head of web, UNAIDS -

• Non-profits and for profits using the Internet = making a difference versus making a killing. Nice summary.
• Traditional media will be with us for a while, but there is a convergence of the new media and traditional (Me-thinks: We're in for a shock - only a few months ago I couldn't have envisaged that Time Magazine, for example, might disappear and now I think, yes, it really could. So could a lot of the others. Whole lot of shaking about to happen and are we asking the questions about what that means?)
• www.god.com is the ultimate online experience (Me-thinks: check it out, so I just did and wasn't impressed, but wonder when they registered the domain name - how early on did these people realize what a terrific address that is?)
• It's not technology that will be the killer applications of tomorrow, but social relations. (Me-thinks: I like that. The web getting stronger at what it does best.)

from Matt Jones, Nokia designer -

Play is not frivolous. It's not entertainment. Amen, so where are my toys, guys?

Too late to do more - time to post body count photos on Flickr. Some interesting other Lift 06 blog comments are going up and I want to check them out.