Late 1990s were the haydays of the Korean internet because we had broadband infrastructure that was unrivaled anywhere else. Cyworld, Dialpad, digital goods and other web services and ideas emerged here long before they did in the west.

Korea, China, Japan are the big economies in the east. In regards to the economy their is not that much of a discrepency but in regards to landsize it is very small. If China was a watermelon, and Japan was a strawberry, then Korea would be a pea… actually half a pea.

There are 48 million people in a very small land area. This is bad… until you look at connectivity and broadband penetration. 94 percent broadband penetration in Korea.

Koreans are a homogenous group of people. Things / ideas spread very quickly because of this.

Tehran Valley is the equivalent of Silicon Valley in the US.

Cyworld preceded Facebook by 5 years.

Korea leads the worlds in many areas including how much time ppl spend online.

11 million went to gaming sites. 13 times/ month

Usage is here. But innovation seems to have stopped. Why?

Walled gardens. Portals have lots of traffic coming in but little being sent out. Also mono-culture for browsers… only uses Internet Explorer

Many types of phone plans in Korea but no unlimited data plan in Korea. Korean companies are not giving consumers what they want.

47% of all internet users in Korea illegally downloaded 55 movies per year.

Korean used to be innovators in internet web service but seems to be going backward now.

Mobile data usage is very low too because of the cost.

Entrepreneurs are here. But VCs need to support them.

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Presentation is paraphrased:

Design is a natural innate human ability that is waiting to be released. By educating everyone in design thinking… it is possible to change the world.

Hosted many design thinking workshops and the results are always exciting. People who attend are from all fields and ages.

Participants build mockups at these workshops.

Three part process to get people to design:

1. Provide the opportunity and enviroment (encouragement) to solve real world problems
2. Materials and coaching to build their solutions
3. Show creative results at the end

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The first speakers are Seungbum Kim and Haejin Jung – both practicing general physicians

We have a cafe attached to their medical office to bring some humanity back into medicine… so rather than making the doctor office a sterile scary experience… we try to bring some warmth back into the situation. So we are focused on creating a human oriented medical experience using medical design.

Something as simple as hiding a stethoscope in the doll can make listening to the heartbeat of a baby a much more enjoyable experience than it otherwise would be. And putting candy on a tongue depressor makes sticking that piece of wood in your mouth pleasant… who would have thought?

Enhancing communication between doctors and patients begins with looking at the way the space around a doctor and patient is organized. In a typical doctor/patient consulation a desk and all the stuff on it sits between the doctor and the patient. How can we overcome this?

In a conversation between the doctor and patient, also lose the story that the patient tells. In an effort to capture the symptoms that the patient in complaining about, the doctor focuses on distilling the patients story to a few keywords… headache, vomiting, shortness of breath etc. The patients story in the end is lost.

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The line up of speakers is quite impressive, from a former Apple lead designer to the Founder of Tattertools (Korean version of the Wordpress blogging service). For speakers who present in Korean, they even have headsets so that us Hangul inepts can understand what is going on. Not to mention the Microsoft Surface sitting outside the conference room to play with… also a first for me.

The event host is this guy…. didn’t catch his name

Here is a list of the speakers:

Jaram Lee – a traditional Korean music performer
Dongwon Hong – designer and founder of Typomedia (Geulsee Media in Korean)
Hwang Doo Jin – Architect fusing traditional Korean and modern western design sensibilities
Jihoon Jeong – Medical engineer
Bill Dresselhaus – former designer at Apple and founder of a design consultancy the Dresselhaus Group
Eungyul Lee – world class magician
Seungbum Kim and Haejin Jung – General physician
Yeonho Oh – Journalist
Chang Kim – founder of Tattertools and blogger at Web20asia
Chibok Song – Copywriter for among other things ex-president of Korea Roh Moo-Hyun

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22 Jan 2009. I woke up this morning with hope swirling within my heart and energy coursing through my veins. Today is a new day. Granted everyday is a new day, but today is different. Today the world is different.

And it all began… yesterday. Yesterday was an exciting day for people all around the world, especially Americans. For me, it was without a doubt the most important election in my lifetime.

Obama comes in riding a wave of hope, in a world where hope seems to be an ethereal wisp teasing us as we are slowly engulfed by the darkness surrounding us. In the past few months, we have seen a frightening collapse of the world financial systems. The economy is going from bad to worse. Unemployment is sitting at 7 percent, and economists are projecting double digit unemployment for the coming year. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to drag on. North Korea’s Kim Jung Il is as crazy as ever. And rumbling in the background is the greatest threat to have ever faced humanity… Global Warming. Greatest, not because it is any more threatening than the specter of nuclear war back in the 60s, but because in order to combat this threat, the whole world must unite.

Obama embodies America’s desire to rejoin the world and regain our place as a leader.

But what made all this possible? How did a no-name senator from Illinois, become the 44th President of the United States?

Technology. Sure Obama’s charisma, message of hope, intelligence (no offense Bush) were all factors in his election. But more so than any of those characteristics, it was Obama’s use of technology to empower his campaign and empower his supporters that allowed his message to touch so many, so quickly.

While I am on this topic, Tom Serres, CEO of Piryx and a friend of mine, had some great things to say on CNN about the Obama adminstration and the current/future use of technology by the adminstration and what that means for our country.

What Tom points out and what the whole nation has come to recognize (or at least those savvy enough to recognize it) is that the way we do politics has changed. Social media just entered the mainstream in a whole new way. Obama used social media to power his campaign by empowering his supporters.

CNN and Facebook joined teams to cover Obama’s inauguration, raising the bar on how social media will be used in the future to cover politics, campaigns, elections, and events of importance… or even social events like concerts.

Today, the world changed. It became something new. And I am excited to see how this will play out over the course of the next four years.

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This story sends me back to those times when I built worlds with Legos and imaginary robots with Tinker Toys. And for me the worlds I constructed were the worlds I wanted to live in… to be a part of. Those worlds were the better worlds, and they held all the potential that my monotonous, uninspiring, sometimes unbearable life in southeast Texas did not.

The Esquire story of Dean Kamen – best known for his invention of the Segway Scooter – is that kind of story. Kamen is a true dreamer… a real life Captain Kirk. Kamen belongs on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise proclaiming his defiance to all those who would stand in the way of exploration… charting a course into the unknown so that the rest of humanity may benefit.

Kamen is David Farragut at the Battle of Mobile Bay shouting Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! Because despite the difficulties and obstacles that face him, Kamen will not stop until he has conquered… or died.

The Esquire piece is a long article. But engaging and well worth the time it takes to read if you are like me, and you would see the world for what it could be… not what it is.

Esquire’s How Dean Kamen’s Magical Water Machine Could Save the World by John H. Richardson.

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The Long Now Foundation hosts a very interesting podcast called Seminars in Long Term Thinking (SALT). I was listening to their latest one, and the speaker for the show was Peter Diamandis – the founder of the X PRIZE Foundation. Although he was speaking about the advantages of using large prizes to create incentive to tackle problems in radical new ways, listening to this I think there is another message embedded in it.

For you multi-taskers, if you would like to listen to the podcast while you read, I have also embedded a copy at the bottom of this post. Enjoy.

History of the X PRIZE

On May 19, 1919 Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 to the first person to fly non-stop from New York to London. At the time, no one believed that it could be done. But on May 27, 1927 that prize was won by Charles Lindbergh. Decades later, a young man by the name of Peter Diamandis heard this story and decided to create something radical… a vision that would send him into space.

In 1996, the first X PRIZE was formally announced. Backed by the Ansari family, the X PRIZE was…

“A prize with a goal that sat at the intersection of audacious and achievable…26 teams from 7 countries spent 100 million dollars [in total]” for a 10 million dollar prize. With the success of SpaceShipOne, we changed the paradigm that spaceflight was just for governments…and we changed government regulation in the process.”

Since the maiden flight of SpaceShipOne on October 4, 2004, there has been more than $1.5 billion dollars in public and private expenditure in support of the private spaceflight industry. This story is Peter Diamandis’ vision.

The X PRIZE Today

Now backed by Google co-founders Larry Paige, Sergey Brin and others, the scope of the X PRIZE has expanded dramatically and in some senses become even more ambitious than that original goal “to reach an altitude of 100km, and to do it again within two weeks”. Today the X PRIZE Foundation offers or will be offering prizes in 5 distinct verticals:

• Energy and Environment
• Global Development – wealth creation to combat poverty
• Exploration – space and underwater
• Education
• The Life Sciences

Listening to this, I can’t help but want to turn back the clock and start my schooling all over again. I want to take the right courses and learn the things that I need to so that I can help tackle one of these problems. And I cannot alone in this feeling. Since the Ansari X PRIZE was won, the X PRIZE Foundation have seen an extraordinary amount of interest – interest on the magnitude of “five and a half billion media impressions”. Alas since I cannot go back in time and choose a new course, I will do what I can to promote this and encourage our children to tackle these problems.

Making Incentive Prizes Work

So how does it work?

“When there is a market failure… when things are stuck… when there are entrenched bureaucracies… and when there is a stigma surrounding it – people are saying that ‘this’ cannot be done, that is when these incentive prizes like the X PRIZE work best.”

Do we face this problem in the way we educate our children today? I would say so, and there are many out there who would agree with me. So what can be done?

Making It Work For Education

As I see it the X PRIZE can be leveraged in two different ways to benefit education.

On the one side it can inspire educators and non-educators alike to invent and evolve in order to change the way we educate. The X PRIZE Foundation envisions prizes in two areas:

• Learning technologies: software and platform trials for products/services that dramatically accelerate learning and expand access.
• City competitions: mobilizing new resources and methods to improve early learning or college/work readiness.

Now I don’t know how many of you have read Ender’s Game but part of the training that the protagonist Ender Wiggens undergoes takes place through a computer game based on adaptive digital content. The game continuously assesses Ender’s skill, his interests, and his reactions to customize delivery. So why am I telling you this?

Ender’s Game was written in 1985 – the nascent stages of the personal computer industry. Orson Scott Card, the author, imagined an educational computer game like the one envisioned by the X PRIZE a decade before the X PRIZE was born. We live in a time now where his fictional visions can become a reality. We live in a time where sci-fiction can become… and does become reality. As educators we need to realize this, and we need to hold on to that vision because unless we do, we will not change the way our kids learn.

Additionally, the X PRIZE can inspire our students, just as it inspires us. Some of the competitions being presented by the X PRIZE Foundation may take decades to come to fruition. And they can serve as long term objectives for the children growing up today.

Who knows… maybe one of your students will win a billion dollars and save our planet in the process. It is our job to make sure they realize that this dream is possible.

Listen to the full podcast below. Click here to return to the top.

Download X PRIZE Founder Peter Diamandis Speaks About Highly Leveraged Incentive Driven Competitions

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- Barack Obama

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But there is a lesson to be learned from this. Because what David Rose is discussing is not how to sell an idea or a company, but rather how to inspire trust. And that – inspiring trust – is something that we could all become better at.

Enjoy the video. If you would rather skip to the pitch, just keep scrolling down the page.

Ten Things to Remember About Inspiring Trust

Before we get into this list, you must believe in one thing before you begin. If you don’t, you will fail.

You must believe in YOU – you are the most important thing at that moment. If you don’t believe it, why would the people you are talking to? Inspiration begins with confidence.

And now for the list. By order of importance the characteristics you must portray are:

1. Integrity
2. Passion about your idea / ideals
3. Experience ingrained from your past mistakes
4. Knowledge about the your world
5. Skills in everything from technical to marketing to speaking
6. Leadership
7. Commitment to your idea / ideals
8. Vision to change the world
9. Realism to know the limits
10. Ability to Listen so you can learn from others

Back to the top.

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