Lift Conference

Lift13 Recap

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 11:59:01 GMT

Over 1000 participants coming from 30 countries, including 70 journalists and bloggers came together to share, connect and create new opportunities. We had a wonderful time at this 8th edition of Lift in Geneva and we hope you enjoyed it too, and left inspired and lifted!

For more information: http://liftconference.com/lift13

Harming and Protecting Robots

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 14:49:47 GMT

Robots act more and more socially, and humans thus get more and more entangled emotionally, ethically and perhaps even legally. The workshop participants will explore the psychology of hurting and killing robots designed to bond with humans. In small groups they will make social experiments, record their reactions and contemplate potential future social and legal norms to deal with seemingly sentient robotic companions.
Workshop concept & moderation by Kate Darling and Hannes Gassert.

Promise: A constitution for the people by the people.

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 18:29:59 GMT

Following the economic crash in Iceland in 2008, there was a general demand for reform. This included increased pressure to perform a thorough revision of the Constitution, which had been set when Iceland became an independent republic in 1944. A process was initiated whereby the public was called to the table to prepare a constitutional bill. In the talk, the following issues will be discussed: Did the public participate? How did this go? Where is the project now? What have we learned?

Lightning in the Age of Cloud Computing

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 20:26:20 GMT

Honor Harger is a curator from New Zealand who has a particular interest in artistic uses of technologies. She is currently director of Lighthouse, a digital culture agency in Brighton, UK. Lighthouse works at the intersection of the art, film and the digital creative industry sectors, producing vibrant, inspirational programmes that show how important artists and filmmakers are in a changing media landscape. Lighthouse shows work in their own venue in Brighton, and works in partnership with galleries, museums, and festivals, nationally and internationally.

References and further information regarding the projects shown in the talk:
http://honorharger.posterous.com/lift-talk-references-credits

Quel futur pour l'industrie du luxe?

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:42:52 GMT

Deux des entrepreneurs les plus innovants du moment partageront leur vision pour le futur de leur industrie. Un débat qui évoquera les grands défis que posent les technologies, et l'arrivée de nouveaux acteurs issus des pays émergents.
Avec Xavier Dietlin, fondateur Dietlin Artisans Métalliers depuis 1854 SA et Maximilian Büsser, fondateur et Creative Director MB&F.

Reading the riots on Twitter

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 14:43:39 GMT

Farida Vis is the lead social media researcher on a team that studied 2.6M tweets sent during the UK riots. The project, 'Reading the Riots on Twitter' (led by Professor Rob Procter) is a collaboration with The Guardian newspaper and Twitter. At Lift12 she gave a detailed and documented account of what happened. You will see that the early conclusions governing bodies jumped to are not very accurate...

The data visualisation documenting the rumours that circulated on Twitter at the time, built by The Guardian Interactive team (led by Alastair Dant) has recently won a Data Journalism Award for the category data visualisation and storytelling (national/international). The full visualisation can be seen here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/interactive/2011/dec/07/london-riots-twitter.

Have a look at the slides: slidesha.re/RTRTlift12

Powerpoint vs people

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 14:12:48 GMT

Pierre Croce, a worldwide authority on creating winning Powerpoint™ presentations to empower the audience into making the best decisions of their smart lives™.

The future of money

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 13:58:28 GMT

We could have some fun guessing about the future of money, or we could look at a future for financial services. Using a scenario model developed for that purpose, David Birch explores what it means for money.

Lift12 Recap

Thu, 31 May 2012 17:44:55 GMT

The 7th edition of Lift in Geneva welcomed over 1000 people from 30 countries for 2.5 days of inspiration and networking. It covered themes like Technology and/in Crisis, The New Face of Gaming, Digital Innovation in Luxury, Beyond Finance and Extreme Hackers.

The Lift12 program featured over 40 talks by speakers such as David Rowan (Wired UK), Nick Heller (Google), Anais St. Jude (Stanford), JP Rangaswami (Salesforce) and Sean Park (Anthemis). Besides the talks participants were invited to join over 20 workshops, a Google Dating Fondue, the start-up venture night and the Röstigraben Express Train from Zurich to Geneva.

Thank you all for making this fantastic experience happen, see you at Lift13 :)

Swiss-Korean Innovation Night, curated by Lift

Thu, 31 May 2012 11:00:16 GMT

April 18th 2012 we had the great opportunity to produce our 4th LIft Event in Korea. The Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, Presence Switzerland mandated us to curate a Lift event in Seoul, taking place prior to the 2012 Expo in Yeosu.

Under the code name “Swiss-Korean Innovation Night” this event featured the traditional Lift ingredients: disruptive ideas, inspiring projects, carefully prepared speeches from pioneers of their fields and entertaining social events in a beautifully designed space. It's mission was to celebrate innovation and create and reinforce bridges of friendship between Swiss and Korean pioneers.

We had a wonderful time, thank you all so much for coming and making it happen, 감사합니다 :)

Alp ICT Venture Night 2012

Fri, 25 May 2012 17:27:20 GMT

In this 4th edition of the Alp ICT Venture Night the following 8 start-ups pitched their projects to the audience: ZMS - InZair // Ecowizz - Geroco // Poken // pebbleage SA // Faveeo // Projet Amanda - Solvaxis Online // Eyep Media / Utribo // Museeka.
Based on the live voting during the event the audience chose ZMS - InZair as the winner of the Alp ICT Venture Night. Congratulations !

The real journey of an entrepreneur

Thu, 17 May 2012 18:45:03 GMT

In the opening keynote of the venture night Christian Wanner, co-founder of leshop.ch, shows how the life of an entrepreneur can be really though. He compares this challenge to a legendary antarctic expedition in 1915, where a team of explorers was stuck in big blocks of ice during three months. Christian motivates start-ups to really fight for their visions and encourages them to (almost) never surrender, however though the challenges they face might be.

Killing your digital identity

Tue, 08 May 2012 18:18:02 GMT

One of the co-inventors of the web 2.0 suicide machine, Gordan Savicic will tell us the story of his invention, and why he is on a mission to help users be smarter about their digital identities.

etoy.CORPORATION - twisting capitalism & technology since 1994

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:39:53 GMT

etoy.CORPORATION SA is a corporate sculpture and a shareholder company registered in the city of Zug/Switzerland, using corporate structures to maximize cultural values. Since 1994 etoy is hacking the dominating model of the individual artist: the concept of the independent star and glorified genius is replaced by an abstract trademark - etoy. Legendary for its «digital hijack» (1,5 million search engine users
kidnapped in 1996), etoy also coordinated «TOYWAR», a milestone in hacktivism, bringing down a multi-billion dotcom operation and thus creating the most expensive performance in art history. A pioneer in container architecture inspired by the Internet's paket system etoy currently invests all resources in MISSION ETERNITY – a digital cult of the dead and a long term data archive focusing on pioneers of the information age.

Dancing with Handcuffs: The Geography of Trust in Social Networks

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:19:42 GMT

How did a student end up making international headlines for throwing shoes at the architect of China's internet censorship infrastructure and then become the hero for information freedom worldwide? Tricia tells us what happened to the student and how the outcomes were dependent on a variety of factors that tells us a lot about how we socialize and build trust online.

Mass customisation and 3D printing

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 12:51:21 GMT

Lisa Harouni is responsible dor the day-to-day management of Digital Forming, a startup that offers design companies and lifestyle brands a competitive edge by allowing customers to get involved in the design process of products.

After an introduction about 3D printing technologies, Lisa will show their benefits and implications for both businesses and individual: rapid prototyping, mass customization, return of local production, consequences on copyright laws, and more.

She will also describe the potential fields of applications of this technology in the near future.

WE FELL IN LOVE IN A CODED SPACE

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 14:29:51 GMT

James Bridle talks about literature and storytelling when everything has become digital, the construction of knowledge and collaborating with robots. Ham, spam, word salad, and what is important in a tent.

Open Source Nuclear Fusion

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 11:34:13 GMT

Mark Suppes built a nuclear fusion reactor with no formal science background. Prior to the fusion project, Mark became comfortable tackling the improbable with eight years of web startups. In these startups, he learned that it's better to be too ambitious than not ambitious enough. Considering the time and effort a startup requires, it makes sense to aim high. Then, in late 2008 Mark watched a video that would change his life. In that video Dr. Robert Bussard revealed his secret invention: a new approach to nuclear fusion called the Polywell. Bussard believed his invention could provide abundant and inexpensive clean energy; something the world desperately needs. Mark took an intense fascination to the Polywell. This fascination grew and spurred Mark to attempt building his own Polywell. Since he had no prior science background the project presented many steep learning curves. Over the course of three years Mark's Polywell fusion reactor project has transformed into a community project with hundreds of contributors. Mark's open source project has built the world's first amateur Polywell, a small but important step on the long journey to clean energy.

Networking for the Unexpected: Building resilience and innovation with...

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:00:54 GMT

What are the desirable qualities in a communication network? Affordability, ubiquity, reliability, privacy, convenience. In the developing world, mobile networks are delivering telephony and broadband where it has never gone before but often at the expense of the above qualities. Village Telco, an Open Source, DIY, telco-in-a-box puts the power of telephone and broadband infrastructure in local hands and offers a complementary alternative network to conventional telecommunications services.

Visualizing urban flows with mobile data

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:51:54 GMT

In this presentation about the "Villes Vivantes" project with the City of Geneva, Lift and Interactive Things, Benjamin Widerkehr describes how the huge quantity of data generated by mobile phone usage can be employed to visualize urban flows. Benjamin focuses on how to create meaningful stories based on these data.

Open Data: How We Got Here and Where We're Going by Rufus Pollock

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:39:02 GMT

Over the past few years, there has an explosive growth in open data with significant uptake in government, research and elsewhere. Open data has the potential to transform society, government and the economy, from how we travel to work to how we decide to vote. But we
have only just begun down this road, and the going, even so far, has not always been easy.

In his talk, Rufus Pollock introduces the idea of open data, explains how, and why, we are where we are today, and, finally, looks to the future of the rapidly evolving open data ecoystem.

Technologies vs people

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 09:35:01 GMT

JP Rangaswami discusses the following interrogations: did technology make our lives easier or worse? What are the things that got better, beyond the obvious and utopian views? Did technologies make our jobs easier or worse? Are we collaborating better?

Level vs. Level Are in the future all games gamified?

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:00:50 GMT

In this short presentation about gamification, Niklaus Moor focuses on the psychological mechanisms of video games and the role of motivation in game design. He describes how applying game mechanisms beyond entertainment is quite challenging and tricky.

The future of mobile phone applications

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:30:44 GMT

Nick Heller addresses the future of mobile phone application, using technologies such artificial intelligence, sensors or voice recognition and how they relate to developed and developing countries. More specifically, he addresses what could we the western learn from other developing markets that have access to new technologies. With examples such as the use of internet of things and real-time language translation (from English to Zulu, Afrikaan to Zulu).

The Open Source Satellite Initiative

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:54:17 GMT

Space programs so far have been the domain of governments and the military-industrial complex - rarely ever have individuals ventured into outer space. But after years of research Korean artist
and independent satellite engineer Hojun Song has found that it is indeed possible to launch and operate a personal satellite at a fairly reasonable price. For the past six years he has been exploring ways to integrate the concept of a personal satellite project into cultural contexts and into his artistic practice. As his first satellite will take off from Kazakhstan this August he came to Lift to share his story, his struggles and his plans.

Peer-to-Peer Currencies: The Amazing (And True!) Story of Bitcoin

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 11:42:31 GMT

The story of Bitcoin: how the world's most famous peer to peer currency went through a gold rush, a bubble, and a crash in only a few months.

Democratizing Innovation - Grandma likes that by Fabian Hemmert

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 10:07:15 GMT

In his talk, Fabian Hemmert talks about the democratization of technological innovation. He shows a series of projects conducted at the Design Research Lab in Berlin, which, rather than serving the average user, embraced niches and extremes.

Perspective on information overload by Anaïs Saint-Jude

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 17:41:06 GMT

Is information overload really new? Anais Saint Jude will provide a bit of perspective by looking at another great period of innovation: the 17th century.

Reinventing finance, one startup at the time

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:09:01 GMT

Sean Park believes finance will change radically in the coming months. He will show us some of the startups he believes in, from people reinventing banks to new payment systems.

Here are the links Sean mentions in his talk:

And just in case you are interested/curious, here are the other companies currently in the Anthemis ecosystem:

FinanceACar – World’s first car finance comparison site
MileSense – Turning data into intelligent risk analysis
Metamarkets – Fast insight for big data
BluFin – Look at finance in a new way
MoBank – Cutting edge mCommerce solutions
PayPerks – Powering innovative solutions for the financially underserved
PeerIndex – Understand your social capital
Hooplo – Social games publishing platform
Visual.ly – Data visualization platform for big data

David Rowan "Startup entrepreneurs should move to Africa now"

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 12:14:49 GMT

David Rowan thinks featured Africa is the next place where great technological innovations will happen. He will explain how startup entrepreneurs should move there.

Lift12 preview with Sylvie Reinhard, Nicolas Nova and Laurent Haug

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:06:52 GMT

Short Preview of Lift12 by the Lift Team. We took the challenge of describing the conference in less than three minutes, and we failed! But really it is a condensed, action packed preview of what to expect on Feb 22-24 2012 in Geneva!

Philippe Lemoine "Wrap up and Take aways"

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 09:20:42 GMT

In his speech, Philippe Lemoine sum up all sessions that took place at Lift France 11 and brightly concludes by some inspiring take aways.

Roger Malina "Lift France 11 Wrap-up"

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 09:04:14 GMT

Roger Malina brings the first conclusion to Lift France 11 and comes back on some of the most inspiring speeches of the conference.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang "Contemplative Computing"

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:43:29 GMT

Information technologies today interrupt and distract us, dividing our attention across a range of activities and devices. This feels like an inevitable state of affairs, but Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues in his talk that it is not. Drawing on recent work in embodied cognition, contemplative practices, and interface design, he describes how we can create and use information technologies in a more thoughtful, meditative way, to help us work in a more sustained, creative and focused manner. He also explains what contemplative computing might mean for individuals as well as corporations, institutions and civic actors.

Juliana Rotich "Ushahidi: Powered by Open Source"

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 08:25:55 GMT

What happens when barriers to use of technology are lowered? What can we learn from the Ushahidi open source community and the technology landscape in Africa about the opportunity and the limits of open innovation?

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino "Homesense project: agile and open innovation...

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:16:40 GMT

In her speech, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino gives an update on the methodology and results employed in the Homesense experiment: a project that rethinks how we design smart homes and investigate how we interact with technologies at home. This project applies open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home.

Kris de Decker "Ecotech myths and lessons from the past"

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:10:56 GMT

The present-day approach towards a sustainable society is doomed to fail. The focus on sophisticated technology - electric and hybrid cars, energy-efficient devices, solar panels and wind turbines, for instance - has little or no effect because these green technologies require large amounts of energy and resources for their manufacture, which makes their development highly dependent on a continuous supply of fossil fuels. What we need to solve our problems is exactly the opposite: less sophisticated technology. There is a lot to learn from the past. While they often worked surprisingly good, most of low-tech solutions have been completely forgotten. In his speech, Kris de Decker explains that reverting to past technologies does not mean that we should go back to the Middle Ages. Rather, it means combining old tech with new knowledge and new materials, or applying old concepts and lost knowledge to modern technology.

Gabriel Borges "Open innovation initiatives"

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:26:15 GMT

Gabriel shares the experiences of two different initiatives based on open innovation. One from a group of friends that got tired of not having the international concerts they wanted in their city, and decided to produce them by themselves with the help of social media. The other project comes from Fiat that decided to invite the consumers to help in the design of a concept car. Almost 15 months later, the auto-maker had a new concept model created with the help of 17 thousand people. Both projects were held in Brazil, a nation that is beholding an almost silent digital revolution as result of their current economy arose.

Ville Keränen "From Team Academy to the future: Building organizations for...

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:08:31 GMT

In his speech, Ville Keränen presents the Team Academy, founded in 1993 by Johannes Partanen. The concept is really different from all schools we know: no lectures, no teaching, no exams, no grades, no simulations, but instead: team company, real clients and projects, lots of dialogue, and team coach. Through various examples, he explains the principles of such a school and what we could get from it.

Anna Meroni "Feeding Milano: a human platform to regain the meaning of slowness"

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 08:57:33 GMT

Food, in Latin cultures, means conviviality, pleasure, taking care of the others and being loved. How can the principle of conviviality, as pleasurable and collaborative relationship, change the way a city feed itself? Anna Meroni believes this principle impacts also the way in which producers and consumers get in touch and exchange produce and knowledge.

Anna Meroni created in Milano, together with Slow Food, a human platform supported by information technology that is designing and prototyping a number of new services to shorten the food chain and feed the city. We can see this platform as a design supported community that is experimenting a brand new system of possibilities to create a sustainable foodshed, by building a network of trust and sympathy among producers themselves and with consumers. It encourages the last mile to be a human mile and relationships to happen, which implies also for designers being there and creating human links as a way to operate. In her speech, Anna Meroni addresses the design challenge of making that possible.

Edial Dekker "Trusted networks and the rise of the micro-entrepreneur"

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 10:55:29 GMT

We're in a world where exponential change is the new normal. Old economic structures are being challenged by newer ones and networked technologies are changing the way we can distribute resources. For a world with so limited resources, it's amazing how much idle-capacity we have at the moment. This does not only apply to natural resources such as minerals and forests, but also applies to human resources, such as knowledge, skills, and tangible resources such as tools and equipment. In his presentation, Edial Dekker dives deeper in the role of social layers connected to the 'social object' of distributed resources and the effects that it has on the network. The talk will touch the concept of a trusted network, the rise of the micro-entrepreneur and why it challenges us to rethink the way corporations and organizations are structured.

Geoff Mulgan "Openness and collective intelligence, its prospects and its...

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 14:30:59 GMT

In his speech, Geoff Mulgan talks about collective intelligence and how we think about the idea of openness. Through several examples, he introduces a reflection around crowd sourcing data and its use.

Jonathan Kuniholm "Open Prosthetics, where it comes from, what it changes,...

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:28:09 GMT

Open Prosthetics is a movement and a community that looks (i) to find economically feasible ways of producing medical devices for underserved medical populations and (ii) to give patients a way to participate to (even large and sophisticated) projects that develop technologies in their name. By facilitating the exchange of knowledge, Open prosthetics has allowed projects to develop that make prosthesis more available, while others focus more on new possibilities that would never find a market before that (such as specialized, customized, or even fancy replacement limbs), or even new ways of producing high-end research (lego hands for prototyping...).

Alain Renk "Unlimited cities"

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 10:17:22 GMT

Alain Renk describes "Unlimited Cities", a participatory platform used by architect to enable citizens to change their neighborhood. A rapid prototyping tool, this service aims at allowing people to bring their ideas and react to architectural or urbanistic proposals in a situated way.

Robin Chase "Building the cities of the future: People empowered (by...

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 09:02:03 GMT

Cities were once constructed by the efforts of individuals, until the grand plans of master architects, and then city planning departments took over, making sense of the "chaos." The city of the future will be both globally connected and highly local and customized -- once again shaped primarily by the individuals living within it. This new power will include sustainable local economies and be thanks to the miracle of the Internet combined with fast, easy access it to through ubiquitous mobile devices and sensors throughout our environment.

Tobie Kerridge "Debating Biotechnology – Speculative Design as Public...

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:59:10 GMT

In this speech, Tobie Kerridge describes the "Material Beliefs" project, a design research project with a focus on a speculative approach to biotechnology as a form of engagement with the public.

Paul Wicks "Putting patients at the center of healthcare; disruption in...

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 10:17:55 GMT

The current disruption in healthcare corresponds to the fact that patients can access tools to gather information, aggregate data, act, and see results reflected in real-time. In his speech, Paul Wicks presents the consequences which can be listed as follows:
Medicine: Patients are more engaged with managing their own illness, receive better outcomes / resistance from medical community in some quarters
Research: Patients can find out about clinical trials going on anywhere in the world and participate online or even carry out their own research programs - increasingly being viewed as credible in the peer-reviewed world
Business: Payers want to pay for improved outcomes, not transactions. The pill must be shown to be more effective than existing alternatives in the real world, not just a placebo in a controlled trial.
Safety: Patients can submit their own safety events in real-time and enter in to a dialogue with manufacturers about how to improve their products.

Frédéric Mazzella "How car-pooling can help forecast car traffic"

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:10:00 GMT

Carpooling consists in sharing a car on a similar trip. Drivers publish their available seats with a price, and passengers buy seats for home-to-work carpooling (on a day-to-day basis for a distance of around 20km) and long-distance carpooling (one-off trips or week-end round-trips for distances of 300km in average). The speech focuses on how to forecast car traffic based on car-pooling platforms with visual representations.

David Marcus "New business models in mobile channels"

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 16:04:02 GMT

In this February 2008 presentation, David Marcus, founder and CEO of Zong, talks about the new business models created by mobile channels. Zong lets people use their mobile phones to buy virtual goods. The system is easy to use: enter your number, go through the verification process, and pay on your monthly cell phone bill. Zong, which works with 250 mobile network operators in 45 countries, was acquired in July by ebay, and David is now VP Mobile for Paypal.

Adam Greenfield "On public objects: connected things and civic...

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 10:09:00 GMT

This talk explores some of the issues that emerge around networked information-collecting objects in our public spaces, and to frame a taxonomy of such objects from the unobjectionable (due to local effect and a clear public good associated with them) to those that ought to be causing us significant concern (no public benefit, global impact, pernicious second-order effects).

Saskia Sassen "The Future of Smart Cities"

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 10:21:56 GMT

A leading researcher on globalization, global cities and new technologies Saskia Sassen discusses the current hype around smart cities. She reminds us that “It is the need to design a system that puts all that technology truly at the service of the inhabitants—and not the other way around.”

Timo Arnall "Making things visible"

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 14:00:00 GMT

A designer and researcher at Oslo School of Architecture, Timo Arnall offers here his perspective about networked objects and ubiquitous computing. His presentation, and the intriguing design examples he takes, highlights two phenomena. On the one hand, he describes how sensors and RFIDs can enable to "make things visible" as the title of his presentation expresses. On the other hand, he shows the importance of going beyond screen-based interactions.

Eric Favre "The story of the invention of Nespresso" (FR)

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 14:07:00 GMT

From Nespresso to Monodor, the story of an inventor. Eric Favre patented the Nespresso process in 1978, the first step of the amazing story of an inventor turning his idea into one of the world's most successful product.

Carlo Ratti "The Sensable City"

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 14:00:00 GMT

Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT, shows various projects he and his lab conducted around the theme of sensed data (mobile phone, flickr pictures) and how they allow to reveal new information layer on top of urban space and or lead to new experience for citizens.

Jan Chipchase "Literacy, Communication & Design"

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:00:00 GMT

Jan Chipchase is Principal Scientist at Nokia Research Center. He presents about "Literacy, Communication & Design" at the LIFT07 conference on Thursday, February 8, 2007

Sampo Karjaleinen "Open-ended play in Habbo Hotel"

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 22:47:00 GMT

Sampo Karjalainen is Chief Creative Officer at Sulake Corporation. He presents "Open-ended play in Habbo" at the LIFT07 conference in Geneva.

Jose A. Briones: "A New Approach To Innovation Management"

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 22:12:38 GMT

This video has been uploaded by a member of the Lift community. To send us your videos, click here.

Product innovation has been described as the way out of today's difficult business environment. However, the rate of success of development projects, in particular white space or disruptive innovation projects remains too low.
We believe that a reason for the low success rate is the erroneous application of methods designed for incremental innovation like Stage Gate to projects with high levels of uncertainty. In this presentation we will discuss the different types of development projects based on degree of uncertainty, and the creation of different project tracks. Projects are managed using different tool sets based on the best fit between information available and decision making needs. (

John Tackara "Design and sustainability"

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 22:43:00 GMT

John Thackara, who is director of Doors of Perception, gives a provocative talk about the role of design in finding solutions to the ecological crisis. After inviting us to avoid terms such as "future" or "sustainable" as they maintain a certain distance to the problem we face, he shows a rich set of projects he participated in. He makes the important point that the resources to be put in place already exist and that they might not necessitates complex technological developments.

Vinton Cerf "From the Jurassic Era of the Internet to its Futures" (FR)

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 22:41:00 GMT

IP protocol inventor Vinton Cerf, who is now Vice President and Internet Evangelist at Google gave the concluding talk at Lift 09. After a quick recap of the history of the Internet, he basically gives an enthusiastic tour of its current limits (bitrot, IP address shortage) as well projects about its evolution, such as interplanetary internet though satellites.

Lift France 11, with Fing

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 14:57:54 GMT

This video presents a snapshot of the Lift France 11 conference. This 3rd edition of Lift France took place on July 6-8 2011 in Marseille, France and welcomed over 700 participants.

Sugata Mitra "How kids teach themselves"

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 22:38:00 GMT

Speaking at LIFT 2007, Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own -- and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?

Bruce Sterling "Shaping Things"

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 12:50:00 GMT

Following publication of his book "Shaping Things", American Science Fiction author Bruce Sterling share his views and visions at LIFT France 09 about the future of Design, the broad concept of an "Internet of Things", and reflects on two important issues: Privacy and Recycling. Bruce has been a regular speaker at LIFT events.

Gunter Pauli "Changing the planet"

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 12:49:00 GMT

Gunter Pauli, from the "Zero Emissions Research Initiative" gives a vibrant speech about how nature provides an important model to find solutions to the ecological crisis. His call for action is followed by disruptive and inspiring examples ranging from battery-less devices to biomimetism.

Suren Erkman "Industrial Ecology"

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 18:39:33 GMT

Suren Erkman is an entrepreneur and a professor at the University of Lausanne, and a specialist of industrial ecology. We are living in a hyperindustrial society where the usage of energy and materials keeps increasing. He uses a hypothetical example about traveling to Mars to explain that we can't sustain our life without closing the loops -- ie. living like the biosphere: space missions show us that there are limits to economic activity. The biosphere is a model for the economy. It's both a constraint, but also a source of innovation. If you develop sophisticated techs for really recycling all materials.

Industrial ecology (where ecology is the science of ecosystems) has three specificities:

we need a broad and rigorous conceptual framework to approach the long-term evolution of the industrial and economic system and how it interacts with the biosphere.
it's coupled with an operational strategy, so it's a conceptual framework for action: you can't just recycle everything in any way, need to take impacts into account.
it's a collective and cooperative strategy. It's not enough that individuals do the best they can for the environment, we must work at every level.
The basic idea of IE is that of an integrated model of economic activity. What we want to achieve is a mature industrial ecosystem. Need of course to understand how the ecosystem works: inputs and outputs of the economic system ("industrial metabolism"). You can apply this model to all product or service: how much energy and material is needed to send an e-mail, or to produce a shoe? Whatever enters the system needs to come out.

Geneva has introduced industrial ecology in the cantonal law. He shows a graph summarizing the total metabolism of the whole Geneva economy (water, food, wood, plastics, etc going in, and waste/incineration, landfill, recycling and water treatment coming out - with thousands of tons of carbon expelled during the "digestion").

The industrial metabolism of the knowledge-based economy is very electricity-intensive (in industrialized countries already 5-10% of energy consumptions goes to serve IT needs, and growing); and it's very materials intensive (metals, etc). So on one side infotech is needed for an efficient operation of the hyperindustrial economy; on the other end we should start taking care of the overall metabolism of the ICT system. An immaterial economy is different from a dematerialized economy. In order to delive "immaterial" goods we are using huge infrastructures and resources.

He offers a roadmap for maturation of the industrial ecosystem:

circularize the economy
minimize the losses
dematerialize the economy
decarbonize the economy
For example: when we talk about recycling, what we should really be talking about is cascading: the waste of one sector should/could be resource for another; and create new activities to valorize resources that so far have been wasted.

Convergence is more than digital: it's about nano, biotech, IT and cognition sciences - and all of the above converging with autonomy (objects that have a capacity to self-repair, learn, and self-replicating). This will be big, and carries also serious risks. We need to interlink two dimensions: material dimension (resources) and the symbolic dimension (cultural).

He ends on a positive notes: if you look at the industrial ecology system, there are a number of new activities and jobs for the future: designer and manager of eco-industrial networks; industrial metabolism analysts; regional dieteticians (in charge of studying metabolism of a region and balancing the "diet" of it); dematerializers and decarbonizers of products and services; nano-dissipators; etc.

(Session recap by Bruno Giussani)

Florence Chee "Localizations of global games: cross-cultural lessons"

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 10:52:03 GMT

What happens when global games meet local culture? In this talk, Florence Chee discusses the idea of games as a medium of communication and how it may look the same or different depending on where in the world you may find yourself. How do factors like culture, social structure, and infrastructure affect how people play online games in different global contexts? Drawing from ethnographic studies of games from all over the map, game designers, engineers, or cultural theorists will be interested in this discussion of the contingent factors that arise from public and private game play that is sometimes not about the game at all.

Memi Beltrame "The free view on Art that anyone can edit"

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 10:04:20 GMT

What is Art ? In a witty presentation Memi Beltrame introduce his project Artypedia.
Artypedia is a Wiki located at http://artypedia.org Its point is to challenge the general understanding of what art is. Artypedia features selected articles from the Wikipedia, with the main term of the article replaced with the term "art".

Jennifer Gay "Google Translate, Skype conferencing, and the future of my...

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 16:07:49 GMT

Jennifer has been behind the scenes - or rather tucked away in a booth - at Lift for the past 4 years. Listening to and interpreting speakers talking about how technology is changing - and will continue to change - how we work. Will it change how Jennifer works? And in the mean time, can some of the speakers get a clue about how complicated it is to follow them? A brief history of conference interpreting, the fun of the present, and how things might change for interpreters!

Alp ICT Venture Night

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 10:20:53 GMT

Alp ICT hosted their third venture night during Lift11. Following the successful 2008 and 2010 experiences that saw eight startups present in front of the audience, more startups were given the chance to accelerate their development by presenting their ideas, products and services to the Lift community. Here are the 8 companies invited to present at Lift11: actracsys, L'Avenue Digital Media, nviso, Geoli.st, NEXTthink, ShopAlive, publiwide and Voice on a Cloud.

Yasmine Abbas "Neo-nomadism"

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 10:04:40 GMT

To soothe the stress of travel, today’s mobile individuals (neo-nomads) engage in tactics of re:location, recreating an image of home but producing a lot of waste. The spaces /objects designed with mobility in mind should focus on bringing comfort to the neo-nomads while addressing the issue of waste.

David Calvo "Beyond transmedia"

Mon, 30 May 2011 12:33:14 GMT

How to built your own cosmos ? In a whimsical attempt to eradicate the narrative debate from the game design process, David Calvo defines an ethic of development, an “affectionate anarchism” leading back to the original source driving creation on any support: poesis.

Alex Osterwalder "A new approach to designing business models"

Mon, 30 May 2011 12:31:00 GMT

Alex Osterwalder is the best-selling author of Business Model Generation. He tells us how organizations start approaching the challenge of designing business models in a radically new way. Companies learn how to test their business models upfront, iterating on the feedback received from their clients, thereby reducing the risk of failure.

Lucie Green "Researching and studying the sun"

Wed, 25 May 2011 10:14:15 GMT

The Sun is our closest and most important star, and is important to study because of its major impact on our planet, and therefore on our lives. This talk looks at the latest global research into solar activity and the stunning imagery provided by international spacecraft which reveal the Sun at its most dramatic.

Nick Coates "Co-creation: present and future"

Tue, 24 May 2011 09:40:52 GMT

Nick Coates of Promise Communities explains the fundamental rules that make co-creation possible. He shows how an idea that has been around for decades is being put back into the spotlight by communication technologies, and tells the audience what to expect for the future of this re-emerging discipline.

Tara Shears "An update on the Large Hadron Collider project"

Tue, 24 May 2011 09:40:17 GMT

The Large Hadron Collider, one of science's most ambitious project ever, is producing headlines a few kilometers from Geneva. Tara Shears gives us an update on the recent findings (including the creation and capture of antimatter!), and tells us what to expect from the LHC in the near future.

Jennifer Magnolfi "Programming space habitat"

Wed, 18 May 2011 10:05:21 GMT

Jennifer talks about the design process for space habitats, how designers and engineers approach the creation of space habitats for the extreme conditions offered by life in micro-gravity environments.

Vlad Trifa "What about a web of things?"

Mon, 16 May 2011 10:03:45 GMT

The Internet of Things (IOT) has been portrayed as the ideal solution to many problems in various disciplines. After describing the problems with our current approaches to build the IOT, Vlad proposes his refined version of the IOT vision - the Web of Things.

Sabine Hauert "Robotics today"

Fri, 13 May 2011 13:08:24 GMT

Sabine is a researcher from the EPFL specializing in robotics. Her presentation explains how robots are changing the way we live and work, with more autonomous and intelligent machines coming to us in the near future. Sabine closes her talk by explaining the legal and ethical challenges facing this growing industry.

Marcel Kampman "Reinventing schools - project Dream School"

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:40:31 GMT

What if you could reinvent a school from scratch? What would you change, how would the technologies that reinvent education impact the construction and design of the building? Marcel Kampman is taking over that challenge in the Netherlands, and share the story of "Project DreamSchool".

Brian Solis "Social currencies"

Mon, 09 May 2011 09:50:50 GMT

Brian Solis discusses the notion of social currency, how the activity we have on social networks helps build an important asset: social capital.

Tiffany St James "How to encourage involvement in online communities"

Fri, 06 May 2011 14:59:22 GMT

Tiffany talks about how people are using online communities to galvanise like-minded participants into action and what we can learn from grass-roots community collaboration to support our own endeavours.

Chris Heathcote "The invisible communities"

Wed, 04 May 2011 10:44:23 GMT

After a brief history of community building on the Internet and how this has changed as web bulletin board and forum communities have become the place for communities of interest to gather, Chris looks at how communities can emerge even without the foresight or wish of the site operators.

Hasan Elahi "Giving away your privacy to escape the US terrorist watch list"

Mon, 02 May 2011 10:06:44 GMT

Hasan tells us his incredible story: he was suspected of terrorism by the FBI by mistake, and ended up living totally in public to protect himself from surveillance. His talk shows how forfeiting your privacy can in fact become a new form of protection of your identity.

Claude Nicollier "The reality of space"

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 10:51:37 GMT

Astronaut Claude Nicollier - with four trips to space under his belt - share his experiences at the international space station , working on the Hubble telescope , and his visions for the future of space exploration.

Kevin Slavin "Those algorithms that govern our lives"

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 15:48:04 GMT

Digital technologies and on-line platforms are essential to the way we work and live. Interestingly, they are defined by algorithms which are not neutral. Kevin discusses how they define new social norms and how our culture is affected by the possibilities embedded in the softwares we use.

Steve Portigal "Discover and act on insights about people"

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 12:11:00 GMT

What do customers want or need ? A permanent concern for entrepreneurs, designers, marketers and others seeking to innovate. Steve discusses methods for exploring both solutions and needs and he explores how an understanding of culture (yours and your customers’) can drive innovation.

David Galbraith "Four trends for the digital world"

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:00:00 GMT

David Galbraith is a former architect turned internet entrepreneur. He helped incubate Yelp.com and was one of the authors of the RSS 1.0 specifications. He talks about four trends for the digital world: people vs. celebrities, people vs. robots (recommendations from friends replace algorithmic results), people powered design (consumer Internet products are better than professional ones) and public vs. corporate networks.

Simon Redfern "The Open Banking Project"

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 20:13:07 GMT

The Open Bank Project is a European initiative to open up financial transactions to much larger groups of individuals and raise the bar of financial transparency. It will achieve this by allowing a diverse range of third-party software applications (including fraud analysis tools, web apps, mobile apps, social widgets and payment gateways) to access any bank account that supports the Open Bank Protocol and API.

Frédéric Kaplan "Beyond Robotics"

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:16:27 GMT

Frederic Kaplan is the co-founder of Ozwe, a company that develops interactive systems ranging from gesture-controlled displays to multi-touch screens. Then a researcher at the EPFL, Frederic takes us "Beyond robotics" at Lift07 in Geneva.

Matthias Lüfkens "Twitter democracy"

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 10:30:34 GMT

Twitter is the preferred channel for quick banter for over 175 million users around the world including our political leaders. Over half of the heads of states and governments of the G20 meeting in Seoul on November 11 and 12 have an official Twitter account (http://twitter.com/Davos/G20).
Some like @BarackObama have 5.5 million followers, while others such as the French Presidency only have 6,600. All other G20 leaders are somewhere in between and yes, you’ve guessed it, none of them tweet personally. What’s interesting though is not who has the most followers, but rather who follows who.

Azeem Azhar "Online communities and reputation management"

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 23:53:00 GMT

With billions of people who can connect with each other almost instantly, the community is global - even smaller communities are global in scale. In a market of voices, how do you help people 'Connect Better'? What you want to build is a lingua franca, a common currency that allows reputation to be portable.

Ben Hammersley "What does the internet bring to the concept of a country?"

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 20:40:56 GMT

With the internet, the concept of the nation-state as something bounded by distance is beginning to die. We now have many nations within each other, bounded by culture and values. Ben will be asking what the internet means for geopolitics, international relations, war and national security.

Jean-Claude Biver "The importance of innovation and thinking different"

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 09:06:17 GMT

Entrepreneur Jean-Claude Biver, famous for his work at Hublot, talks about innovation, creativity, and his philosophy that can be summarized by three commandments: "be the first, be unique, be different".

Lift11 timelapse

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 23:04:52 GMT

Lifted Up! Participants of Lift Conference 2011 pour into the main auditorium at the CICG in Geneva. Photography by Ivo Näpflin; Music by Loveshadow ft. Snowflake & Alex Beroza.

Don Tapscott "MacroWikinomics"

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 13:54:18 GMT

"What an amazing time in human history. Among other things, there is a revolution in revolutions. Up until three weeks ago [during the events in Tunisia], all revolutions throughout history had leaders..."

Don Tapscott talks about the new age of networked economy, and how collaborative innovation is deeply transforming our society as well as our institutions. Why not open source government, education, science, energy production or even health care as new models of collaboration?

Paul Barnett "MMO's, movies, las vegas, and golf"

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 14:52:25 GMT

In one of Lift's most entertaining talk, Paul Barnett - creative director at Electronic Arts - explains that the conventional thinking which goes into designing an existing product and simply make it bigger, louder, taller, and crazier doesn't work in the world of online games. There has to be room for new ideas, and it's the person with the ideas who is going to be walking away with the money.

Dorian Selz "Virtual organizations"

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 22:47:19 GMT

Dorian Selz's companies are great examples of what could be deemed virtual organizations. Flat hierarchies, less management, geographically dispersed teams are all part of his daily life with local.ch and now Memonic. He will share his experience on how new technologies are reshaping the way our organizations function.

Thomas Sutton "Creating space for open innovation"

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 10:24:48 GMT

What happens if we stop trying to understand consumers’ needs, and start cultivating empty spaces where people can innovate for themselves? In other words, letting go of the dream of a perfect, scientific innovation process by which products or services could "fulfill unmet needs".

Yuri Suzuki "Music for dyslexic"

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:31:50 GMT

Artist Yuri Suzuki talks about his experience with dyslexia, approaching music for dyslexics and presents his "Color Chaser 2010" project.

Steffen P. Walz "The lowdown on "gamification""

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:20:45 GMT

With the advent of gamification, we've seen a recent proliferation of points, badges and other game mechanics in lots of on-line services. Based on various projects, Steffen offers an insightful and critical perspective on how game design is not just about forcing users to earn points…

Robert Scoble "Trends and Projects from Silicon Valley"

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 17:18:03 GMT

Robert Scoble shares his latest discoveries (as of February 2011) while checking out start-ups in Silicon Valley and Western Europe. A technical evangelist and author, he's best known for his blog, Scobleizer.com.

In this talk, he argues that we're in a tech bubble again, at a point when several start-ups had raised several million dollars. But we need to consider what are the drivers this time round? Smartphones, huge growth in social media platforms, and new customers using emerging platforms.