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Every year in April we know if we did a good job or not, if you guys liked the event or not. We anxiously await Glenn O'Neil's post-conference survey he has been doing for LIFT for the past three years (see LIFT06 and LIFT07 surveys).

As usual the community massively answered our call for feedback (thanks to the 272 attendees who took the time to answer), and as usual you were kind enough to give us a good grade, with 89% of attendees having a good or excellent overall appreciation (and nobody called LIFT08 very poor which I'm quite proud of). FULL REPORT HERE (pdf).

The report indicates we achieved some of our main goals (networking, learning and exchanging) with room for improvement on a few things like the venue. Some formats will be improved, like discussions (we really need a more quiet place, you will have that in Asia and next year) and Open Stage (I hope more LIFTers will get involved when voting time comes).

Read the full report here (and be sure to check page 5 to see the evolution over the three editions), and I will soon post my thoughts and the things that will change as a consequence of all the feedback. Thanks to all, and congrats to the team who deserves a big praise after such a plebiscite :)

After a lot of travel which resulted in slow blogging I have some important news regarding LIFT Asia. We have a location, a theme, a format, and partners!

^{Picture from a recent trip to Jeju University}

• JEJU
it will be Jeju. We decided to hold the conference on the island because it is really the most beautiful place there is (you will like the view on the pacific from the rest area, breath taking). It is one hour from Seoul - so we will ask you to travel a bit more - but it is worth it.

• BEYOND BORING BROWSERS
We want to have a main theme for the event, and we want to ask a simple question: what happens beyond the browser? Where will the next revolutions come from? Robots? Mobile? Ubiquitous computing? Virtual worlds? We will explore many of these fields with diverse points of views from all over the world, with a focus on Asian speakers of course. Robert Scoble, Jan Chipchase and Dan Dubno have already saved the dates and will be with us.

• FORMAT
We pushed the date one day (4-6 instead of 3-5 of Sept.) because we want to use less week-days and facilitate the life of those who will have to take some time off to attend. We will have seven sessions, an open afternoon (dedicated to workshops, discussions, demos, etc...), two evenings and time for cultural activities as there are tons of things to see on the island.

• PARTNERS
We already have five partners! The Jeju University, Jeju Knowledge Industry Promotion Agency, Daum of course, and the geneva based WattWatt and Alptic who will travel to the other side of the world with us to make the conference happen.

A new event just got on our radar and it seems worth the trip to Barcelona. Welcome iFest (formerly Renacer), run by our friends of Infonomia, and that will feature speakers like Hiroshi Tasaka or Alex Steffen.

For some reason I missed Guy Vardi's talk when putting all 30+ videos online. Sorry Guy, here is your talk now available in streaming, download, 3gp and podcast.

The TSR got 100'000 views in 3 weeks on the LIFT08 content, but as our videos are hosted on numerous platforms (Nouvo, Google, Vpod, YouTube) it is not the only place where our speakers get a lot of online exposure. We are about to pass 100'000 views on Google Video:

For each person visiting the conference we get 150+ views on the online videos, which confirms there is strong interest in the ideas expressed at LIFT all over the world!

Every year we go through hundreds of adventures when organizing a large scale event like LIFT. Here are a few stories you've never heard about LIFT08:

• Everybody thinks that all LIFTers come with laptops, and the prospect of hosting the conference generates a few sleepless nights for the IT manager of our conference center. Some pictures might easily let one think that there is a one to one relationship between attendees and laptops. But I got the real number, and we only has 240 laptops at the event this year! That's right, a mere 35%... that generated 28'000 connections. It seems some folks tried to finish their downloads, and the mandatory wifi blackout happened. Next year we should have all p2p traffic blocked and I hope that for the first time ever we will have reliable wifi service :)

• The caterer had an extremely hard time serving everybody - and came up with unfortunately deserved mixed reviews - because we had a last minute problem. The person in charge of the kitchens at the conference center resigned four days before LIFT. He had promised we could use the kitchens to cook, but his successor had other plans and didn't allow us in. Our caterer had to cook the meat at a remote location, driving it just in time for lunch. Add that to the fact the bakery didn't find the delivery entrance on Thursday and you have a recipe for disaster.

• We delivered 6 visa letters to participants coming from eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Half of these were accepted, with unfortunately three attendees were unable to attend for administrative reasons.

• For the second year in a row we received a proposition of someone who wanted to pay to speak. For the second year that was an easy decision for us - a loud no! - but we had a sign that being on stage at LIFT creates more and more value for the speakers. At some point we will be forced to think about channeling all this, just like the creation of the venture night allowed us to give all entrepreneurs a tribune to express themselves, which resulted in less pitches and less "aggressive" networking during the conference.

• Last year we had 100 tshirts remaining, among them 80 S-sized women tees. This year all that remains is 150 M-sized women tshirts. Not sure what conclusion we can draw on the population from this, but if are coaching a women soccer team just let us know we are happy to sponsor your jerseys ;)

• We had a small problem with a (fake?) journalist who had forgotten his press card and said he was working for a magazine called "nectars and flavours". More than the absence of a press card, we had a hard time finding any relation between LIFT and hid magazine ;)

• As we had around 80 people showing up unregistered on Thursday (most of them from our partners, some journalists, a few late registrants) we suddenly had 700 people attending the conference, which means we had a potential overbooking at the fondue as the venue could accommodate 600 persons. I quickly called Fabien - who was in charge of the evening's logistics - and he found a way to create 50 more seats. Fortunately - or unfortunately ? - "only" 550 persons showed up, and we had some spare tables which gave the impression the fondue was less crowded than it was.

We are adding some job offers as we need to extend the LIFT team to mirror the growth of the event. Currently two part time openings are available and we have a few more coming your way. We are looking for a partners care-taker (the right title didn't exist in the recruiting vocabulary so we made that up and hope you like it ;) and for an editor/information architect.

I just updated this website, archived the LIFT08 homepage and put information on our next event: LIFT Asia!

The venue will be confirmed in about three weeks, and registrations will promptly open after that decision is made.

We are gathering some figures about the impact of LIFT for a meeting we have scheduled with the LIFT08 partners next week, and here is another impressive number: since we launched the new version and enabled community features, the LIFT conference website has received 1'371'896 visits from 416'832 different sites. Our servers have sent 6'380'092 pages or 192GB of data.

After the numbers we got on our videos, this shows that the conference's impact is not only happening inside the CICG but also everywhere on the planet. If you are interesting in the liftconference.com evolution of traffic stats click here.