Event independent

Remember the fabulous cloud chair that we had on stage at Lift09? It was the work of Richard Hutten for Ormond Editions... Here we see it with Vint Cerf in the background:

Well, we'd like to extend our congratulations to Ormond Editions for winning a 2012 Wallpaper Design Award for their work: Altaïr collection, by Stéphane Parmentier, for Ormond Editions. In collaboration with Ormond Editions, Stéphane Parmentier presents an exclusive collection of occasionnal furniture, tables, console and decorative objects. You can get a closer look here.

La septième édition de la Conférence TechnoArk aura lieu le 27 janvier prochain au Techno-Pôle de Sierre. Le thème de ce rendez-vous incontournable sera « Internet et Mobiles : Fiabilité des informations ? ».

D’un geste du doigt, le consommateur accède à une myriade d’informations depuis son téléphone portable. Mais comment peut-il s’assurer de la fiabilité des informations? Comment peut-il faire confiance aux nombreuses sources de données? La fiabilité, l’exactitude et l’authenticité des données constituent le nouvel enjeu de l’internet mobile.

Des conférenciers issus par exemple du MIT de Boston ou du GS1 de Bruxelles vous permettront d’approfondir ce thème d’actualité. Vous trouverez le programme complet de la manifestation sur la page www.technoark.ch/technoark2012.

The Chinese government is working hard to improve its e-government services, or so it looks.

After the launch of the Zhongnanhai website, where netizens could chat with their leaders, four cities in Guangdong have created an online system to submit petitions – one of the oldest form of communication between the citizens and the government. According to the Financial Times, the service will even include webcasts.

Some cynics may argue that it is probably those keen on petitioning – the disenfranchised – often don’t have access to the Internet and for those who do, well, there is always the risk of mails being lost in cyberspace.

Artemisia may not mean much to you nor Youyou Tu for that matter.

Dr. Tu – who was recently awarded the Lasker Prize – is the Chinese doctor who developed an artemisia-based drug therapy that helped saved millions of lives threatened by malaria. The plant has been known for more than 2000 years in China and used to cure diseases as different as hemorroids or malaria.

A little bit like the Internet, artemisinin is the result of a secret military research conducted after the 1950s in China which took time to spread across the world. It is now extensively used (together with another molecule) by the World Health Organization to fight malaria in the developing world.

I wouldn’t be surprised that ancient Chinese medical books help cure other diseases.

Looking for help....

I’m organizing a couple of innovation related workshops at ITU World Telecom on 27 October in Geneva, Switzerland at the Palexpo venue next to the airport – you can find out more about World Telecom at world2011.itu.int and the agenda is here.

These workshops are not presentation-based – they’re about interactive participation by delegates. We want to together tackle specific challenges in hands-on action-based workshops.

Each session lasts 90 minutes. A maximum of 30 delegates to Telecom World 2011 will come together to share experiences, lessons learned, emerging best practices and to network with peers from around the globe. Together you’ll co-create potential solutions to the outlined challenge and formulate co-created recommendations that will feed into the Telecom World 2011 Manifesto for Change.

Open Innovation Workshop 1: The Challenge: Innovation for Development – and how ICTs can help?

09:00-10:30

We can sum up the goal of innovation for development as discovering new ways of creating opportunity for those in developing countries to meet their aspirations for a better life. How can ICTs be best used to foster innovation for development? Innovation rarely comes in big leaps – it takes the form of what Steven Berlin Johnson calls ‘slow hunches’ – small tweaks and refinements to what already exists. That’s why virtually every new idea or advancement often has several originators – the time and conditions for emergence were just ripe. What are some of the big ideas in the innovation field currently being discussed that are perhaps “ripe for emergence” and how can we use ICTs to apply them to development challenges?

In China patents come in increasingly surprising forms.

Apple has recently secured Chinese patents on “some of the distinctive elements of its store designs”, including a glass dome. This rather unusual approach to intellectual protection derives in part from the recent discovery of fake Apple stores throughout the country – the one in Kunming looked so real that even the staff thought they were working for Apple.

It is of course quite far away from the more high-tech image that one can have from patenting activity. At the end of the day the technology component of a brand is often quite low.

What is the big difference between China and the West when it comes to electric cars? Most Chinese citizens don’t live in private houses and therefore have to rely on external charging stations for their electric cars.

That’s why having a strong top-down approach to rolling out a new technology comes in handy. The State Grid Corporation - China’s (state-owned) largest electric transmission company – is rumored to thinking of introducing an electric pricing system for electric cars (in addition to those used for private, agricultural and industrial purposes) – not a small feat given the heterogenous technologies on the market and its evolutive nature. Help will be provided by the China Electricity Council’s efforts of standardization and by the arrival in the sector of other state-owned firms seeking to diversify.

Industrial policy does come handy at time – electric cars is one of China’s seven strategic emerging industries - something that must give some hope to firms like BYD whose prospects tended to look rather bleak lately.

Lift creates a lot of value, as an independent survey confirmed: 48% of the participants have gained concrete returns and new projects attending Lift11 (full report).

Our passion is to create an environment where great things happen. Our carefully designed events offer a unique opportunity to connect with the world's brightest minds, and see tomorrow's ideas ahead of everybody else. Here are a few examples of Lift's impact on the life of its participants:

They launched a new project at Lift

• Author Cyrus Farivar met the father of the Internet and Google VP Vint Cerf at Lift09 and asked him to write the preface to his book The Internet of Elsewhere
• The Korean artist Sey Min and the New York-based architect and assistant Columbia professor Yang Soo-in met at Lift Asia 08. Their meeting lead to a collaboration on "The Living", Soo-in's practice emphasizing open-source research and design.
• After we had invited Jaewoong Lee (Korean Entrepreneur, founder of the web portal Daum) to Lift07 as a speaker, he invited us back to Korea to start Lift over there! That was the beginning of a fruitful partnership featuring 3 Lift events in Korea. The fourth is coming up in spring 2012.
• At Lift06, Ellen Wallace was inspired to create the free online community newspaper "GenevaLunch". In 2007, GenevaLunch became one of the sponsors of Lift, Ellen's way to say thank you :)
• Andre Ribeirinho and Pedro Custodio were inspired by their time at Lift, so they decided to create their own conference in Portugal. SHiFT was born shortly after, gathering hundreds of Portugese and international attendees in Lisbon.
• Blogger Stephanie Booth was thinking about running her own event for a while, and Lift inspired her into making the jump. After Lift06, she launched GoingSolo, a conference discussing the challenges and opportunities solo workers face.
• Presenting the Dream School project at Lift11, one of Europe's most innovative creative director Marcel Kampman met Eva Sander who organized for him a tour in Mexico, to present the Dream School project. Marcel also met the UK-based great folks at Yoomee who finally designed the Picnic 2011 conference website:)
• At Lift France 09 Paul Bristow had an intriguing discussion with the speakers John Thackara, Dennis Pamlin and Gunter Pauli. This encounter inspired him to create a few months later the non-profit Eco-Pratique, which is now turning Ferney Voltaire into a Transition town!
  
  
  
  
  

  They got global buzz at Lift

• Following Lift08, Robert Scoble mentioned MixIn on his famous blog Scobleizer and gave it a huge boost. In 2006, Scoble already made CoComment one of the world's most visited website with one of his posts, sending the startup's IT team scrambling to find more servers to serve hundreds of thousands of requests from all around the world.
• Florence Devouard, then chair of the Wikimedia foundation, got the world's attention as Wikipedia was in the middle of a crucial fund raising campaign. After her talk, one of her answers to the moderator's questions on Wikipedia's cash flow was misinterpreted by a blogger in the audience. The report was saying that wikipedia would run out of money in a few months (which was not the case), and the news spread like wildfire all around the web. The result: worldwide attention to WIkipedia's funding situation, and an increase in donations.
• The Digital Media Consumption Manifesto initiative "Don't Make Me Steal" was launched at a Lift11 workshop by Pierre Spring and Jordi Boggiano, and it had been on Wired, as well as on Wired UK, and was retweeted by the Vice President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe, Neelie Kroes.

Lift accelerated these projects

• Raphael Briner's Hyperweek raised a first round of investment at Lift10, before becoming one of Switzerland's major social media company.
• Fontself was an artistic project at Lift07. People loved the concept, and Franz Hoffman and Marc Escher started to thing they had more than a fun project: it was a startup! After months of hard work, Fontself incorporated and raised money from prestigious investors.
• Benedikt Foit founded his start-up Vic Ventures at Lift.
• Poken launched their interactive conference badge at Lift09, and successfully gathered attention from conference organizers around the world.
• After their presentation at the AlpICT venture night in 2008, Wuala was in the spotlight and was bought by LaCie in 2009.

They found a job at Lift

• Companies such as Swisscom, Accenture and LIIP recruited new team members among Lift participants.

They found an editor or book project at Lift

• FYP Editions scouted authors at Lift and published the books of several Lift speakers: Nicolas Nova, Stefana Broadbent, Yasmine Abbas, Jean-Henry Morin.
• Both speakers at Lift08 Paul Dourish, Informatics Professor at UC Irvine and Genevieve Bell, Intel's Experience research director, met and started writing together a book at the conference as mentioned in their book preface.

They found love at Lift

We are still asking for the permission of the couples who met at Lift to disclose their names ;) but we counted around five couples, and one birth has been confirmed: Daphne Jin-hee Haug, Laurent's daughter.

Lift T-Shirts all around the world

Our design partners at Bread and Butter take great care to make nice Lift T-shirt designs, that people will wear also after the conferences. Here are some shots of Lifters with their T-shirts, send us your own pictures!

From left to right: Lucky Joy playing on a stage in Lausanne ///Robert Scoble founder of Scobleizer at SXSW in Austin, Texas /// Mike Radparvar co-founder of Holstee at a party in Washington D.C /// Korean entrepreneur Jaewoong Lee on stage at Lift.

As we mentioned the other day, this year the Lift team is teaching at various institutions. Among them, there's a more community-based model that we're implementing at Haute Ecole de Gestion in Geneva. The course is about digital innovation and is taught not only by us but also by members of the Lift community. Given their expertise, it's good to engage them in this course made of lectures and short workshop activities.

We're currently on the lookout for an expert of Information Visualization for a 3-hours course on November 17, 2011. The idea is to give an overview of Infoviz and deal with (for instance) the following aspects:

• A short historical intro of the field,
• The current trends and opportunities in this domain
• Storytelling and InfoViz on the Web
• The current tools and visualization platforms

If you're interested in this, please contact us at info (at) liftconference (dot) com

It’s back to school days here, pencils are being sharpened, wireless notebooks being bought… and new courses are being prepared. This year the Lift team will be teaching different courses in Switzerland and France.

• Nicolas Nova will teach at EPFL, Lausanne, a masters students (engineering) course:
• "A creative toolbox for innovation" with Daniel Sciboz. The year-long weekly 3 hours course will be an overview of design processes, approaches and tactics. From prototyping to sketching, design ethnography and storyboarding. This course is based on both lectures, studio-based activities and a personal project by the students.
• Laurent Haug will teach at HEC Lausanne, for Executive MBA students
• The course will be exploring how to manage one's identity and career in the digital universe". We will discuss communication, social media, personal branding, transparency, privacy, and much more.
• Nicolas Nova will teach at HEAD-Geneva, the following masters students courses:
• "Introduction to interaction design": a year-long 2-hours a week course about the main notion of interaction design (affordance, mental models, design process, direct interaction, usability, interaction styles), the history of the field and the main subdomains (web, mobile, locative media, 3D virtual worlds, networked objects, etc.). It's going to be a mix of lectures, discussions and practical exercises.
• "Usage-Oriented Design": a semester-based course about how to apply field investigation in design. The emphasis will be made on data collecting techniques and how to turn the results into sound design. This one will be a mix of short lectures and studio-based activities.