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Lift11 talks
This page lists all the talks that will be given at Lift11. For the detailed program, refer to the conference schedule.
MacroWikinomics
Don Tapscott (Moxie Insight, Canada)Don 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, ...
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What does the internet bring to the concept of a country?
Ben Hammersley (Six Creative ; Campus Party USA ; WIRED Magazine, UK)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. ...
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Social currencies
Brian Solis (FutureWorks, USA)Brian discusses the notion of social currency, how the activity we have on social networks helps build an important asset: social capital.
Read Brian's interview.
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Giving away your privacy to escape the US terrorist watch list
Hasan Elahi (University of Maryland, USA)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 ...
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Those algorithms that govern our lives
Kevin Slavin (Area/Code & Starling, USA)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 ...
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The reality of space
Claude Nicollier (EPFL, Switzerland)Why should we continue to explore space? What are the next frontiers to be crossed in the coming years? What is the democratization of space going to bring to the world? Astronaut ...
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Welcome to Lift11
Nicolas Nova, Laurent HaugWelcome speech by Lift founders Laurent Haug and Nicolas Nova.
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The importance of innovation and thinking different
Jean-Claude Biver (Hublot, Switzerland)Entrepreneur Jean-Claude Biver, famous for his work at Hublot, shares his vision on the importance of innovating constantly.
Four trends for the digital world
David Galbraith (Samba, Switzerland)David explains the big trends he sees developing in the digital world, a provocative talk sure to trigger reactions among the audience when he says that the long tail is dead or ...
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Open Stage: Twiplomacy
Matthias Lüfkens (Burson-Marsteller, Switzerland)Twitter is the preferred channel for quick banter for nearly 200 million users around the world including our political leaders. Over half of the heads of states and governments ...
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A new approach to designing business models
Alex Osterwalder (OSF, Switzerland)Alex 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, ...
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Virtual organizations
Dorian Selz (Memonic, Switzerland)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 ...
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The story of a unique workplace: transplant
Alexandre Bau, Birgitta RalstonIn 2003, Parisian designers Birgitta and Alexandre decided to build their dream of a cross-competent creative workspace in an isolated village of Norway. This radical choice gave ...
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Neo-nomadism
Yasmine Abbas (neo-nomad, France)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 ...
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Open Stage: Google Translate, Skype conferencing, and the future of my career!
Jennifer Gay (myself!, France)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 ...
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How to encourage involvement in online communities
Tiffany St James (Stimulation Community, UK)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 ...
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The invisible communities
Chris Heathcote (Metaloca, UK)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 ...
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Online communities and reputation management
Azeem Azhar (UK)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 ...
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Open Stage: Artypedia - The free view on Art that anyone can edit
Memi Beltrame (Liip Agile Web Development, Switzerland)This speech is a presentation of Artypedia, an art project that aims at expanding the view on the term "art". It is a Wiki located at http://artypedia.org Its point is to ...
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Discover and act on insights about people
Steve Portigal (Portigal Consulting, USA)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 ...
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Co-creation: present and future
Nick Coates (Promise, UK)Nick tells us more about co-creation, how this idea has been around for many years but was put in the spotlight by communication technologies, and what to expect for the future of ...
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Relinquishing Control: creating space for open innovation
Thomas Sutton (frog design, Italy)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 ...
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The lowdown on "gamification"
Steffen P. Walz (GEElab, Australia)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 ...
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The paper book as a new computer platform
Etienne Mineur (les éditions volumiques, France)If you're interested in how designing old fashion paper book can be transformed by video game mechanics and computing technologies, you'll be intrigued by Etienne's talk. The work ...
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Beyond transmedia
David Calvo (Ankama, France)In a whimsical attempt to eradicate the narrative debate from the game design process, this talk tries, through theory and the speaker's own work, to define an ethic of ...
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Open Stage: Localizations of global games: cross-cultural lessons
Florence Chee (Simon Fraser University Vancouver, Canada)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 ...
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Monetization of media
Philippe Gendret (Edipresse Publications.SA, Switzerland)Readers are slowly but surely migrating to digital reading, but what are the realities of usages of mobiles and tablets? How can media monetize their content and find a ...
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The Open Bank Project
Simon Redfern (TESOBE, Germany)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 ...
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Open Stage: Music for dyslexic
Yuri Suzuki (Japan)Artist Yuri Suzuki talks about his experience with dyslexia, approaching music for dyslexics and presents his "Color Chaser 2010" project.
Trends and projects from the Silicon Valley
Robert Scoble (Rackspace, USA)Über-blogger Robert Scoble shows us the latest projects and trends he found while roaming the Silicon Valley for new ideas. His presentation is sure to make you write down a couple of URLs from new and exciting companies you had never heard of.
Reinventing schools - project Dream School
Marcel Kampman (happykamping, Project Dream School, Mastermundo Creative Gathering, Netherlands)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? ...
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An update on the Large Hadron Collider project
Tara Shears (CERN, UK)The Large Hadron Collider, one of science's most ambitious project ever, is producing headlines a few kilometers from Geneva. Tara Shears will give us an update on the recent ...
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Open Stage: How to remix architecture?
Attila Bujdoso (Kitchen Budapest, KÉK - Contemporary Architecture Centre, Hungary)It is surprising how new concepts arisen from technological developments have so little impact on the architectural practice. Deeply inspired by restricting but at the same time ...
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What about a web of things?
Vlad Trifa (ETH Zurich / MIT SENSEable City Lab, Switzerland)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 ...
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Robotics today
Sabine Hauert (EPFL / Robots Podcast, Switzerland)Sabine aims at truthfully portraying how robots are changing the way we live and work today. Despite new and accelerating developments, the future of robotics is in the labs, ...
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Open Stage: From Ballet Dancing to 3D Hip Simulation
Caecilia Charbonnier (artAnim, Switzerland)In this 5 minutes talk, Caecilia presents the work she did in collaboration with the Grand Théâtre de Genève and the University Hospital of Geneva. Starting from the ...
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Programming space habitat
Jennifer Magnolfi (Herman Miller , USA)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 ...
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Researching and studying the sun
Lucie Green (Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UK)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 ...
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Listening to the sound of space
Honor Harger (Lighthouse, New Zealand)Honor Harger is working on broadcasting what Pythagoras and Johannes Kepler called "the music of the spheres", the "sounds" that extra-celestial bodies like the sun or planets ...
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