Lift12 news

Watch this great talk by leshop.ch co-founder Christian Wanner to get a motivation boost for any ventures you are involved in. In this keynote of the Lift12 venture night Christian explains how the life of an entrepreneur can be really though, but also incredibly rewarding! 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.

The Lift12 video of Gordan Savicic talking about the "Web 2.0 suicide machine" is finally online!

I recently checked my Facebook friends to see how many actually had deleted their accounts. They are listed at the end of the list, and I was quite surprised by the number!

Not sure however if they used this fantastic "Web 2.0 suicide machine", which offers quite an entertaining way to end your life on social media in style.

Finally the third talk of the legendary Lift12 "Extreme Hackers" session is online! In his talk etoy.ZAI tells the incredible story of 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. Media art history, a must-see!

A cultural sociologist interested in understanding how people use digital tools in their day to day lives, Tricia Wang is involved in various projects related to ethnography and information technologies.

In her talk at Lift 12, she focuses on a story you may have heard of, concerning a student who ended 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.

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.

"Where did the future go?" was the question we asked at Lift10. For those who regret the absence of flying cars, immersive virtual reality and humanoid robots, the Lift 12 talk by James Bridle is definitely a good way to cheer up. Simply because this is about how to go beyond the nostalgia for yesterday's tomorrows.

Entitled "WE FELL IN LOVE IN A CODED SPACE", it deals with the technologically-enabled novelty in the world and the new aesthetic trope. What James referred to with this term is the kind of representations you get when artifacts in the physical are produced for robots and computers: the ability to see through satellites with Google Earth, the pervasive presence of robot-readable content (think about QR codes!) or the massive presence of spambots on social media. More specifically, the talk focused on the evolution of literature and storytelling when everything has become digital, the construction of knowledge and collaborating with robots!

People interested in this topic should also read what long-time Lifter Bruce Sterling wrote about it recently in this thought-provoking essay.

Check out the second video from our Lift12 Extreme Hackers session. 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.

Learn more about "the desirable qualities in a communication network" in this video of the Lift12 talk by Steve Song, Founder of Village Telco.

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.

In his talk, Rufus Pollock introduces the concept of Open Data with unparalleled passion. He takes a close look at the current state of affairs in Open Government Data and the ecosystem emerging around this powerful and rapidly evolving idea.

These ideas on opening up public sector information, championed by Rufus' Open Knowledge Foundation, have been falling on very fertile ground here in Switzerland. Policy makers and activists, hackers and designers have gathered under the banner of Opendata.ch and are making amazing progress these days.

Opendata.ch is having a two-day, two-city hackathon on open transportation data later this month, 30/31. March both in Geneva and Zurich. And then they'll bring back Rufus for their big Swiss Open Data Conference in June.

Enjoy this energizing talk!

One of the most discussed projects at Lift12 was the urban information visualization project "Ville Vivante", a collaboration between the City of Geneva, Lift and Interactive Things. In this talk Benjamin Widerkehr, founder of Interactive Things, describes how the huge quantity of data generated by mobile phone usage can be employed to visualize urban flows and create meaningful stories.

The project was widely covered by international media and specialized media. Below are a few examples,
you can see the full press coverage here.

readwriteweb.com:
A Pretty Data Viz From Geneva Switzerland

Fast Comany Design:
A City Visualizes Its Own Inner Workings, With Infographics Powered By Cellular Data

infostethics.com:
Ville Vivante: Tracing the Liveliness of Mobile Phone Usage in Geneva