Today we have opened the lines for this year’s Open Stage!

The Lift 10 Open Stage will feature seven of you who will take us on a short tour d'horizon of what their days look and feel like. You might walk us through your typical work week, bring your favourite tool and showcase your craftsmanship or tell us about that one secret ingredient in your life. All this can be work-related, but does not have to be: We are interested in what you are genuinely passionate about.

Please have a look at the full brief and send us your proposal using the Open Stage forms. Everyone who attends Lift 10 can hand in a proposal for a chance to hit the big stage in May and we are looking forward to receiving your ideas.

Submission deadline is April 5th – but the earlier we hear from you, the better your chances!

If you have got any questions or comments, please talk to us at openstage@liftconference.com.
Thanks for reading!

Important reminder: workshop submissions close on April 1st. That's in 15 days time, so make your proposition soon!

We already have some really nice workshops scheduled for Lift10. See the current propositions:)

Lift10 is in less than 2 months time, and we are posting profiles of the confirmed speakers. Don't forget to have a look at the program!

Stephen Graham will be speaking at Lift10 in our opening session on the redefinition of privacy. We invited him to speak because of his investigations into how networked technologies redefine the notion of surveillance. His perspective as a geographer adds an important dimension to the discussion around the evolution of privacy.

Following a period at Durham Geography Department, Stephen is now Professor at the Global Urban Research Unit at Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. He has a background in urbanism, planning and the sociology of technology. His research addresses intersections between urban places, mobilities, technology, war, militarization, surveillance and geopolitics. He writes and lectures in many countries and across a variety of disciplines.

Stephen has authored, co-authored and edited a range of books, including Telecommunications and the City (1996), Splintering Urbanism (2001) (both with Simon Marvin), The Cybercities Reader and Cities, War and Terrorism (both 2004). His most recent books, Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructures Fail (Routledge), and Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (Verso), were published in December 2009 and January 2010 respectively.

Six months after its launch, our attempt to recycle the Tupperware idea in the world of conferences is going well. Twenty-five lift@home events have either happened or are scheduled. Here is a look at the upcoming events of the next three months:

Lift Austria

Enable! Profound Innovation in Society, Economy & Knowledge

18-20 Mar 2010, Vienna, organized by Thomas Fundneider
More of a real conference than a small, one time event, we call this Lift Austria and a couple of Swiss members of our community will be in the audience to brainstorm about the art of Enabling. Like the earlier Lift Workshop @ Brussels, Council and Tinker.it, some events gather more than a hundred participants and surpass our original intent of holding small, informal gatherings. Of course we love it, and thank the courageous organizers who work hard for their community!

Lift Presentations @ THINKDATA:

Social, semantic, manipulation, real-time, mobile data

18 Mar 2010, Lausanne, organized by Raphaël Briner
A dive into the technical and fundamental topic of data. The bonus of this event will be the possibility to visit the Rolex Learning Center (Switzerland's most exciting building of the moment) before the conference.

^{Visit the Rolex Learning Center ahead of the LIft @ Thinkdata conference.}

Lift Presentations @ imaginove

Alternate reality games, jeux mobiles et géolocalisés

28 Apr 2010, Lyon, organized by Emmanuel Rondeau
This event is part of a series of six events organized by the Imaginove cluster in Lyon. Don't get fooled by the low registrants number on the website, check the pictures of the first event instead. This is France, people show unregistered and the spontaneity of the ensemble adds up to the experience :D

Lift Presentations @ Seoul, South Korea

Digital Architecture and Large Scale Media Art - DALSMA

9 May, Seoul, organized by Andrea Bianchi
Lift goes back to Asia thanks to Andrea Bianchi who will be organizing his second event in the Korean capital. This time, several organizations are behind the project, and the event is expected to at least double in size.

Thanks to all those who organize and attend these events! If you have never heard of Lift@home, check the initiative's site and don't forget you can organize your own event if you attended a previous Lift conference!

The Alp ICT cluster and a group of organizations promoting Swiss entrepreneurship have teamed up with Lift to facilitate access to the 2010 edition of the conference for:

Startups based in Western Switzerland
Founded less than four years ago
With less than twenty employees

If you think your project fits the above description, you can apply for one of the fifteen packages that include:

Two tickets (one of them offered by Alp ICT and its partners) for the full Lift10 conference (value CHF 1700).

Dedicated space inside the Alp ICT startup corner where you can demo your product. For startups offering online solutions, your services could be presented on the Lift website if they add value to conference participants (value: CHF 3000).

Bonus: eight of the fifteen companies will be chosen to present during the Alp ICT venture night on the big stage alongside legendary investor Neil Rimer of Index Ventures.

Price for this package: CHF 1'250.- HT.

To apply, please download the application form and email it to info@alpict.ch.

Please note:
• If you would like to benefit from this package and already registered for Lift10, contact us and we will cancel your earlier ticket.
• This offer is made possible by organizations promoting entrepreneurship in Western Switzerland. If you are a young company from somewhere else in the world, get in touch to see how we could facilitate your participation to the conference.

Supported by

Here come the latest news on Lift@Austria event to take place in Vienna on March 18-20 under the guidance of Thomas Fundneider and other local entrepreneurs.

The true trans-disciplinary conference on game-changing innovation is right around the corner. In one week, we will start a journey to collaboratively generate new knowledge on the challenge, how to orchestrate and configure parameters that enable profound innovations. A gathering of true innovators, academic grounders, practitioners and social entrepreneurs will inspire and spark new insights.

Speakers

All speakers will build their input on the topic of Enabling. Intensive preparations are under way in order to adjust the talks and the design of the workshops. When we speak about workshops, we mean it. Workshop facilitators, illustrators, prototype building blocks are all there. We want to see results at the end of the day!

Speakers include:

• Michel BAUWENS, An integrative approach to enabling open infrastructures, Peer to Peer Foundation, Chiang Mai, Thailand
• Florian BRODY, Enabling the Right Mindset, Cimbal Inc., CA, USA
• Silja GRAUPE, And the Ruler of the Central Sea was “Chaos” – Cherishing Chaos from Asian Perspectives, Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences, Germany
• Stefan CAMENZIND, Enabling Workplace Design - How would you love to work?, Camenzind Evolution, Architecture - Design - Technology, Switzerland
• Markus F. PESCHL, Enabling -- Introduction, University of Vienna, Austria
• Franz NAHRADA, Global Villages as Enabling Environments, Labor GIVE, Austria

Be sure to check the conference program.

Tokens

Inspired by alternative currency systems like Freigeld, we want to experiment on alternative rewarding- and motivation mechanisms by means of exchanging tokens between participants of Enable! At registration, you will receive tokens which have a real value in Euros. You can then award the most interesting input(s) by handing over all or parts of the tokens to the person(s) generating the input. Finally, these tokens can be converted back into real Euros at the end of the convention. A little game, which may cause that collaboration efforts will be rewarded visible and maybe you are the one, who can change reputative capital into some real Euros at the end (and buy a coffee or make holiday).

Practical information

Date: March 18-20, 2010
Location: Trinkomathallen, Vienna
Click here for registrations.

Lift10 is in less than 2 months time, and we are posting profiles of the workshop organizers. Don't forget to have a look at the program!

Christian Miccio will be hosting a workshop at Lift10. Christian studied computer science at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. He built products in the IT/Mobile space for several years. Just before getting an MBA at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, he was instrumental in the creation of the Shazam mobile phone music recognition service, based in London, and now live in 20+ countries. Following his MBA, Christian joined Google and can now come up with even fancier stuff!

After his presentation about innovation at our Lift @ home in January, Christian decided to host a workshop entitled: Let's create a product (yes, in the workshop :)

The workshop audience will explore and experience product development in a practical way by being split into 2 teams: a product development team and a user base. The activity will be a set of iterations where the product team will design a first version of an imaginary product and test it on the group of volunteered users to integrate the feedback into a new version.

Interested? Sign up here.

Lift10 is in less than 2 months time, and we are posting profiles of the confirmed speakers. Don't forget to have a look at the program!

Neil Rimer will be giving the keynote speech at the Alp ICT venture night on the 5th of May at Lift10. Neil is a co-founder and Partner of Index Ventures. In 1992, He started the venture capital activity of Index's predecessor firm, later co-founding Index Ventures and raising the firm's first fund in 1996.

Neil's current investment focus is on innovative solutions for energy and environmental problems.

He is currently on the board of several innovative companies (such as AlertMe, Lehigh Technologies, Netvibes, Moo Print, Innovative Silicon). Neil sponsored many of the firm's investments including Betfair, Ofoto (now Kodak), Trolltech (now Nokia) Listen (now Real Networks), Numerical Technologies (now Synopsis) and Genmab. He has also served on the board of Human Rights Watch and has served on the Board of Directors of U.C. Sampdoria, a football club competing in the Italian Serie A.

Before starting Index Ventures, Neil spent four years with Montgomery Securities in San Francisco. Neil has a BA in History and Economics from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Following Neil's speech, eight startups from Western Switzerland will present on the big stage. If you think your company could qualify, please read this.

At Lift France 09, Elizabeth Goodman spoke about Changing the Planet. You can watch the video here.

We caught up with Elizabeth this week. She's been quite busy since we last saw her in Marseille. She was awarded an Intel PhD fellowship, and was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research New England. At the moment, she is organizing City Centered, a festival of locative media and urban community, to take place in San Francisco's Tenderloin District in June.

Lift Austria is featured on this month's Doors of perception newsletter:

"Gone is the time where can just focus on technology, or political change, or personal change. The challenge of the times require tackling all aspects of change simultaneously". Thailand-based Michel Bauwens, founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation, always has something wise and interesting to say. His keynote talk at the Lift conference in Vienna on 19 March is about "an integrative approach to enabling open infrastructures (and) value-driven social practices...we need to change ourselves, as well as our ability to cooperate in groups".

Link