Lift conference news

The Lift12 program is almost final now, and I am happy to announce three exciting speakers:

Maximilian Busser
Owner & CCO at MB&F
Maximilian is an innovator in an otherwise conservative world. He has a passion for working with the most talented independent horological professionals to create a totally different dimension.

Sean Park @anthemis
Founding investor at Anthemis
Sean has been involved as founding investor in a number of disruptive and highly successful new ventures such as Betfair, Weatherbill, Seedcamp and BankSimple and has extensive experience investing in and advising start-up and high growth companies in addition to over 16 years of experience working at a senior level in capital markets and investment banking. Building businesses has been a key theme throughout his career. He is the co-founder of Anthemis Group and the author of The Park Paradigm.

Xavier Dietlin @xdietlin
Founder at Dietlin
A former professional soccer player, Xavier is now an artist and innovator, crafting the world's most innovative displays for the luxury industry.

Xavier is doing the kind of things you see in the video below. He will demo his latest creations on stage, and bring them to the Lift experience space where Lifters will be able to play and test the displays themselves!

To see the full list of Lift12 speakers, click here.

The workshop submission process ended last week and we now have the full list.

18 workshops have been selected, focused on a wide range of topics: crowdsourcing, product features co-creation, the future of education, location-based games among many of others. Some of them have been submitted by long-time Lifters, others by newcomers.

You can now register for the workshop you want. Go on the list, click on the title of the workshop you want to attend, and sign up using the form at the bottom of the page.

Watch out, seats are limited!

Please meet Lift12 speaker Sebastian Deterding who is a designer and researcher currently best known for his stance on "gamification", which he has presented at events like CHI, Playful, Web Directions, and DiGRA. He speaks and publishes internationally on gameful design, persuasive technology, and the social contexts of games at venues such as the Gamification Summit, Gamescom, reboot, or Google. He pursues a PhD on the motivational psychology of ‘gameified’ applications at Hamburg University.

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.

We are pleased to introduce Lisa Harouni, co-founder and Managing Director at Digital Forming, a company that provides designers and small businesses with the software tools to design and build products using additive manufacturing.

At Lift12, Lisa will speak in the "Near Future" session and show us how mass customization and 3D printing are disrupting whole industries. How in the future everybody will be able to design and create products with a few clicks. To learn more about Lisa Harouni check-out her profile and video on Wired Conference 2011.

Lisa has a background in Economics and worked in the G7 Economics team at Deutsche Bank AG. She later headed a UK based distribution company for 5 years, supplying consumer products to major international retailers and e-commerce sites.

Russell Davies has to cancel his participation to Lift12. Here is a short statement he sent us.

I'm very sorry, I won't be able to come to Lift due to illness in my family. I'm really going to miss it. It's normally a highlight of my year.

I'm not entirely sure what I was going to talk about, but I think it would have been inspired by this piece by Neal Stephenson about "Innovation Starvation". He laments our contemporary inability to execute BIG STUFF. I was going to try turn that into something more positive. We've built all these incredible connective tools - the internet, social media, blah blah blah - perhaps it's time we stopped congratulating ourselves about that and started thinking about what we're going to do with them to make life unarguably better. What can we build with them? What BIG STUFF? They aren't the answer, they're the tools.

And I'd have said of course technology makes our lives better. Technology is what we do, it's who we are. It's like asking whether water makes fishes lives better.

Probably one of the greatest talk never to happen. We will do that another time. All our best wishes to Russell and his family!

Please meet Lift12 speaker Adrianne Jeffries, who is a tech reporter for The New York Observer and Betabeat. Before that she has worked at USA Today and ReadWriteWeb.

Adrienne mostly writes about the start-up scene, tech innovation and virtual currencies like Bitcoin. Lately Adrianne was also live-blogging from Occupy Wall Street.

At Lift12 Adrianne will share with us her insights about "Peer to peer currencies: the story and questions of Bitcoin".

We are glad to welcome Nick Heller, Head of New Business Development, Europe, and a Principle at Google EMEA as Lift12 speaker! Nick is focused on new product incubation and exploratory efforts in technology, meta-data licensing, strategic partnerships, special projects, and alternative distribution for existing and new business initiatives. He was formally leading the Media & Publishing team at Google in the European Strategic Partnerships group.

Nick has a rich history of working within the media industry, primarily across mobile, television and online. To learn more about his background check-out his Lift Profile or his Google Plus page.

We look forward to welcome Nick as a speaker in the mobile session, along side Gesche Joost and Fabian Hemmert, from the Deutsche Telekom Lab. One more great speaker to be confirmed for the Lift12 "The mobile world" session very shortly, stay tuned!

At Lift, we always keep an eye on cool new event formats, and Julien has provided some of the most innovative and interesting events in recent memory. His latest creation: Museomix, a giant workshop happening inside one of Paris' Museum, with attendees looking to reinvent the way our glorious (and a bit old fashioned...) museums work.

Julien will speak about the future of several things, explaining how the principles of the web (collaboration, sharing, openness) have now "contaminated" many spaces, among them conferences... and Museums!

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.