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We have the pleasure to announce that a delegation of Google Business Development from China, Japan and India will accompany Lift12 speaker Nick Heller. To tap into their extraordinary wealth of knowledge we will organize a "Google Dating" during the Lift Fondue, on the evening of February 22nd.

This is a great chance for start-ups and entrepreneurs to exchange with the Google Venture Team during the Lift Fondue! To participate in the call send us an e-mail with a short description about your project and why you'd like to meet the Google Team to google-fondue@liftconference.com until February 14th.

Good luck!

A premier this year: all Lifters can ride the Röstigraben Express together from Zurich to Geneva on Wednesday, Feb. 22. Join the ride, have fun and save!

«Traveling to and arriving at a conference often is an awkward experience» resumes Glenn Oberholzer, Partner of customer experience consultancy Stimmt. «You travel alone, don't know how to get to the venue, need to stand in line to check-in, have to find your friends. Let's do this better at Lift12».

So here we go: meet fellow Lifters on the train to Geneva and make friends before you even get there.

• Pre-arrival check-in on the train,
• 10% off the regular fare,
• Café Complet sponsored by Stimmt
• and maybe even a moving bar-camp, if people feel like it.

The Röstigraben-Express is an extra coach or reserved seats on the 09:32 train leaving Zurich. You can also hop on in Bern at 10:34, Fribourg at 10:56 or Lausanne at 11:42. We'll arrive at the conference location in time even for the start of Lift12.

All Lifters are welcome. How do you register? If you don't have a conference pass yet, register online and choose the option at the bottom of the 2nd page. If you already bought a pass, go to the registration page and enter the promotion code: RöstigrabenExpress12.

Take your chance, the Global Business Service (GBS) organization of Procter & Gamble, the world leader in consumer-goods products, is searching for innovative IT startups to collaborate with them on new IT solutions and services.

P&G would like to meet startups during the Lift12 Conference which will take place in Geneva from 22 to 24 February 2012.

If you are interested please respond according the Need Briefs below, and your startup might be selected for a pitch with the P&G managers, and maybe have a chance to count one of the world's largest and innovative companies among your first clients!

This is the second edition of the P&G Lift start-up call, after the success of the 2011 edition, when some of your fellow startups have had a chance to run a Proof of concept with P&G.

This call for responses is focused to one of the 4 following areas:

• Alternate Share Reporting
• Next Generation visualization
• Ubiquitous work space solutions
• Win at the Zero Moment of Truth

For further information on each of these subjects, please click on each link above to see the detailed briefs and expected responses.

Please send us your responses by the 9th of February. The selected startups for attendance will be confirmed by the 15th of Feb.

We are awaiting your submissions!

A quick update from the conference program: due to logistics reasons, Patrizia Marti will unfortunately be unable to attend Lift12 this year. She was going to talk about the role of emotion and aesthetics in design.

She is going to be replaced by Ben Bashford, an interaction designer and inventor focusing on the emerging networks of software, people, places, and objects.

In the "Near Future" session he will explore the use of artificial emotion and empathy in digital products. We invited him because of his insightful perspective on what we he calls "emoticomp" or how to embed personality, emotion, behaviour in “connected things”.

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!