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

Our friends of Lumens8 (the team behind the Audio/Video of Lift) are running Geneva's festival of electronic cultures called Electron. Friday evening was the opening of the expo that will last a month and present the work of several media artists, among the the fascinating "Other side break" shown below:

^{Other side break by Cléa Coudsi et Eric Herbin.}

Yesterday in Lyon, Emmanuel Rondeau and I organized a Lift@Home about gestural interfaces. We (Lift) partnered with Imaginove, a French cluster of companies, research institutions and universities focused on video games, audio-visual, cinema, animation and multimedia. Several other Lift seminars will be organized around various topics such as the Social Web, 3D virtual environment, networked objects and locative media. We'll focus on the uses and practices of each of these technologies, to reflect upon how they are appropriated by users and how this information can be fed back into the design process.

Yesterday's seminar focused on how gestural interfaces such as the Nintendo Wii, new kinds of accelerometers and (3D) cameras are used in the context of video games. There were around 50 participants, mostly game designers, interaction designers and Human-Computer Interaction academics.

After a quick introduction about the evolution of video-game peripherals over time, I described the pros and cons of these kind of interfaces as shown on the following slide:

In addition, I mentioned some of the projects we carried out when I worked at Phoenix Interactive, a French video-game studio based in Lyon. These projects showed how we studied the various ways to transmit/explain gestures to players, a project in collaboration with a laboratory in Cognitive Psychology.

The next presenter, Emmanuelle Jacques, a sociologist from the University of Montpellier, described some results from an ethnographical study of Nintendo Wii usage. She described the discrepancy between the gestures that game designers expected to be made and people's practices. As shown in the following picture, the movement amplitude of gestures is indeed quite different with expert players (the smaller girl) and novice players who think they must replicate real-world gestures. Emmanuelle discussed the implications of such notions, showing that playability is a much more complex notion than simply replicating what is done in the physical world.

The following presenters, Timothée Jobert from Litus/CEA and Etienne Guerry from XPteam in Grenoble presented an interesting case study of user-centered design. They described the results of an ethnographic study about how people use two sorts of gestural interfaces (the Nintendo Wii and the Bodypad). They then showed how these results were used in the design of video game prototypes, based on a new kind of technology (a combination of an accelerometer and a magnetometer designed by Movéa). They ended their presentation with a demo of their prototypes, leading to a lively discussion about how new technologies can overcome the problems game designers encountered with the Wii and the notion of realism.

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

Alexander Osterwalder will be hosting a workshop at Lift10. Alex is an author, speaker & adviser on business model innovation. You can download a 70-page preview of his bestselling book: Business Model Generation.

Before (re-)focusing on business models Alex was partner at strategy consultancy Arvetica, helped build-up and manage a globally-active NGO based in Thailand working on HIV/AIDS & Malaria, did a PhD on business models, consulted as a freelancer, wrote as a journalist at BILANZ and launched a start-up in the field of finance.

Given his background and experience, Alex is hosting a workshop entitled: Business Model Innovation for Start-ups, Corporations and Social Entrepreneurs.

Workshop participants will interactively learn about a business model development methodology that is applied by leading global organizations such as 3M, Ericsson, Telenor, Deloitte, Capgemini, Public Works and Government Services Canada, and start-ups alike.

Participants will start “practicing” the design of a business model during the workshop and the group will work on a challenging case study.

Sign up for the workshop here.

Our friend (and member of our advisory board) Guido Van Nispen has sent us a book with the pictures he took at Lift09. Guido is an AMAZING photographer as his Flick stream will show you... Thanks for the gift, there is really something nice in tangible objects and artifacts. I think this real world thing is here to last ;D

Update: Guido sent us a PDF version of the book you can download here (50MB).

^{View all pictures on Flick.}

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

This year Lift welcomes Alice Taylor as one of our speakers! We've invited Alice to speak during our session on online communities. She will present various cases showing how the video game environment can be used for public diplomacy, democracy, entertainment, education and experimentation.

Alice works at the UK's Channel 4, and her job is to commission cross-platform educational content for UK-based 14-19 year olds, aiming to get useful, life-helpful information to teens via their most-favored platforms and formats.

She specializes in video gaming and playful experiences, and Channel 4 Education’s 2009 slate includes:

• Routes, a cross-platform game tackling DNA and genetic testing. Winner of Best Content BIMA 2009, nominated for children's interactive BAFTA 2009.
• Smokescreen, a cross-platform game on the subject of privacy, online security and surveillance.
• 1066 The Game, a web game depicting the events of the battles of 1066. Winner, Best Online Game, BIMA 2009, and nominated for children's interactive BAFTA 2009.
• Bow Street Runner, C4 Education’s first game commission, won the children’s interactive BAFTA in 2008.

Alice was a judge for the 2006 & 2007 Independent Games Festival, the D&AD awards 2008, and IndieCade 2009. Alice writes the gamecentric blog Wonderland and occasionally contributes to sites and magazines such as The Guardian or Kotaku. She joined Channel 4 from BBC Worldwide, where she was Vice President, Digital Media for the USA’s west coast operations.

A flashback to Lift France 09, and Douglas Repetto's talk about creative innovation and tinkering.

Douglas Repetto "Changing Innovation" (Lift09 France EN)
Uploaded by liftconference. - Technology reviews and science news videos.

As you may remember Douglas is the founder of Dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity. He is also an artist producing sculptures, installations, performances, recordings, and software. We caught up with him this week, and he gave us an update on his recent activities!

In December, he presented "Walking Tables and Wrestling Foals": A Hands-on Workshop and Musical Performance" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as part of the exhibition "Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity." In the workshop a large group of volunteers fabricated and assembled thirty three simple mechanical walking tables, aka "foals." That evening the foals were arranged in a circle and set free to wander around in a MoMA lobby, where they broke down, fell over, embraced, and occasionally triumphed. Contemporary music ensemble WetInk improvised a score based on the tragicomic movement of the foals. Have a look at this video to get a feel for the event.