Meet the first four Lift11 speakers

As we continue putting the Lift11 program together, we want to introduce you to the four speakers that have already confirmed their presence:

Steve Portigal

Steve is the founder of Portigal Consulting, a boutique firm that brings together user research, design and business strategy to help organizations discover and act on new insights about their customers. Clients include companies such as Logitech, GE, Hewlett-Packard, Nestlé, and Sony. Besides being an avid photographer with a Museum of Foreign Grocery Products in his home, Steve has taught Design Research at the California College of Art. He also built one of the first online communities (Undercover, a Rolling Stones fan group) in 1992! At Lift11, Steve will share his experience on how to discover and act on new insights about customers - and your own organization.

Kevin Slavin

Kevin is the founder of area/code, creating cross-media games and entertainment for clients like Nokia, CBS, Disney Imagineering, MTV, Nike, Puma and EA. Area/Code builds on the landscape of pervasive technologies and overlapping media to create new kinds of entertainment. They have built mobile games with invisible characters that move through real-world spaces, online games synchronized to live television broadcasts, and a game in which virtual sharks are controlled by real-world sharks with GPS receivers stapled to their fins. Their Facebook game "Parking Wars" has generated over 1 billion pages in 2008.

David Calvo

David is a game designer and sci-fi writer. He works at Ankama, an emerging French video-game studio best known for its 2D MMORPG, Dofus. David founded Ankama Play in 2007 as an indie R&D venture inside Ankama. They are currently developing Islands of Wakfu for the Microsoft's online game platform (XBLA). As the creative director, David is taking care of the transmedia approach of the project. He builds the structure of the game universe and supervises its adaptation to various game platforms.
David Calvo has published novels, short stories, poems, pen and paper RPGs, LARPS, video games and comic books.

Vlad Trifa

Long-time friend and active member of our community Vlad Trifa will hit the Lift11 stage. A PhD candidate at the Institute for Pervasive Computing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich), he is a Research Associate with SAP Research. Prior to that, Vlad designed software for sensor networks to monitor and recognize tropical antbirds in the Mexican rainforest and in Californian natural reservations with the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) and the Department of Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Afterwards, he spent a year as researcher at ATR International Research Center in Kyoto (Japan), where he worked on multimodal human-computer interaction, humanoid robotics, and computational neurosciences. Vlad will talk about the "Web of Things" in one of the parallel session focused on technical innovation on Thursday.

Don't forget that as a member of the Lift community, we count on you to recommend speakers! Send us the names of people or organizations you think would fit our program. Remember the sub themes: Touchpoints, Social media & gaming in Asia, Transactions, Pervasive gaming, Connected everywhere, Future corporations, Creative thinking, Stories and new frontiers.