Latest news about the Lift conference

Cory Doctorow published a story on Bruce Sterling's Lift France 09 talk on Boingboing. The video then received 3000 views in 48h :) Thanks Cory!

Mike sez, "In this video from the LIFT 09 conference, Bruce Sterling looks back at what he wrote in the great book 'Shaping Things' about spimes, RFID, and the 'Internet of Things,' and sees how his theorizing has held up."

Very few books have influenced me as much as Shaping Things did (here's my review). The video is a don't-miss/must-see.

Bruce Sterling "Shaping Things" (Lift09 France EN)

(Thanks, Mike!)

Link to Boingboing post

At Lift France 09, Mike Kuniavsky spoke about Changing Things: Fab Labs, towards decentralized design and production of material products. You can watch the video here.

Mike sent us some news this week, as his book on ubiquitous computing user experience design is done and will be shipping in August. You can pre-order it here. Based on case studies, the book will show the evolution of products caused by ubiquitous computing. It also describes frameworks and processes, as well as giving practical advice on how to handle these unique design challenges.

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.

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

Douglas Repetto "Changing Innovation" (Lift09 France EN)
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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.

“Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything.”, Gregg Easterbrook

Somebody suggested we add a "lift by the numbers" section on the site's about page, and I decided to act on this recommendation as it gives an perspective what has happened in the past three and a half years.

4'000 attendees from 60 countries.

8 events held on 3 continents in 3.5 years

2 million visits and 13.5M page views on liftconference.com per year (full stats)

450+ articles and interviews in national (TSR, Bilan, RSR, Swissinfo) and international (BBC, CBC, BusinessWeek, FastCompany, Wired, AFP, Europe1) media

200+ talks available free in video

5000+ members in the Lift community

180+ speakers from more than 40 countries

Lift @ home events happening in Toronto, Tokyo, Barcelona, London, San Francisco, Brussels, Barcelona, Zurich, New York, etc.

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Owl RE undertakes an evaluation for each Lift conference to measure the successes, opportunities and potential improvements. As a new collaboration with Thierryweber.com, the findings are now available in video format. The first was created for Lift France 09 held in Marseille in June 2009. Lift France 09 explored the social consequences of new technologies with over 560 people attended the conference.

We had several Lifters sending us visual notes (Aram Armstrong, Philippe Méda, Rachel Hinman), and now Julien Cordier took this craft to a whole new level, sending a short comic strip capturing the essence of Gunter Pauli's legendary talk (video). Enjoy, we really love when cartoonists send us their work like that!

Here is coverage of Lift France 09 from Tiburon.tv, a great series of interviews of participants and speakers captured in Marseille.

Intelligent robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction. They are walking into everyday life and are in widespread use performing jobs cheaper or more reliably than humans. But before using a robot in the real world you want to test it in many situations and repeat the situation over time modifying the environment.

„Most of the time robots are used in dangerous situations or complicated environments so testing in simulation saves a lot of time and money. We create easy-to-use simulation editors to help people use simulation“ explains Bertrand Copigneaux, COO and co-founder of SimplySim. „I’ll give you an example: One of the projects of French robot constructor robosoft is to have an autonomous vehicle in a city. To test it you would have to block the city in order to have a situation which is close to the use cases of the robot.“

Bertrand and his two co-founders Nicolas Dalmasso and Nicolas Oudit started SimplySim in April 2008 when they were still students. For now the 3D Simulation Experts are mainly a service company but they are also working on offering products like a robot simulator with a more realistic way to simulate robots, especially with regard to physics simulation. Bertrand wrapped up his interview with Viktoria by giving a presentation of a 3D simulation they have developed for Microsoft Imagine Cup Competition.

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Here is coverage of Lift France 09 from Tiburon.tv, a great series of interviews of participants and speakers captured in Marseille.

Luckily there are some people out there who are looking for ways to help save the planet. Romain Vailleux, co-founder and community manager at Paris-based Hop-Cube, is one of them. His startup offers a new approach to sustainable development by providing ecological scoring on a wide range of consumer goods. The service is specifically designed for online marketplaces and will be displayed next to each product referenced in the product catalog.

„Hop-Cube gathers information that is already accessible to the public, analizes and ranks it with a specific score out of ten given by our HopScore indicator“ explains Romain. „All kinds of criteria like conception, transport, usage of the product and its recycling are applied. We also collaborate with eco-labels to bring their labels to the consumer.“ E-commerce companies pay based on a monthly subscription - around €5 per product for the scoring service, but Hop-Cube also makes different offers depending on the company size and the number of visitors on the website.

There are some eco-portals providing information on the web, but other than Hop-Cube’s service at one glance, these portals oblige the users to come to their portal and choose their products through it. Anyone interested in providing more support for Hob-Cube: They just started two months ago and still need consumers to help them continue as well as funding in order to grow further...

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Here is coverage of Lift France 09 from Tiburon.tv, a great series of interviews of participants and speakers captured in Marseille.

„The biggest hurdle we have is that we teach our entrepreneurs the MBA courses. With our core business and core competence thinking we have been generating an awful lot of waste, unwanted consequences and collateral damage“ finds Gunter Pauli - founder and director of the "Zero Emissions Research Initiative" of the United Nations University in Tokyo. „Natural systems are so efficient that there is no one unemployed and there is no waste - everyone is put to work with pleasure. Evolution is really all about doing much more with less, building up social capital and having everyone contributing to their capabilities. The entrepreneur can also see in the natural system ways that this reduction of material requirements comes even to the point where you can do something with nothing.“

„Nature is on a continuous path of improvement, that is also what entrepreneurship is all about. You can be competitive in the market with a new idea even if you have no experience because you can envision very clearly how you can achieve the same service or product with much less.“ Gunter hopes that future entrepreneurs raise hell for the existing economic profile and accelerate economic innovation. For him, the condition for innovation acceleration is that the players have no experience and that they accept the fact that they will make mistakes but will correct them on route.

According to the founder and former President of Worldwatch Europe and author of eight books, the experience on the ground is the key to success: „We have to bring us to such a high level of emotional intelligence, motivation and perseverence that we can start without seeing the big picture, because we’re creating it. Generate multiple cash-flows by responding to multiple needs with one system and get multiple results by resolving multiple issues. Keep on searching for connections that make sense and then create partnerships. Once you have made a connection the logic sticks with you forever.“

Sorry for the mistaken title in the middle of the video...

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