We are twice excited to introduce our mobile payment partner Mobino.

Why twice excited? Because this is a much awaited premiere at Lift and because Mobino is the brainchild of three long-time lifters:

Jean-François Groff, Jens-Christian Fischer and Alessandro Lampis.

This year Mobino is holding a private launch of their mobile payment solution at Lift. Join the fun and install the app to get 10 Swiss Francs of free credit on your Mobino account. Use it around the conference venue to buy snacks and drinks, a limited edition Lift T-shirt, an extra fondue ticket, a lunch voucher, or even a
relaxing massage. It's just with a few taps on your phone. If you need more credit, top up your account with cash at the Mobino stand, or be creative and share the bill with your fellow Lifters - you can send money to anyone in your addressbook!

Mobino is available today for iPhone and Android

SPECIAL BONUS: 10 lucky Lifters who download the app will win 100 Swiss Francs credit. Results will be announced at
the closing session on Friday.

Please meet the third speaker of the "Innovation Drivers XXX" session: Garion Hall is CEO of abbywinters.com, a premium and successful adult pay site, with tens-of-thousands of paying members. They employ a staff of 22 talented experts in their Amsterdam office. The pay-site launched in 2000 and is still going strong (despite the Australian government causing them to move continents in 2010!).

A strong team of experienced managers lead the staff of 22, and use robust systems to produce consistent works of a high quality and low cost, while empowering individual staff to excel and enjoy their work.

Motivated by principles of social responsibility, we deliver provocative media by embracing imagination, creativity and emerging technologies. Our models, customers and business partners are inspired by our fervid passion. We change the game!

Garion Hall is the CEO of abbywinters.com, primarily working in the business as the “Product Owner”, leading the agile software development team in various projects. Casual, relaxed but packing some contentious views of the adult industry, Garion enjoys talking about effecting social change, corporate responsibility, and systemising workflows in the adult industry.

Garion has lead the team to develop a world-class billing service, a rock-solid Content Management System, and a company that delivers solid profits for 12 consecutive years.  The CMS is provided via SAAS to other adult sites, and the billing system has a bevy of scrappy clients. The company recruits and shoots models in Amsterdam, and is regularly adding new CMS features to heighten user-engagement.

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Come and meet Garion at Lift13, grab your ticket now before prices go up!

We are very pleased to share with you a short interview with Mark Sorrell, Development Director at Hide&Seek. At Lift13 Mark will talk in the session "Mobile stories" on how to discover the creative potential of mobile phones and how artists and designers repurpose them in original ways.

Mark, who are you and what do you do?

I’m the Development Director at Hide&Seek - a London based game-design agency with a focus on inventing new kinds of play - which means that I have to match the creative and commercial needs of the agency together. Continually shaping strategy, finding new insights, speaking nicely to people, getting excited about things, getting other people even more excited about things, designing stuff, writing all of it down, that’s what I do. Thinking, talking, writing, mostly about games.

Tell us a bit about one of your latest projects your were working on.

There are mounds of exciting stuff I can’t talk about yet, as is always the case, but the last really exciting project we worked on was the British Intelligence Officers Exam for Sony, which was a chat-bot powered text adventure for Skyfall, the latest Bond film. It was  and update to the old text-adventure style of game (“GO EAST” “YOU WERE EATEN BY A BEAR”) and was genuinely exciting, mentally challenging and really quite emotive. It was a great mixing up of the old and the new and had some really great writing involved. It’s good to see technology enabling craft like that, especially when the end product is so exciting and much fun.

What recent change, technological or social, were you surprised by? Why?

Given that I’m supposed to be at least one step ahead of any social or technological change, I’m not sure I should admit to any surprises...

The success of tablets, the size of the userbase now, has been somewhat unexpected, but to be honest, I’m far more surprised at how much things haven’t changed than how much they have. People still watch TV in huge numbers for incredible lengths of time, second screen still isn’t a monetisable thing, no-one has cracked what the mobile (or even internet) advertising product to match the billboard, newspaper ad, or commercial is, Facebook is still massive, banks, in internet terms, still lag behind the rest of the world by a decade or more - things move slowly. Behaviours don’t change overnight (though sometimes they look like they are.)

What do you do to disconnect ?

Not much, I don’t feel like being connected is stressful, or that being disconnected is relaxing. I tend to have phases of consuming as much media as I can, chewing through games, books, movies at a tremendous rate, then consuming almost nothing, letting it all settle in. I’m a big believer in the best ideas coming when you’re not thinking about a problem, so I like to stuff myself full, then give myself plenty of time to digest.

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Meet Mark Sorrell in person at Lift13, grab your ticket now! http://liftconference.com/lift13/register

Alp ICT, CTI start-up, OSEC, the Geneva Promotion Economique and Lift Conference are happy to announce the Venture Night Panel of acclaimed entrepreneurs. They will discuss how to successfully conquer markets abroad and award a prize to the start-up that has the best international potential. The winning start-up will receive support from OSEC in researching markets and finding international partners.

We are really looking forward to welcoming these great entrepreneurs. The Venture Night will take place from 16h45 on Thursday 7 February. Come and discover the most disruptive start-ups in Switzerland!

This event is open to the public.