News

New lift13 speaker: Venkatesh Rao

Sep 7, 2012

At Lift13, Venkatesh will stimulate our thinking on Resilience and Resistance. As an independent researcher, consultant and writer with over a decade of experience in corporate, academic and startup settings, he has authored the popular ribbonfarm blog with posts featured on Slashdot, Kottke, BoingBoing, and The New York Times.

Venkatesh recently wrote an insightful piece that caught our attention. It addresses how we fail to notice when the "future" actually arrives, and how technological adoption is about turning innovative products and services into what he calls "manufactured normalcy": the incorporation of a piece of technological novelty into larger conceptual metaphors built out of familiar experiences.

New Lift13 Speaker: Konstantina Zoehrer

Sep 3, 2012

We are happy to announce Konstantina Zoehrer, a young entrepreneur from Athens as a speaker for Lift13. Konstantina is a social innovation activist, co-founder of the social enterprise Loft2Work Loft2work and initiator of Startup Live Athens, an initiative under the umbrella of Starteurope, which supports and fosters entrepreneurship in Europe. She is also an active member of the Sandbox Network.

Konstantina's work focuses on how informal structures and communities contribute to the socioeconomic development of less privileged areas in Greece and how they can lead the country out of the current circumstances of crisis. In the Resilience Session at Lift13 Konstantina will share her experience unlocking "Untapped cultural and social capital", that is often being unveiled silently in times of intense pressure.

New Lift13 Speaker: Heather Kelley

Aug 21, 2012

Heather Kelley is a media artist and video game designer. Named by Fast Company magazine as one of "2011's most influential women in technology".

Heather’s extensive career in the games industry has included design and production of blockbuster next-gen console games, interactive smart toys, handheld games, research games, and web communities for girls. She's also the founder of Perfect Plum, a consultancy designing and building, among other things, the world's most creative and intuitive personal pleasure software for women. In 2012 Heather also co-curated the well-received "Joue Le Jeu" exhibition at La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris and the Star Wars Identities exhibition in Montreal.

At Lift13 Heather will talk in the session "XXX" and share her experience designing very personal sensual devices. What mental models, what design principles can be applied for sensuality and pleasure, alone or perhaps together, for high-end technology that's not getting in the way?

Towards "Podular" futures with Dave Gray

Jul 24, 2012

It's been a while we wanted to have Dave Gray at Lift. Long-time followers of his work, we just waited for the right occasion... which came up recently in the form of two inspiring articles he wrote about pods, working practices and "podular futures".

A challenge lot of companies encounter nowadays revolves around the need to be adaptive in a dynamic, volatile business environment. The common answer lies in enabling of small and autonomous ("pods") that can react quickly without fear of risks. Hence the need for a "podular design" that can allow this to happen in creative ways. What do such systems requires to work? What's the role of cultural and technical standards in this? How can companies leave room for failure in this? Lift13 speaker Dave Gray, will discuss theses issues and what it means to have self-directed teams.

Senior Vice President Strategy at Dachis Group, Dave is also the author of Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers, a thoughtful book about tools to help companies and people generate new ideas, work through them, and act on them.

Going Agile with Daniel Freitag

Jul 19, 2012

One of Lift13's «learn today, apply tomorrow» sessions is going to discuss the agile enterprise - the application of learnings from lean manufacturing and agile software development to all aspects of business, in all sorts of companies.

An extraordinary example illustrating the way to great adaptability is a maker of fashionable bags: FREITAG. FREITAG is manufacturing 300'000 unique bags a year, using recycled truck tarps, with minimal waste, maximal style a and constantly changing model line, sold in own stores from New York to Tokyo.

Lift13 speaker Daniel Freitag, who founded the company together with his brother Markus in 1993 will tell us about his journey to reorganize all of the company for one goal: maximal agility. For the first time Daniel will speak publicly about how Freitag is leveraging the Scrum framework for individual teams and the entire enterprise, how they're going far beyond flexible budgeting in order to build a manufacturing company fit for the challenges of the next decades, all in a custom-built space in Zürich Oerlikon.