Speakers

Jean-Claude is CEO and board member of Hublot, a Swiss luxury watchmaker. Prior to this, he had successfully rejuvenated the Blancpain and Omega brands, both currently owned by Swatch Group.

Don is an internationally sought writer (we know him for the best-seller “Wikinomics”), consultant and speaker on business strategy and organizational transformation. Don is Chairman of Moxie Insight. He was founder and chairman of the international think tank New Paradigm before it’s acquisition in 2007.

Nicolas is research and consultant at the Near Future Laboratory.As a curator at Lift, he is taking care of the program of the... » read more

Long-time friend and active member of our community Vlad Trifa will talk about the "Web of Things". A researcher at the Institute for Pervasive Computing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich), he is also a Research Associate with SAP Research.

What if you could rethink a school from scratch? What would you do to improve the way kids are educated? Marcel Kampman is doing just that in project Dreamschool.

Dorian Selz is the founder of several high profile Swiss startups, starting with local.ch and now Memonic, a system helping users organize their online information.

Etienne is a graphic designer who co-founded Editions Volumiques, a publishing house which creates “Paper Video Games”, mixing paper in either books or board games to the digital world. He also teaches at several design schools around the world.

David is a poet, cartoonist and game designer. David has written and designed novels, short stories, comic books, video games, LARPs and freeform RPGS. He is currently Creative Director of Ankama Play, a division of Ankama, a french company best known for his MMORPG Dofus.

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 - the subject of his talk at Lift11.

Alexandre is Creative Director of Ralston & Bau, Head of Nordic Materials and partnerships in Transplant. Today he’s engaged in sustainability issues within design and architecture.

Since being detained by the FBI in 2002 as a suspected terrorist, Elahi, an artist and professor, has made his life an open book. He documents every aspect of his life on his website: trackingtransience.net

In 2009 Jennifer Magnolfi joined the Herman Miller Ideation Studio at the front end of Research & Development, where her work focuses on continuing to explore programmability as a driver for future business development and innovation.

Nick oversees Promise's research activities and has a particular interest in the creative industries, education and the arts, language and semiotics and cross-cultural research. Nick is currently leading Promise's work with LSE Enterprise to produce a report on the history, application and benefits of co-creation.

Tiffany St James is the former head of citizen participation for the UK government. She trained the UK Civil Service on how to better engage with the public online, part of which a digital strategist who gathered a strong experience on how you can motivate people to participate in online communities.

Yasmine Abbas is an architect and Doctor of Design from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. In 2008 she founded Pan Urban Intelligence, a practice dedicated to "help entities innovate and improve the built environment". Yasmine's work has covered subjects such as the new forms of work, mobility and nomadism.

Tara is a particle physicist. She works on the LHCb experiment at the CERN, amongst others, focusing on aspects of the trigger, and studying how to measure electroweak boson production.

Rahaf Harfoush works with organizations to build authentic relationships by aligning their social media initiatives with their vision. She was involved in the extraordinary effort that helped bring President Obama to the White House in 2008. Her talk will explain how to use social media for politics in the US, Iran and elsewhere.

Neil is the co-founder of Index Ventures, a venture capital investment firm famous for its investments in Skype, MySQL, and Betfair. He is on the board of organizations as diverse as Netvibes, Moo Print or Human Rights Watch. His talk will focus on the current trends in investment and entrepreneurship.

Russell has spent most of his working life in advertising and communications strategy. He’s also a columnist for Campaign and Wired UK. He works at Really Interesting Group and thinks about things that connect the web and the world.

Basile Zimmermann is interested in the circulation of technological objects from one culture to another: the design of social networking websites in China or music devices such as synthesizers, music software and turntables in contemporary Beijing. He will described how one can better and faster understand what is going on with technology when it comes to cultural differences.

Katrin Verclas is in charge of a global network of practitioners that use mobile phone applications for social impact (citizen participation, health and development or civil society organizations). She will explain what does and does not work in mobile participation.

As a researcher in media studies, Jean Burgess investigates everyday media creation and use in relation to technological change, with a particular focus on the YouTube community as well as various other sites of user-led content creation, both online and offline. She will share her findings on stage.

As a regular speaker in hacker and new media conferences, german futurist and film critic Christian Heller will talk about how to adapt to the privacy change caused by technologies and the transformation of personal and political identity patterns in the digital age.

Felipe works in the fields of technological appropriation and low tech experimentation. He has been lead articulator in MetaReciclagem.org (an emergent Brasilian movement working on low tech labs) and Bricolabs.net, an international network of experimental labs. He will atalk about hacking to climb the social ladder in Brazil.

A sociologist interested in (and avid user of) digital technologies, Antonio will revisit and criticize the myths around the notion of "digital generations". Based on various cases, he will discuss how computer users are not doomed to stay young forever.

Richard works with the largest companies in the world to install sustainable new media strategies. He will talk about how businesses can benefit from the conversational technologies.