funny

Some of you are arriving or traveling to Geneva, in time for tonight's drinks at the parc des bastions. Welcome to a fascinating city full of amazing stories and people, incredible potential, and millions of contradictions! I love this picture taken a couple of weeks ago during the anti-WEF protests, it symbolizes both the weird and conservative side of Geneva.

More photos on Laurent Guiraud's blog.

This year's theme is "where has the future gone?" to try to understand why some predictions fail, and why others end up happening. I couldn't resist posting the recap of 2008's Worst Predictions:

Business Week hosts an article on some of the worst financial predictions from 2008. We know that hindsight is 20/20, but still these are pretty bad. Among the many gems...
• The National Association of Realtors declared that "Existing-Home Sales to Trend Up in 2008." Perhaps their graph was upside down?
• In July, President Bush said he believed the economy was growing. The opposite turned out to be true, as a recession was already well underway.
• A Wall Street analyst proclaimed that AIG "could have huge gains in the second quarter." A few months later, the U.S. government would take over the troubled company.

Link

Yes, with hindsight it's easy, but also so much fun.

After Octopus sashimi and rotten pink fish, I had live shrimps yesterday night as this video will show.

If you travel to Lift Asia be sure to ask a Korean friend to take you to a sashimi place, it is a really unique experience you will never forget, plus it is good and healthy!

As Lift enters the email period - where our job basically consists of sending messages to arrange the final details, promote the conference, and refine presentation topics - I have a tradition which consists in looking at past editions speeches again. And as I watched Robin Hunicke talk about The Modern Age of Gaming (in what became Lift's third most popular talk online) I found this funny little moment where the one and only Robert S. is writing a post and gets caught on camera. Slightly disturbed by the sudden incursion, he closes his browser with one eye and promptly turns his attention back on the presentation as 700 pairs of eyes see him appear on the screen above the stage. Watch a blogger caught blogging!

Every year we go through hundreds of adventures when organizing a large scale event like LIFT. Here are a few stories you've never heard about LIFT08:

• Everybody thinks that all LIFTers come with laptops, and the prospect of hosting the conference generates a few sleepless nights for the IT manager of our conference center. Some pictures might easily let one think that there is a one to one relationship between attendees and laptops. But I got the real number, and we only has 240 laptops at the event this year! That's right, a mere 35%... that generated 28'000 connections. It seems some folks tried to finish their downloads, and the mandatory wifi blackout happened. Next year we should have all p2p traffic blocked and I hope that for the first time ever we will have reliable wifi service :)

• The caterer had an extremely hard time serving everybody - and came up with unfortunately deserved mixed reviews - because we had a last minute problem. The person in charge of the kitchens at the conference center resigned four days before LIFT. He had promised we could use the kitchens to cook, but his successor had other plans and didn't allow us in. Our caterer had to cook the meat at a remote location, driving it just in time for lunch. Add that to the fact the bakery didn't find the delivery entrance on Thursday and you have a recipe for disaster.

• We delivered 6 visa letters to participants coming from eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Half of these were accepted, with unfortunately three attendees were unable to attend for administrative reasons.

• For the second year in a row we received a proposition of someone who wanted to pay to speak. For the second year that was an easy decision for us - a loud no! - but we had a sign that being on stage at LIFT creates more and more value for the speakers. At some point we will be forced to think about channeling all this, just like the creation of the venture night allowed us to give all entrepreneurs a tribune to express themselves, which resulted in less pitches and less "aggressive" networking during the conference.

• Last year we had 100 tshirts remaining, among them 80 S-sized women tees. This year all that remains is 150 M-sized women tshirts. Not sure what conclusion we can draw on the population from this, but if are coaching a women soccer team just let us know we are happy to sponsor your jerseys ;)

• We had a small problem with a (fake?) journalist who had forgotten his press card and said he was working for a magazine called "nectars and flavours". More than the absence of a press card, we had a hard time finding any relation between LIFT and hid magazine ;)

• As we had around 80 people showing up unregistered on Thursday (most of them from our partners, some journalists, a few late registrants) we suddenly had 700 people attending the conference, which means we had a potential overbooking at the fondue as the venue could accommodate 600 persons. I quickly called Fabien - who was in charge of the evening's logistics - and he found a way to create 50 more seats. Fortunately - or unfortunately ? - "only" 550 persons showed up, and we had some spare tables which gave the impression the fondue was less crowded than it was.

You know our policy: we don't do things unless we can do them well. In 2006 we couldn't do good tshirts, so you didn't get one. In 2007, we managed to get them done 2 weeks before the event, when the budget became a bit more black and a bit less red. They were so beautiful that you still see them all around flickr, on Scoble's shoulders for example. And Thierry Crouzet even interviewed José Bové with his tshirt, unfortunatly nobody could snap a picture of that historical moment ;)

In 2008, we had to do even better. So Cristiana asked Rodrigo Soares, one of the world's best young fashion designer, to oversee the production of the tshirts. And he landed in Geneva today after going to Brazil for two days to bring them back.

^{Rodrigo with 6 - yes SIX!! - pieces of luggage, coming back from Brazil were the tshirts were printed}

At what other conference do you get a tshirt created by one of the best design agency and produced by a famous fashion designer? And how do these tshirts look like? Well, it was John's birthday two days ago, and today he threw a small party. So I left my email alone for one hour, popped by, and offered him to be the first person on earth to wear the tshirt, and here is the result:

Niiiiiiiice, I like!!

Can you guys help Nicholas (the programmer who's behind this website) get a macbook air? If you live in the US please read his post on the community blog.

This blog post made me wonder if it would really be that unlikely to meet women at LIFT08, and so I took 5 minutes to do some interesting and less interesting stats on the 541 participants who are set to attend at this point.

Let's start with the interesting stats.

Gender of attendees.

We have 412 men and... 129 women. Good for 24% of all attendees.

^{(sorry I couldn't resist the cheap color code ;)}

24% is of course not enough, but on the other side I think we are 1) getting better 2) above the average of other tech conferences. I very seriously toyed with the idea of giving women a discount like they do in French nightclubs (you see where I get my ideas from ;) but at the end of the day I thought if might sound a bit too... desperate? And as much as I think we need to care about this issue (especially in the conference program, i.e. the part we control) I believe womens' under-representation is more a global than a LIFT issue. We are doing our part, but society needs to evolve a bit too.

Countries of attendees.

We have 30 different nationalities registered, a figure that is actually lower than the truth. I always say that LIFT is 60% locals, 40% foreigners, but only 40% Swiss and 60% foreigners. That is because Geneva is such an international city. We have many attendees living in Geneva (and therefore reporting "Switzerland" as their country) but coming from abroad, so the number of countries is always a bit under evaluated.

This year we welcome new countries like Israel, Singapore, Costa Rica, Serbia, Romania, Malta, Slovakia or Mexico!

Job titles

The most used job title is "journalist" (we gave 60 passes to the press and bloggers, 30 more than what was planned, and we could not accept all demands, sorry about that), barely beating CEO (what else!)

In our system the job title is an optional and free field, so this data set is not very relevant, but still funny.

Most used last names

That's for the stupid part: the most used last names. And we have some clear winners with the Smith, the Favre, the Jones and the Richard! 2 English names in the top 4, we are an international community. At LIFT Asia this stat will be very interesting, and I am ready to bet a lot of money that Lee, Kim and Park will top this list VERY easily.