google

We have the pleasure to announce that a delegation of Google Business Development from China, Japan and India will accompany Lift12 speaker Nick Heller. To tap into their extraordinary wealth of knowledge we will organize a "Google Dating" during the Lift Fondue, on the evening of February 22nd.

This is a great chance for start-ups and entrepreneurs to exchange with the Google Venture Team during the Lift Fondue! To participate in the call send us an e-mail with a short description about your project and why you'd like to meet the Google Team to google-fondue@liftconference.com until February 14th.

Good luck!

A new research by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has come up with several interesting findings. The study "was designed to examine the media coverage that occurs when technology news crosses beyond technology-oriented outlets or news sections to the top of the American news agenda—to front-pages, the national nightly news, cable prime-time and other general interest news outlets. It did not delve into specialty publications or sections."

• The press reflects exuberance about gadgets and a wonder about the corporations behind them, but wariness about effects on our lives, our behavior and the sociology of the digital age.
• The mainstream media’s coverage of technology was not vast. It made up less than 1.6% of the total coverage over the course of the year, ranking it 20th out of the 26 identified topics. That puts technology news in same range as the environment, sports and education. And while it trails far behind crime (4.7%), it comes in ahead of religion (.6%) and immigration (.9%).
• The study examined which technology companies generated the most media attention in these venues. Apple, with its flashy press events and often drawn out releases of new products, narrowly outpaced Google in total coverage. Twitter and Facebook ranked third and fourth. Microsoft, on the other hand, once the feared technology behemoth, fell far behind—attracting just a fifth of the coverage of Apple and less than half that of Twitter.
• For Apple, the most heavily covered technology company, 42% of the stories described the company as innovative and superior, and another 27% lauded its loyal fan base. But there were doubts. The most common such negative thread, that Apple products don’t live up to the hype, appeared in 17% of stories about Apple. For Google, the company’s advancements in making content easier to find topped its coverage at 25%. But it was only half as likely as Apple to be framed as having superior, innovative products (20%).

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Vinton Gray "Vint" Cerf is an American computer scientist who, together with Robert Kahn, invented the Internet. His contributions have been recognized repeatedly, with honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Japan Prize, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Vint has worked for Google as its Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist since October 2005. In this role he has become well known for his predictions on how technology will affect future society, encompassing such areas as artificial intelligence, environmentalism, the advent of IPV6 and the transformation of the television industry and its delivery model. He is also working with NASA on the implementation of an interplanetary extension of the Internet.

Why LIFT
For Vint, LIFT is an opportunity to see through many eyes the strengths and weaknesses of prediction and vision about the Future. He would like to compare with others the speculative exploration of future, unexplored landscapes and to compare those speculative explorations with the reality that emerged from the past.

What Vint expects
Vint has high expectations for the conference in February. He told us that he would like to have a much clearer sense of what the future may hold, in part to enhance imagination and also to find realistic paths towards technological progress.

Web 2.0 meets Marxist (Foucaultian?) economic theory in the latest video from Austrian subversive art collective http://www.monochrom.at/english/

Sorry it is not possible to embed content, so you´ll have to leave the site
http://tv.boingboing.net/2008/02/15/monochroms-marxist-s.html

Go see for yourself. The are pretty good. And smart. And on-topic.
Enjoy!