switzerland

We are happy to launch the Lift12 ticketshop today! This 7th Swiss edition of Lift will happen on 22-24 February 2012 in Geneva. The event will consist in the usual two and a half days of talks, workshops, demos and social moments. More details will follow in the coming weeks on the content, as we are busy defining the event's focus and program.

Registration

Buy your Lift12 tickets at the early bird price. The ticket shop is now open, and tickets start at only 650chf for 60 days. Students and press/bloggers passes are also available, while one day tickets will be offered after the end of the early bird period.
Please note that to minimize food waste, we will again ask you to buy your meals separately so that we can know precisely how many we need to order.
» Lift12 tickets shop.

Help us design Lift12!

Join the September 13 workshop to design Lift12 with us. We will discuss the event's format, theme, sessions, and speakers. This workshop is a unique opportunity to have your say on how the event happens. Seating is limited to 40 participants to ensure we have a decent level of interaction, so hurry up and register for a nice discussion followed by drinks at our office!
» Learn more.

Be part of a kick-starting community of designers, coders, communicators and activists to help Switzerland move towards a more ‘direct data democracy’ for participation, transparency and accountability from the grassroots.

Switzerlands first Open Data Camps brings together thinkers and doers to get things done and make a difference: designers looking to make an impact, passionate developers, citizens and stakeholders from all parts of society. Your ideas and your competence are in high demand to shape to future of how we deal with data in this country, so if you too feel it's time to make a difference sign up as: Ideator, Designer, or Developer.

Click here to get more info

Sitting on a Swiss train the other day, I became fascinated by this air pilot playing with his laptop PC and his tablet.

But it became even more fascinating when the guy fired up his iPhone:

This is a truly compulsive usage of technologies by an extreme user. But it was interesting to see how he combined certain sorts of interactions/app usage to certain parameters (screen size, presence of a keyboard, etc.). It was also curious to see how the mobile context (a train with a limited personal space) was not so problematic to accomodate the use of three displays at the same time.

Laurent Haug, fondateur des conférences Lift présente le programme de ce premier jour de l'édition 2009 de Lift à Genève.

Lift conference editorial director Nicolas Nova revisits technological failures from the past ranging from the videophone to the intelligent fridge. He then describes the reasons behind them and shows that failures can be turned into successes as shown by the videophone, which has now resurfaced on platforms such as Skype.

Laurent Haug, founder of the Lift Conference, opens the Lift09 conference and introduces the events' program.

Patrick J. Gyger is a Swiss historian, curator and writer. In the 1990s he specialised in medieval studies. Since 1999, he has been the director of Maison d’Ailleurs (the “House of Elsewhere”), a Swiss museum.

With it’s over 60,000 books and thousands of pulp magazines it houses one of the world’s largest collections of literature on science fiction, utopia, and extraordinary journeys.

In 2008, Patrick opened the “Espace Jules Verne”, a wing of Maison d’Ailleurs dedicated to Jules Verne and extraordinary journeys. In the early 2000s, he was one of the co-managers of European Space Agency’s ITSF study – Innovative Technologies from Science Fiction for Space Applications – a research looking into Science Fiction to find ideas for space engineers. His most recent book is “Flying Cars or, Memories of a Dreamt Future”.

Patrick, together with Nicolas Nova, will kick off the conference on Thursday morning with his talk in the first “Change” session. We are very much looking forward to his talk on “Memoires of a magnificent future”. Find more info on Patrick on his LIFT profile.

I arrived in Geneva about an hour ago and proceeded to withdraw way too much money from the ATM by mistake (darn exchange rates).

Hotel Capitole initial reactions: Friendly staff. Room smells of old cigarettes (or mold; I hope it's old cigarettes), and (surprise, surprise) the WiFi doesn't work! (Will hotels figure out how to provide Internet connectivity properly in our lifetimes?)

Oh yeah, and it's a good thing I checked about the time difference (I live in the UK) because there's an hour difference. Even though my iPhone is set to automatically change timezones it didn't pick it up.

And did I mention I picked up a lovely little Asus Eee PC at the duty free in Gatwick. I can't wait to charge this baby up and play with it a bit more. Ah, and I've added yet another charger to my rapidly growing collection (it's a good thing I've gotten into the habit of carrying along a multi-socket extension cable whenever I travel; that way you only need one adapter at the end).

So I'm at the hotel and I have no idea where the conference is -- or whether Thomas Vander Wal's ticket has transferred to my name correctly (apparently it has but I don't see my name listed in the attendee list.) No big deal, I'm sure we'll get it sorted tomorrow.

Which reminds me, I gotta stop writing this and get back to finding out where I need to go and what's happening tomorrow (I decided to come down on a whim yesterday afternoon!)

Oh and I've got oodles of emails to reply to about Singularity. What is Singularity? Why, it's the world's first large-scale online web conference :) We just announced it yesterday and I've been getting some amazing feedback on it ever since.

Looking forward to meeting some of you, seeing more of Geneva, and experiencing the conference tomorrow :)

The talks (sorry in french) from last week are online on klewel.ch:

http://www.klewel.ch/technoark2008.php
http://www.klewel.ch/technoark2008light.php
http://www.klewel.ch/technoark2008texte.php

[it includes videos, slide synchronisation, slide search mechanism.]

Why we invited Henry to LIFT
Henry Markram is Co-Director of the Brain Mind Institute, Director of the Center for Neuroscience & Technology and Director of the "Blue Brain Project". He works at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. A worldwide recognized expert in his field, Henry Markram, is also local. And, at LIFT we like to promote locals! His main project, the Blue Brain Project, is carried out in collaboration with IBM

What will Henry talk about
In the context of our New Frontiers Track, Henry will present the Blue Brain Project to us. The Blue Brain project is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, in order to understand brain function and dysfunction.

Official biography
Henry Markram started his academic career in South Africa at Cape Town University and became particularly interested in the mammalian brain during his stay at the Weizmann institute of Science in Israel. For more information about Henry see his LIFT profile.