Latest news about the Lift conference

See you at these events

Sylvie Reinhard — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 17:37:00 +0200

The Lift Team will be on the road in the next months. Nicolas and Laurent will be participating and speaking at several good events, come and say hi if you are around :)

• Playful (London, Sept 24)
Playful is a one-day event all about games and play – in all their manifestations, throughout the contemporary media landscape. It’s a conference for architects, artists, designers, developers, geeks, gurus, gamers, tinkerers, thinkerers, bloggers, joggers, and philosophers. We look at what PLAY means both creatively and culturally, and put speakers on the stage who offer different perspectives on where we are currently, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

• ICCA Congres, Hyderabad, India (Oct 23-27)
One of the major meeting industry event. Laurent will follow up on his 2008 talk in Victoria, Canada and share the latest developments of Lift.

• Swiss Design Network Symposium, Basel, Switzerland (Oct 28-30)
Nicolas will present a workshop together with Lift advisory board member Julian Bleeker:)

• Cinéma Tout Ecran, Geneva, Switzerland (Nov 5)
Geneva's largest movie festival looks beyond the big screen and into gaming with Nicolas on a panel discussion.

Media Forum, Monaco (Nov 10-12)
Monaco's event on new technologies. Let's see how sun, glamour and innovation mix together ;)

Event: Lift Workshop @ Hungary

Laurent Haug — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 12:50:35 +0200

In two weeks, Attila Bujdoso of Kitchen Budapest in collaboration with KÉK (Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre) are holding the first ever Hungarian Lift event. The number of seats has already been extended once (from 35) and you can grab the last free tickets if you hurry!

The first edition of Lift Workshop in Hungary sets the scene in the Eastern Quartier of Pécs at a historical coal mining site, an outstanding architectural merit, now part of the city’s cultural heritage.

^{Széchenyi mine, old compressor hall.}

The aim of the workshop is to explore the implications of urban information systems for architecture and urban design, disciplines that have been largely absent from the mostly technologist-driven discussions of "ubiquitous" computing but nevertheless can provide new insights and alternative perspectives on the implications of “networked objects” for urban culture, newly emerging spatial practices and organizational forms. During the workshop participants develop responses, scenarios applicable to Eastern Quartier and later other urban areas undergoing similar transformation.

Link to the event

Who we would like to see at Lift: a Network Analysis Specialist

Laurent Haug — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:49:40 +0200

Two articles have popped on our radars yesterday: one telling the story of how the U.S. military used social networking to capture Saddam Hussein, the other on how the ability to analyse social connections is proving increasingly useful for organizations.

Both articles show the growing importance of a new field called "social analysis". A strategic importance first, as understanding data can help completely rewrite your perception of reality.

^{Massive antennas seen downtown Portland. Listening to what data?}

In the case of Saddam, social analysis allowed the US Army to locate the former Iraqi dictator. Before the war, the intelligence services created the infamous most-wanted Iraqi playing cards, thinking that through these guys they would get to their leaders. Careful usage of the "same theories that underpin Facebook" showed that Saddam's network had evolved after his regime collapsed, his relationships turning to relatives from his hometown.

For telecom operators, social analysis showed that the most valuable customers are not those "who spend a lot, but thriftier customers [...] known as influencers [who] frequently persuade their friends, family and colleagues to follow them when they switch to a rival operator".

Both examples show how information hides in massive amounts of data, and how complicated and tricky it can be to make sense of (and frequently unlearn) what you think you know. What is a challenge always becomes an opportunity for business, and the prediction is for a $15 billion market in five years.

Have you come across an expert in social analysis that would make a great Lift speaker?

Links:
• Searching for Saddam: A five-part series on how the U.S. military used social networking to capture the Iraqi dictator.
• Untangling the social web: From retailing to counterterrorism, the ability to analyse social connections is proving increasingly useful.

Our new conference: Robolift (March 2011, Lyon)

Laurent Haug — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:58:34 +0200

We are excited to announce the preparation of a new 2011 event to discuss one of today's most important and life changing domain: robotics! The "Robolift" conference will take place on 23-25 March in Lyon, during the first edition of inno-robo, the European trade show dedicated to robotic technologies organized by the French Robotics Association Syrobo.

Our job at Lift will be to build the Robolift conference program, and animate the participants community. Since our first edition in 2006, robotics, artificial intelligence, smart algorithms and networked objects have always been at the center of our interests. With robots set to become mainstream and impact everyone of us, it makes great sense to gather the thinkers and doers of this field to talk about the developments and innovations ahead.

Robolift will also be a an occasion to work with our longtime mentor and friend Bruno Bonnell, who has been accompanying us since his talk at Lift08 - and Lift Asia that same year (video). More information on the program - and the ticket shop - will go online mid september.

Meet the first four Lift11 speakers

Sylvie Reinhard — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:30:00 +0200

As we continue putting the Lift11 program together, we want to introduce you to the four speakers that have already confirmed their presence:

Steve Portigal

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. Clients include companies such as Logitech, GE, Hewlett-Packard, Nestlé, and Sony. Besides being an avid photographer with a Museum of Foreign Grocery Products in his home, Steve has taught Design Research at the California College of Art. He also built one of the first online communities (Undercover, a Rolling Stones fan group) in 1992! At Lift11, Steve will share his experience on how to discover and act on new insights about customers - and your own organization.

Kevin Slavin

Kevin is the founder of area/code, creating cross-media games and entertainment for clients like Nokia, CBS, Disney Imagineering, MTV, Nike, Puma and EA. Area/Code builds on the landscape of pervasive technologies and overlapping media to create new kinds of entertainment. They have built mobile games with invisible characters that move through real-world spaces, online games synchronized to live television broadcasts, and a game in which virtual sharks are controlled by real-world sharks with GPS receivers stapled to their fins. Their Facebook game "Parking Wars" has generated over 1 billion pages in 2008.

David Calvo

David is a game designer and sci-fi writer. He works at Ankama, an emerging French video-game studio best known for its 2D MMORPG, Dofus. David founded Ankama Play in 2007 as an indie R&D venture inside Ankama. They are currently developing Islands of Wakfu for the Microsoft's online game platform (XBLA). As the creative director, David is taking care of the transmedia approach of the project. He builds the structure of the game universe and supervises its adaptation to various game platforms.
David Calvo has published novels, short stories, poems, pen and paper RPGs, LARPS, video games and comic books.

Vlad Trifa

Long-time friend and active member of our community Vlad Trifa will hit the Lift11 stage. A PhD candidate at the Institute for Pervasive Computing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich), he is a Research Associate with SAP Research. Prior to that, Vlad designed software for sensor networks to monitor and recognize tropical antbirds in the Mexican rainforest and in Californian natural reservations with the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) and the Department of Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Afterwards, he spent a year as researcher at ATR International Research Center in Kyoto (Japan), where he worked on multimodal human-computer interaction, humanoid robotics, and computational neurosciences. Vlad will talk about the "Web of Things" in one of the parallel session focused on technical innovation on Thursday.

Don't forget that as a member of the Lift community, we count on you to recommend speakers! Send us the names of people or organizations you think would fit our program. Remember the sub themes: Touchpoints, Social media & gaming in Asia, Transactions, Pervasive gaming, Connected everywhere, Future corporations, Creative thinking, Stories and new frontiers.

Icelandic Human Electricity Pylons

Laurent Haug — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 21:29:38 +0200

A great idea that could transform a liability into an asset by turning electricity pylons into pieces of art. The project comes from Choi + Shine Architects (USA) and was an entry into a contest ran by an Icelandic utility. There is no realization date set yet, but let's hope this will take life somewhere in the world.

Links:
• Project page on Choi + Shine
• Telegraph: Chain of human pylons planned for Iceland

"On Twitter, no one knows you're a car"

Laurent Haug — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 15:58:00 +0200

The past, present and future are made of social connections. What will happen when objects and buildings join the party?

For buildings, you might already know a little if you watched Yang Soo-In's Lift talk on the Living City, skyscrapers communicating with each other to say something like "there is a cold wave at my location, it is coming your way, start your heaters". Not as useless as it first sounded.

Now what happens when vehicles also become members of social networks? "On Twitter, no one knows you’re a car" writes the New York Times, discussing the recent Ford American Journey 2.0, a project to experiment "applications combining social networks, GPS location awareness, and real-time vehicle data".

The project had several goals: see how a trip can be "socialized", allowing followers and fellow travelers to receive meaningful information, find out how web applications could use the data generated by a car, how the interface would work, and connect the car to existing social networks to see how it could communicate by itself in natural language.

^{Project map from Razorfish's Headlight blog.}

Concretely, the car took screenshots of its interior and of the road (and will have to develop an algorythm to blur plates and faces if it wants to do so in privacy-concerned countries like Switzerland), sent messages describing the road conditions it was facing ("I am not too happy about this weather. Current conditions: mostly cloudy day"), and checked-in at locations it was visiting. Nothing too revolutionary.

But remember one cardinal rule of innovation: very often, "what begins as a lark develops into a major invention". This could have interesting usages: localization and alert in case of emergency, tracking and broadcasting to surroundings for stolen cars, sharing and archiving of trips, tracking of driver's localization for senior or young drivers, etc. Not as useless as it sounds, again.

This will be an interesting area to follow, because it involves such a mass product and because social technologies will be one of the major differentiating factor car makers have at their disposal to attract more customers. Now admit it: this plus an electric engine, that would be nice right?

Links:
• NYT: Social Networking for Cars
• Living City talk at Lift Asia 08 by Yang Soo-In's profile.
• A project this reminds me of: GPS taxi for women in Korea.
• Ford American Journey 2.0 project homepage.
• Make Magazine: American Journey 2.0: AJtheFiesta takes Boulder.
• Nicolas Nova on the importance of futility in innovation.
• Switzerland Tells Google To Take Down Street View
• Ford’s American Journey 2.0 – Redux

Video: "The business of broadening perspectives", Anab Jain (Lift France 10)

nicolasnova — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:19:00 +0200

How can design methods help visualize potential futures and broaden our perspectives? Can we reveal the unusual and invisible possibilities by prototyping objects and services that do not exist yet?

This is the topic chosen by Anab Jain in her talk at Lift France 10. Following up on her previous appearance, she showed inspiring examples of speculative designs and prototypes made by Superflux, the London and Ahmedabad based studio she founded to explore the implications of technological change on people, society and the environment.

Such projects shed some light on how to create new dialogues between science, emerging technologies and the wider public. Another important aspect lies in the interdisciplinary approach: collaborating with futurists, technologists or hardcore scientists generates a greater chance to find fresh ideas and perspectives on the future.

Related links:
• Anab put her slides and a summary on the Superflux's blog
• [in French] Hubert Guillaud wrote a very complete write-up published in Le Monde.fr.

Last call for super early bird tickets

Laurent Haug — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:05:53 +0200

Tomorrow our ticket shop switches from super early bird to early bird, which means the price will go up by 160chf to 590chf. Don't miss that deadline and get your Lift11 ticket at the best possible price.

You will also be enrolled in our viral tickets system which allows you to get your ticket for less (or free!) by promoting Lift to your network. Find out more on the Lift11 registrations page!

Meet the Chinese Super Bus!

Marc Laperrouza — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 20:37:23 +0200

Asia will be one of the topics explored at Lift11. Marc Laperrouza - a two time speaker and active member of our community - writes a blog on China titled Time to look east. Here is an intriguing project he spotted: the super bus, a vehicle that lets traffic flow while loading and unloading passengers.

For an etymological take on super - from latin “supra” meaning above - there is no need to go further than…Shenzhen, home of Hashi Future Parking Equipment.

What looks like a whale swallowing cars is in fact a project to maximize mobility on a given stretch. For now buses are “in competition” for space with cars. The super bus project aims to improve mobility (up to 30%) on a given stretch by superimposing a moving structure on top of the road.

On the one hand this may sound like a good idea given the level of road congestion in Chinese cities. On the other hand one can just imagine the chaos caused by an accident “under the bus”. We will soon be fixed as whether there is any future for the project as the superstructure will soon be tested on the outskirts of Beijing.

Here is a video presentation of the project officially titled 3D express coach:

Related links:
• Link to original post.
• Marc's talk on Mobile in Asia (Lift08).
• Time to look east, weekly column on Chinese innovation and technologies.