A quick update concerning our speaker roster. The latest addition to the Lift program are:

• Natalie Jeremijenko, a new media artist working as a professor at UCSD in San Diego. Her project deals with technological changes and upcoming boundaries to be crossed in the near future.
• Melanie Rieback, researcher at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, who works on security, RFIDs as well as the evolution of privacy.
• Patrick Gyger, director of a science-fiction museum in Switzerland. Patrick wrote about flying cars we dreamed about in the recent past.

They will all contribute to uncover the issues related to our main question this year: "where has the future been?". We're almost done with the last discussions with speakers from the main track. Feel free to propose ideas in the workshops session or in the open stage!

We are proud to announce that Swiss International Air Lines will be the Official Carrier for Lift09!
Swiss offers special Congress Fares to all participants. These Congress Fares offer reductions and special flexibility on selected flights, depending on the fare type, route and space availability.
Click here for more information on how to take advantage of this offer!

We are happy to announce that two new women joined our team:

Solveig Sautier, a freelance Event- and Project manager, will support us as Partner Relations manager. Before joining the Lift Team Solveig worked as coordinator for events such as the Pacte Multimedia produced by the Télévision Suisse Romande or the Festival Nord-Sud.

Eléonore de Lusignan, a recent graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design, will support our Team as Event management Intern, helping us to make Lift a great experience for you!

Welcome to the Team Solveig and Eléonore :)

As you might have noticed we started to publish the speakers profiles, a tradition we started at Lift07 with the idea of allowing participants to preview the speakers they want to focus on during the conference.

This year the profiles will be published by Benedikt Foit and we added a little something new: participants profiles! We have amazing people coming to the conference, giving workshops, speaking at the open stage, or simply attending, and we decided to profile some of them. Lift veteran Tom Hume, who attended every edition since lift06, has the honor to go first, with more profiles coming at the pace of one every four to five days.

I would like to pass a very important information today: we are closing program suggestions. Here is why.

We created program suggestions in 2006 because of a simple fact: most of those attending the conference also deserved be speakers. Over the years we have been very happy to hear all suggestions from the community, and even created the open program to give you more access to presenting (currently open program is 36 slots of more than 50 hours while official program is 20 slots and around 10 hours).

As Lift grows, gets covered by the BBC, BusinessWeek, and hundreds of blogs, we are getting EVERY DAY a number of suggestions equivalent to the number of speakers slots FOR ONE EDITION.

This results in a very frustrating situation: we have to turn down 99% of the propositions simply because we have no room! And very good people, with very good propositions, who took one hour of their time to create a nice pitch, these people end up feeling left out (and it's not funny nor easy for us either).

Open Program stays unchanged, based only on suggestions!

To end this situation we decided to stop accepting propositions for the official program. The open program will be where the community can speak, you make your propositions (workshops, open stage, discussions coming soon), you vote, and this should be a much more effective system.

Last year 100% of workshops propositions were accepted (and we even added 4 slots this year!), these numbers going down slightly to 60% for open stage and discussions. That is a better mechanism: those who take time to propose somethings end up being rewarded for their effort more often.

Jury Hahn is the co-founder of MegaPhone, a gaming company based in New York which makes real-time multi-player games on cell phones. Jury explains the potential of mobile gaming, and how phones can allow rich public interactions. She then demos MegaPhone's gaming platform and Lift participants go wild and play against one other :)

I have no idea why Google put me in the video thumbnail, if someone knows how to change that I'm happy to hear your solution :)

We have a Facebook group, we have a Flick, a Google account for our videos, and now our collection will grow with the beautiful Dopplr (created by Lift's friend and past speaker Matt Jones) where we now have a group thanks to another former speaker, Greensboro-based futurist Scott Smith!

Join us on Dopplr!

After yesterday's newsletter, the last super early bird tickets are selling very quickly. As I speak there are 3 remaining (out of 50) so if you want to attend Lift for only 650chf (that's a bit less than 550$) go to amiando.com/lift09 now!

If you have an account on our website you will receive the first issue of our newsletter! After not really using email to keep in touch with our growing community, we decided to send a couple of updates every year, mostly to announce each event and keep you guys informed of the changes that we make to the format of the conference.

We hope you like this new way of passing information to you, and you can subscribe or unsubscribe on your account page, by clicking on the "My newsletters" tab.

Last but not least, our Google Group is now closed after a few years of great service!

LIFT is recruiting! As the events grow we need more and more talented individuals to join our
team. For Lift 09 we are looking for a motivated and reliable intern who wants to gain insights and valuable work experience in all aspects of the event management of one of the most innovative international conferences.

For more details please download the job description. Contact us if you are interested, and please forward this opening to your friends!