We are proud to announce that Bruno Bonnell is joining our advisory board. Bruno is a legendary French entrepreneur who created Infogrammes and became CEO of Atari before starting a new venture around the world of robots called Robopolis. He is also one of the funniest person on this planet (ask him to tell you the story of his visit to Neverland ;) and is joining Lift to provide us with ideas and contacts to further develop the conference.
Take also the chance to see Bruno's great speech From Robota to Homo Robotus he held at Lift Asia 08

^{Photo by Robert Scoble}

Our advisory board is now Julian Bleecker (Nokia Design), Bruno Bonnell (Robopolis), Pierre Chappaz (Wikio), William Cockayne (Change Research), Xavier Comtesse (Avenir Suisse), Bruno Giussani (Writer/blogger/entrepreneur), Adam Greenfield (Nokia), François Grey (CERN), Jeffrey Huang (EPFL), Daniel Kaplan (FING), Beth Krasna (independent board member), Jaewoong Lee (Daum/Lycos), Joanne Lee (Writer and entrepreneur), Bernard Rappaz (TSR), Bruce Sterling (Writer and futurist), Jasmina Tesanovic (Publisher and Filmmaker), Guido Van Nispen (Veronica).

I will be representing Lift in Paris at Le Web, watching as the whole web industry gathers in Europe thanks to the efforts of Loic Lemeur and his wife Geraldine. The speakers panel is beyond impressive (Marissa Mayer of Google, CEO of Myspace, founder of Meetic, Scoble, Arrington, etc etc) and features some non-web speakers like Paulo Coelho or my good friend (and amazing presenter) Itay Talgam.

The organizers have asked to pass the Lift community the only 30% discount code they have created (thanks Géraldine :)! Feel free to use it if you plan to attend the conference next month. Use LIFTLEWEB08 on amiando.com/leweb08!

Sometimes when we come up with a Lift session, it is a bit hard to see why this particular topic matters. Everybody understood why we were discussing blogs and social media at Lift06, or online environments in 2008. But every once in a while the connection is harder to make. Why did we have Sister Judith? Because we wanted to show that even a millenarian organization like the Vatican could use new technologies. Why have a session on Gaming? Because gaming is not anymore the specialty of fifteen years old male nerds. It is now entering education, played by more girls than boys, and is a moment where very complex socialization takes place.

At Lift Asia I got a couple of questions about Eric Rodenbeck's presentation on vizualization. "Why should I care about this, I am not a designer!"

Well this Newsweek article might provide an answer. Vizualizations (actually the lack of) were one of the issues behind the current crisis. Our computerized world is putting way too much data in front of us, and there is a need to reinvent the way we filter signal from noise.

The First Disaster Of The Internet Age

One of the ways of averting the next crisis is to make the Internet better at consolidating information. Right now when you go to financial sites you are deluged with information about stocks and major market indices, plus some news headlines, and on and on. What if, instead, you saw something akin to the dashboard of a car—with dials and knobs corresponding to what's going on in credit markets, derivatives, commodities and stocks. Instead of giving endless tables—the sort of thing that used to clutter newspapers—imagine heat charts (red is bad, green is good) and simple graphs. The financial dashboard would interpret information: here is what is currently working properly in financial markets, here is what isn't, and here is what you should be terrified about. If you want to know more you can click and find out. A well-designed dashboard will at least make sure you know enough not to be surprised.

Instead of giving everyone a Bloomberg workstation, we can ask that our personal-finance providers build us a better dashboard over the Web.

Link

Jan Chipchase is a researcher for Nokia Design. He details the nine trends he thinks will shape the future of social interactions, trends he identified through the extensive field work he and his team are conducting around the world. Jan's work shows how the digital devices are creating new practices and usages by becoming smaller and smaller, opening up a new design space for the mobile industry.

More videos on liftconference.com/videos.

I did a short version of Tomoaki Kasuga's speech, leaving only the demos of the SPC-101c robot. Check out all the moves this little guy has, quite frankly amazing:

Check full speech here, and as usual liftconference.com/videos for more talks.

Nicolas Nova posted the conference program, and you can now see the first sessions and speakers. As Nicolas puts it in a short intro:

The Lift09 program is build around one central idea: that our future is built less around material and tangible creations - such as flying cars or Asimov-inspired robots - than it used to be in the 20th century. We will start by asking what happened to the future, then consider what and how important changes have happened in the past decades. The next sessions will then address less techno-centric changes, showing how solidarity, love, and the way we inhabit space have evolved in recent times. The conference will end with a focus on the new frontiers as well as the designers' role to build new representations of the future.

As usual half of the program is in your hands via the workshops and open stage, so enjoy your possibilities and make your propositions. We noticed that early propositions have much more chance to be accepted than late ones (because they stay up for vote longer) so warm up your slides!

^{A picture from an early version of the program, and a glimpse of the Lift10 format ;)}

See the Lift09 program.

Speecys robotics' Tomoaki Kasuga, a Japanese inventor who has been working on bringing robots to the living rooms of the world for more than fifteen years, showcases his latest creation: a humanoid-shaped robot connected to the Internet. The SPC-101C is part of a whole new botcasting ecosystem (think iTunes for robots) and shows how the expressiveness of movements and the quality of manufacturing are a very important component of human-robot interactions.

More videos on liftconference.com/videos.

I'm often asked: "Don't you think putting all the videos online is shooting yourself in the foot?". No no, the free videos are part of our public service mission, and they don't replace one of Lift's biggest added value: the quality networking. Nothing beats face to face, whatever technology you have. Attending Lift brings concrete returns as shown in the Lift08 post conference survey:

Did you get any new business at LIFT08?”

Of the 145 attendees that responded, some 20% confirmed that they did get new business at LIFT08 and 45% responded that had established interesting contacts at LIFT that could perhaps generate new business. The remaining 35% said that they did not get any new business at LIFT08 but with many commenting that this was not their aim in attending LIFT or was not part of their current professional role.

Link

We should get together even more in hard times. Network is the new job security after all!

Adam Greenfield, head of design director at Nokia, talks about the emotional aspects of living in a networked city. What happens when the choices of action in the city are not only physical, but also influenced by an invisible overlay of networked information?

See more Lift talks in video.

Swiss adventurer Sarah Marquis, who travels by foot around Europe, Australia and America, explains what happen when you reconnect with nature and try to be autonomous, finding water, getting some electrical energy, collecting food were some of the topics discussed during her presentation. She spoke during the WattWatt special session on sustainable development.

See more Lift talks in video.