On March 18, while our international community will gather in Vienna for the first Lift Austria, Swiss Lifters are invited to the amazing Rolex learning center for Lift Presentations @ ThinkData. The conference will explore data under all its form: social, semantic, real-time, mobile, geo, etc. Click on the image below to learn more and register for this free event!

See you at the EPFL learning center

Probably one of the most impressive building of the year. Learn more on the official website.

We love having students at Lift. This year we are even actively working on bringing high-school scholars to make our audience as diverse as possible. We know our tickets are too expensive if you are still at university (see our pricing policy for an explanation), so we organize various initiatives: a contest, the opportunity to be a volunteer, and individual partnerships with schools in Switzerland and now internationally.

These partnerships work in a very simple way: we offer a discount on the ticket, the school/university pays 80% of the remaining price and the student 20%. This is how 40 students from the ENSCI, University of Geneva and CERN (see full list) attend the conference. We are currently developing more of these partnerships, and we are asking our community to give us more contacts inside academic institutions. If you are studying and would like your school to help you attend Lift, please get in touch, introduce us to the right person and we will work on making the conference accessible to you.

Our partner Redbull will give you wings, but Air France will actually fly you to Geneva for Lift10 :)
Air France will be offering Lifters a CHF 50 reduction on any flight (to any of their destinations, not just Geneva) for a limited period. We look forward to this new partnership and having them on board...

Have a look here for more details, and the discount code. Please note that the code only works on the Air France Switzerland site, and that this is only in French and German. The site will be available in English in April.

To give you an idea of the current rates and savings, here are some example fares for the conference dates:
- From London (direct): CHF 210, discounted to CHF 160
- From New York (via Paris): CHF 890, discounted to CHF 840

The first ever Russian Lift event has just been announced! Organized by Council members Vadim Chekletsov (Institute of Philosophy Russian Academy of Sciences) and Rob van Kranenburg (Fontys Applied Sciences), the event will take place on Friday, Sept. 24 and talk about the Internet of Things:

New trends of NBIC-convergence, Human Enhancement Technologies on the one hand and Smart Environment (Ambient intelligence, Ubiquitous computing, Internet of Things) on the other prepare us to a future paradigm shift blurring Anthropology and Social Philosophy borderlines. We believe the "winning solution" to making the most open, inclusive and innovative Internet of Things is to transcend the short-term opposition between social innovation and security by finding a way to combine these two necessities in a broader common perspective.

Lift Presentations @ Moscow

Lift@home's schedule looks quite busy, with a series of six events in Lyon, Lift@Austria and now Lift Presentations @ Moscow!

We have been pretty quiet lately, working on developing and implementing partnerships with several organizations: the HEAD for the scenography and experience, Alp ICT and other partners for a massive startup operation, etc etc. During that time, registrations continued nicely, and we passed an important milestone when our 450th participant registered today.

Our efforts to convince you guys to register early - and at a better price - have worked. At least if we compare to other years where 80% of registrations happen in the last sixty days! So in the name of the team, thanks to all those of you who registered early, you make our life much easier and less stressful :)

Note: you might have noticed the difference between the Amiando participants count (currently 300) and the Lift website count. The reason is simple: on liftconference.com we take into account the tickets that will be used by our partners as this is the effective number of attendees we should expect, and therefore prepare the logistics for. Currently, we have 150 such tickets, with Alp ICT buying more than forty tickets for Swiss startups. Until the partners register all their guests, the counts diverge. They then reconcile the day of the event. Now you know the inside of our little processes a bit more ;)

Every year we work hard to promote entrepreneurship during Lift. With journalists, investors, bloggers, potential clients and partners attending, the conference is an ideal platform for young companies, and our track record shows how powerful a platform Lift can be. See Fontself (now a startup after being featured in the 2007 Lift experience), Poken badges in 2009, GenevaLunch (founded after Ellen Wallace attended Lift06 and thought: "I could start a media!"), coComment's accidental launch in 2006, TagCrumbs (whose founders met at Lift), the conferences we inspired (SHiFT, GoingSolo, ICCM), Ozwe's QB1 getting hundreds of articles after launching at LIft09, etc etc.

We are very proud of all this, and consider these to be tangible proofs of the strength of our concept (NOTE: contact us if something like this happened to you and you never shared your story!).

This year, we want to go even further, and offer startups an improved way to introduce their products to the world. We have teamed up with Alp ICT, TheArk, Creapole, the CTI and the State of Geneva to do the following:

• discounted Lift tickets for Swiss startups
• organization of a venture night, similar to what we did in 2008
• creation of a startup zone where projects will be demoed

The call for projects will launch in the coming weeks, and you can already contact the project coordinators on info@alpict.ch to learn more.

Actually there are many Lift conferences, the longest standing being the Long Island Forum For Technology. These days we get a lot of alerts in our ego-search system (monitoring keyword #lift10) and as you will notice, the various Lift have very, very different focuses ;)

^{London International Festival of Theatre}

^{Lift10, "training young leaders to stand up for Jesus.}

^{Long Island Forum For Technology}