Latest news about the Lift conference

Lift 10 Intern wanted :)

LIFT Conference — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:00:00 +0100

LIFT is recruiting! As the events grow we need more and more talented individuals to join our
team. For Lift10, which will happen May 5-7 2010 in Geneva, we are looking for a motivated and reliable intern. This opportunity offers great 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!

Sandbox dinner in NYC

LIFT Conference — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:22:12 +0100

Lots of people in the digital industry are gathering next week in New York for the Web 2.0 Expo. Sandbox Network founder and Lifter Fabian Pfortmuller organizes a dinner on Tuesday night to connect Web2.0 guests, Sandboxers and others Lifters over some nice food.

Guests will include Dominik Grolimund (founder of Wuala, see his presentation at Lift08 venture night), Jun Loyaza and the Head of Innovation at Deutsche Telekom USA.

More info and rsvp.

Lift Presentations @ Toronto

LIFT Conference — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 12:49:10 +0100

And the next Lift@home will happen in Toronto next Tuesday! Thomas Purves and the Canadian Lift gang started to work on a 40 persons gathering, and the event has now moved to a new venue to accommodate a massive attendance (120 persons at this point!) and eight speakers who will demo imaginary 2019 technologies... Check the program, Swiss food is coming to Canada :)

Theme: "DemoCamp 2019"

We want to see demos from the near-medium future of 2019. Predict the future one decade out. This is DemoCamp 2019.

Our presenters have a fairly open ended but challenging design brief. We’ve tasked them with imagining a future state of the world, to make a bet on what might happen to the earth, technology, society in the next decade, and then present to you what will be the killer demo in the year 2019. So unlike normal demos, we don’t want to see working code. We want to see stuff that would be impossible or hopelessly impractical today, but could be the killer app in just a decade more.

Presenters

Special Guest: Scott Smith @changeist
Founder of the excellent Changist the design research and human foresight consultancy based in North Carolina.

2019 Demos by:
Matthew Milan @mmilan Partner & Design Director at Normative
Leila Boujnane @leilaboujnane Founder & CEO Idée
Ann Poochareon @miserychick Maker of interactive stuff, Director Aesthetec
Jonathan Laba @J_LabIntern, Brightspark
Anatoliy Kats in/anatoliykats Grad Student, UofT
Sabaa Quao @xsabaa VP Strategy, The Hive
Matthew Lincez & Ricky Thomas WEREPIDEAS

More Announcements!

Special Guest Retro-DJ from the Future: Duarte Da Silva @modernmod =)
Food: Presentations will be followed Music, “networking”, delicious Swiss-themed nourishment, and bar service. Though you may also want to grab a quick bite on your way.
Volunteers: We need some! to help with setup and the door and sundry. 5 volunteer tickets have been added to the guestlist app. These tickets of course come with free admission – thanks for your help!

Thanks to Wireless Toronto for sponsoring wifi access!

Learn more about Lift Presentations @ Toronto

Lift@home posters

LIFT Conference — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:24:58 +0100

We wanted to offer Lift@home organizers a possibility to create their own poster for their event. We asked our friends at Bread and Butter to come up with a solution, and here comes the Lift@home do-it-yourself posters based on a system of PDF forms that organizers can customize

Bread and Butter explained their thinking on their blog:

Lift@home is the new way to be involved in the Lift community and allows you to:

• Organize your own Lift somewhere that matters to you
• Choose the program, the format, the date, the number of attendees, etc
• Post your event on liftconference.com, the community will notice and register
• Have a great time, be inspired and meet amazing people!

You can choose between 5 kind of event: Workshop, Dinner, Exhibition, Gathering and Presentation.

In order to preserve Lift branding on one side and to be able to support a large variety of event, we developed an evolutive, simple design, that focus on the chosen theme, on a white (laser printer friendly) or dark grey background.

Link

Are you organizing a Lift@home? Get your poster now!

Lift seminar @ lift offices

LIFT Conference — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:46:51 +0100

Last monday, at the Lift seminar at our offices, we organized a set of talks about urban informatics. We discussed the large variety of data that are generated on top of the physical environment and their opportunities in terms of representations, analyses and services. When it comes to digital data, one can talk about "traces" but I will left the term "urban traces" out of the discussion because this discussion can applied to situations that go beyond the city context (suburbs, countryside...). This event was part of the urban informatics workshop series Fabien and have been running.

My introduction to the seminar was about the types data that are available. I presented first the usual kind of data (cadastral, road/railroads/water/electricity/cable/telephone networks infrastructures and usage), talked about the open data initiative. However, our interest was really about "traces" of people's activity in space, for which one can discriminate:

Activity-generated data: fixed sensors that can detect bike usage, moving sensors (pedometers, mobile phone, use of Velo'v bikes (unlike Velib bikes, Velo'v seemed to have GPS sensors, is that correct?), automatic location-declaration (on location-based services such as Aka Aki which automatically tells you who is in the vicinity)
Volunteer-based data: that is... user-generated content, which can be technology-based (pictures uploaded on sharing platforms such as Flickr, or self-declared positioning as people report their location on Foursquare). It can also be non-technology-based: see for example Respiralyon a french initiative that enable people to report on smells and odors in their own city.

We talked about different projects, which aims at engaging the audience on the potentials benefits of exploiting the logs of digital activities in our contemporary cities.

(Measuring the pedestrian flows in Barcelona using Bluetooth sensors, a project carried out by Fabien for a spanish client)

All of these data form a sort of informational membrane that surrounds the spatial environment. We have already dealt here with the possibilities afforded by these data that I described my french book about locative media:

Visualize the data to describe the urban activity, reveal the invisible, make explicit the implicit (you can see Real Time Rome as a paragon for this use). This first step generally helps bringing new perspective for decision making and policies building or raising awareness and effect the discussion making of individuals or of a crowd.
Use the data as a model for spatial activities that can enable what i would call "urban stakeholders" to act upon them. A good example for this is to provide urban planners, transportation authorities or traffic engineers with data to refine their models of citizens spatio-temporal behaviors... and eventually help the decision-making process: where to install certain services (or how can we craft certain incentives so that we make specific shops/services to be located in a designated areas). As Fabien mentioned, these data can help to complement existing models (it's not a substitution) drawn out of surveys or qualitative analyses.
Use the data as a model to build applications on top of them. This is what Citysense aims at: building a tool to help people taking certain spatial decisions based on others' behavior. It shows the overall activity level of the city and hostpots as well as also links to Yelp or Google to show what venues are operating at those places. In addition, combined with other sources of information (such as Yelp), it allows to filter out places in the vicinity.

This part was followed by a presentation by Boris Beaude (EPFL) who is an insightful geographer and a talk by Pascal Wattiaux who discussed the role of technologies in the production of the olympic games. My role as a moderator did not allow me to take notes but Fabien did. Both of them gave some perspective to the "urban informatics" trend by showing a large set of constraints (geographical issues, event-related problems, marketing troubles), critiques (data reductionism) and of course opportunities for the near future.

Thanks Fabien, Boris and Pascal for their participation!

iPhone application (with bug fixes!)

LIFT Conference — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:36:53 +0100

The new version of our iPhone application has been approved by Apple, and you can now install it free on the app store. Some users reported "Video not found" issues that have been fixed. Please also note that apple forces providers of network intense applications (like video) to force users to use wifi. We had to implement this restriction and hope you will still enjoy watching our talks on the go.

Urban Informatics

LIFT Conference — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:20:38 +0100

The next Lift@home will happen next Monday (Nov 9) in Geneva. Organized by Nicolas Nova, the event will be about "Urban informatics".

Future "networked and digital cities" have popped up on the radar for sometime now. This is a topic we address on a regular basis at Lift from a various set of viewpoints (art, design, architecture, digital services) and with a long-term vision. This time, we would like to explore what could be the implication of urban informatics in the city of today

Speakers

• Nicolas Nova, Researcher at Lift lab / Lift conference
• Fabien Girardin, Researcher at Lift lab
• Boris Beaude, Adjoint Scientifique at Choros / EPFL
• Pascal Wattiaux, IT consultants for sport events at PW Sport Ltd.

More information (and free registration)

"Devine qui vient diner"

LIFT Conference — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:28:04 +0100

Nicolas and myself spent the evening at the Radio Suisse Romande for "Devine qui vient dîner, a one hour discussion around Nicolas' latest book on Geolocalised medias ("Les médias géolocalisés") where we ended up explaining much about our work at Lift.

You can listen to the show (in French) on rsr.ch, in streaming and mp3.

Lift@home London pictures

LIFT Conference — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:41:48 +0100

Felix Koch - host of the recent Lift @ Living room event, sent us a recap + pictures of the recent mini conference he held in by the fireplace of his home!

The conceptual idea behind the lift@living room in London was to go analog: no laptops, powerpoint and digi-cams but overhead projector, acetats and polaroids. Apart from that, all speakers were welcome to chose their topic freely, passion for it provided.

Given our status as the 'hinge generation' - having been raised in mass-mediated societies while having adopted everything digital later in life - it felt oddly familiar/homely to work with and experience these old techniques again.

Interestingly, most of the talks did mirror a similar sentiment and feeling. The common thread of the conversations of the day:
- go and make digital less sterile, more charming and warm - give it a personality, make it age and crumble
- show wear and tear of interfaces, add a quirk here and there, add a stubborn character
- cherish the one-off, the unique, the perfected craft, start young!
- be social, cycle, scratch-cook, up-skill your analog, the everyday

Tea, coffee, sausages and the bonfire helped facilitate a lot of these concepts right there in the living room and garden. Thanks to all who came and made it happen!

And now, a few pictures (view all)

Lift by the numbers

LIFT Conference — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:55:37 +0100

“Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything.”, Gregg Easterbrook

Somebody suggested we add a "lift by the numbers" section on the site's about page, and I decided to act on this recommendation as it gives an perspective what has happened in the past three and a half years.

4'000 attendees from 60 countries.

8 events held on 3 continents in 3.5 years

2 million visits and 13.5M page views on liftconference.com per year (full stats)

450+ articles and interviews in national (TSR, Bilan, RSR, Swissinfo) and international (BBC, CBC, BusinessWeek, FastCompany, Wired, AFP, Europe1) media

200+ talks available free in video

5000+ members in the Lift community

180+ speakers from more than 40 countries

Lift @ home events happening in Toronto, Tokyo, Barcelona, London, San Francisco, Brussels, Barcelona, Zurich, New York, etc.

Link