A very warm welcome to the four new members of the LIFT conference advisory board:

Bruce Sterling
SF writer, journalist, essayist and commentator, Bruce is is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his seminal work, which helped define the cyberpunk genre. A tech journalist, Sterling also launched another movement: the Viridian Greens, which focuses on how industrial design could be used to respond to global climate change.

Adam Greenfield
Soon to be Nokia's Head of Design Direction, Adam is an internationally-recognized writer, user experience consultant and critical futurist, having worked for clients ranging from global concerns like Toyota, Capgemini, and Sony to local nonprofits. He is also the notorious author of "Everyware", the the first book on ubiquitous computing suitable for general audiences.

Jasmina Tesanovic
Jasmina is a feminist, political activist (Women in Black, Code Pink), translator, publisher and filmmaker. She is the author of Diary of a Political Idiot, a war diary written during the 1999 Kosovo War and widely distributed on the Internet.

François Grey
François is in charge of outreach and public relations for CERN's IT Department. A regular contributor to the Economist, François was in charge of organizing the CERN Computing Colloquium, a series of conference that welcomed the likes of Mark Shuttleworth or Richard Stallman to the CERN, the birthplace of the web.

The LIFT08 Asia program is coming along and we're happy announce the main topics we will talk about on September 4-5-6:

Beyond the Web we know what's exciting on the web from the near future, what comes after web2.0?

Online for better society: how web technologies will help shaping a more inclusive society and take advantage of the world's diversity.

Towards a Networked City: the new digital layers provided by ICTs on contemporary cities are now a reality, what does that mean for its inhabitants? What changes can we expect? How will ubiquitous computing influence the way we live?

From robots to networked objects: current robots are going beyond the traditional anthropomorphism and start to communicate. What will we see? What's hot in that domain that we will soon see all around us?

The near future of social worlds: social platforms on the Web and Massive Multi-Player games are now merging in a new category of digital entertainment platforms with new business models and screens such as mobile phones. What does that mean for users? What does the usage of such platform tell us about new forms of sociality?

Techno-nomadic life: the wireless and mobile technologies have freed us from the tyranny of "place", but what are the new constraints? What are the new behavior? Is the mobile web going through the same process as the Web of the 90s?

Does money go virtual? Recent changes in the digitalisation of money are less perceptible than more glamorous technologies, but they are of considerable importance. New banking solutions and money circulation practices are around.

Sustainable development/green technologies (in partnership with WattWatt).

In partnership with our friends of the TSR, we organize an informal debate about the evolution of the video game industry. Registration is free but you need to register by emailing julie.bauer@tsr.ch. April 14th, 2008, 6-8pm @ Télévision Suisse Romande, 20, quai Ernest-Ansermet, Geneva, full event in French

Bien que le jeu vidéo en tant qu'industrie de loisir de masse ait une histoire relativement récente, il apparait aujourd'hui que ce média atteigne une nouvelle maturité tant par de nouvells formes ludiques que des nouvelles pratiques de création. De nouvelles formes ludiques telles que le "serious games" sont là pour en attester. Les "serious games" désignant l'emploi de mécaniques ludiques issues du jeu vidéo pour favoriser l'apprentissage de divers contenus. D'autre part, la création des jeux en elle même implique la maitrise de ce moyen pour porter du sens, des émotions, des messages afin de toucher tous les publics.

Intervenants:
Le débat sera animé par Bernard Rappaz, rédacteur en chef de TSR Multimédia. Ses invités:

Jean-Noël Portugal: Consultant Associé du cabinet Intuneo spécialisé dans les industries de la création numérique : jeu vidéo, animation, cinéma numérique, Internet, télévision, téléphonie et médias interactifs. Il est également président d’HD3D SAS, filiale de studios d’effets spéciaux et laboratoires cinématographiques d’Ile de France

Emmanuel Guardiola: Game Designer depuis 10 ans, Emmanuel Guardiola est directeur de la conception pour la gamme Game4Everyone à Ubisoft. Auteur de Ecrire pour le jeu (Dixit, 2000), il enseigne le Game Design à l’Ecole Nationale des Jeux et Media Interactifs Numériques (l’ENJMIN).

And finally, here are the two last speakers of the main program track:

In the "Stories" session, Eric Favre, who is the co-inventor of Nespresso, will tell us more about "intrapreneur" innovation and the story behind coffee capsules on thursday afternoon.

And Kevin Marks from Google will continue by telling us more Open Social, a common framework for building social applications across many websites in the "Web entrepreneurs" session of friday afternoon.

Everything's now set, the official program is closed and we're looking forward to have you there!

Two new speakers are joining our LIFT08 program:

In the "stories" sessions, feminist, political activist, translator, publisher and filmmaker Jasmina Tesanovic will give a presentation about blogging, genders and politics exemplified by Balkan examples.

Then, Gen Kanai will give the last talk of the Asian session. Business developer for Mozilla Asia and director of marketing and partner relations for Mozilla Japan, Gen's speech will be an overview of the open source situation in Asia.

We're glad to announce the addition of two new speakers to the LIFT program, both participating in the session about sustainable development sponsored by WattWatt:

Tom Taylor from Headshift, a company who build and consult on social software applications, will talk about peer pressure and social networking to get ordinary people into the habit of changing their behaviour in favour of more sustainable activities

Guy Pignolet from Sunsat Energy Council will describe how capturing solar energy in orbit and beaming it down to Earth in a 24 hours a day controlled process, in combination with hydrogen technology, apppears as one of the global, clean and sustainable solutions to replace fossil fuels.

We're pleased to announce a new speaker: game-industry veteran Bruno Bonnell. Founder and CEO of video game publisher Infogrames Entertainment for 24 years, he recently started a new venture in robotics.

Bruno will give a talk in the "stories session", describing his perspectives and projects about mass-market robotics.

Internationally renowned for her style as well as for her stance on political and social matters, the Dutch graphic artist Mieke Gerritzen will talk about some consequences of new media: the different views on visual and natural culture that new networks brought to us. Real nature is not green, Visual inflation as inspiration, Creativity is
all we have left. Together with Koert van Mensvoort she organizes Visual Power Shows about Next Nature.

Mieke and Koert work at www.all-media.eu.

Sad news, one of our speaker, Jyri Engestrom had to cancel his LIFT08 talk. Here is Jyri's message to the LIFT community:
LIFT is one of the few special conferences that I try not to miss for the rare quality of the talks, the people, and the fondue. This year I was surprised and delighted when Nicolas asked me to speak. Alas, it is with regret I say I won't be able to make it due to work-related reasons.

Here's wishing everyone at LIFT08 a fantastic conference!
Yours, Jyri Engeström, Google/Jaiku

Tech journalist and science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling will give the opening speech of the LIFT08 edition. We asked Bruce to give us a "state of the [technological] world address", a 30' overview of what happened in the previous year that struck you as pertinent, interesting and curious to be conveyed to the LIFT audience.