The Alp ICT cluster and a group of organizations promoting Swiss entrepreneurship have teamed up with Lift to facilitate access to the 2010 edition of the conference for:

Startups based in Western Switzerland
Founded less than four years ago
With less than twenty employees

If you think your project fits the above description, you can apply for one of the fifteen packages that include:

Two tickets (one of them offered by Alp ICT and its partners) for the full Lift10 conference (value CHF 1700).

Dedicated space inside the Alp ICT startup corner where you can demo your product. For startups offering online solutions, your services could be presented on the Lift website if they add value to conference participants (value: CHF 3000).

Bonus: eight of the fifteen companies will be chosen to present during the Alp ICT venture night on the big stage alongside legendary investor Neil Rimer of Index Ventures.

Price for this package: CHF 1'250.- HT.

To apply, please download the application form and email it to info@alpict.ch.

Please note:
• If you would like to benefit from this package and already registered for Lift10, contact us and we will cancel your earlier ticket.
• This offer is made possible by organizations promoting entrepreneurship in Western Switzerland. If you are a young company from somewhere else in the world, get in touch to see how we could facilitate your participation to the conference.

Supported by

Here come the latest news on Lift@Austria event to take place in Vienna on March 18-20 under the guidance of Thomas Fundneider and other local entrepreneurs.

The true trans-disciplinary conference on game-changing innovation is right around the corner. In one week, we will start a journey to collaboratively generate new knowledge on the challenge, how to orchestrate and configure parameters that enable profound innovations. A gathering of true innovators, academic grounders, practitioners and social entrepreneurs will inspire and spark new insights.

Speakers

All speakers will build their input on the topic of Enabling. Intensive preparations are under way in order to adjust the talks and the design of the workshops. When we speak about workshops, we mean it. Workshop facilitators, illustrators, prototype building blocks are all there. We want to see results at the end of the day!

Speakers include:

• Michel BAUWENS, An integrative approach to enabling open infrastructures, Peer to Peer Foundation, Chiang Mai, Thailand
• Florian BRODY, Enabling the Right Mindset, Cimbal Inc., CA, USA
• Silja GRAUPE, And the Ruler of the Central Sea was “Chaos” – Cherishing Chaos from Asian Perspectives, Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences, Germany
• Stefan CAMENZIND, Enabling Workplace Design - How would you love to work?, Camenzind Evolution, Architecture - Design - Technology, Switzerland
• Markus F. PESCHL, Enabling -- Introduction, University of Vienna, Austria
• Franz NAHRADA, Global Villages as Enabling Environments, Labor GIVE, Austria

Be sure to check the conference program.

Tokens

Inspired by alternative currency systems like Freigeld, we want to experiment on alternative rewarding- and motivation mechanisms by means of exchanging tokens between participants of Enable! At registration, you will receive tokens which have a real value in Euros. You can then award the most interesting input(s) by handing over all or parts of the tokens to the person(s) generating the input. Finally, these tokens can be converted back into real Euros at the end of the convention. A little game, which may cause that collaboration efforts will be rewarded visible and maybe you are the one, who can change reputative capital into some real Euros at the end (and buy a coffee or make holiday).

Practical information

Date: March 18-20, 2010
Location: Trinkomathallen, Vienna
Click here for registrations.

Lift10 is in less than 2 months time, and we are posting profiles of the workshop organizers. Don't forget to have a look at the program!

Christian Miccio will be hosting a workshop at Lift10. Christian studied computer science at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. He built products in the IT/Mobile space for several years. Just before getting an MBA at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, he was instrumental in the creation of the Shazam mobile phone music recognition service, based in London, and now live in 20+ countries. Following his MBA, Christian joined Google and can now come up with even fancier stuff!

After his presentation about innovation at our Lift @ home in January, Christian decided to host a workshop entitled: Let's create a product (yes, in the workshop :)

The workshop audience will explore and experience product development in a practical way by being split into 2 teams: a product development team and a user base. The activity will be a set of iterations where the product team will design a first version of an imaginary product and test it on the group of volunteered users to integrate the feedback into a new version.

Interested? Sign up here.

Lift10 is in less than 2 months time, and we are posting profiles of the confirmed speakers. Don't forget to have a look at the program!

Neil Rimer will be giving the keynote speech at the Alp ICT venture night on the 5th of May at Lift10. Neil is a co-founder and Partner of Index Ventures. In 1992, He started the venture capital activity of Index's predecessor firm, later co-founding Index Ventures and raising the firm's first fund in 1996.

Neil's current investment focus is on innovative solutions for energy and environmental problems.

He is currently on the board of several innovative companies (such as AlertMe, Lehigh Technologies, Netvibes, Moo Print, Innovative Silicon). Neil sponsored many of the firm's investments including Betfair, Ofoto (now Kodak), Trolltech (now Nokia) Listen (now Real Networks), Numerical Technologies (now Synopsis) and Genmab. He has also served on the board of Human Rights Watch and has served on the Board of Directors of U.C. Sampdoria, a football club competing in the Italian Serie A.

Before starting Index Ventures, Neil spent four years with Montgomery Securities in San Francisco. Neil has a BA in History and Economics from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Following Neil's speech, eight startups from Western Switzerland will present on the big stage. If you think your company could qualify, please read this.

At Lift France 09, Elizabeth Goodman spoke about Changing the Planet. You can watch the video here.

We caught up with Elizabeth this week. She's been quite busy since we last saw her in Marseille. She was awarded an Intel PhD fellowship, and was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research New England. At the moment, she is organizing City Centered, a festival of locative media and urban community, to take place in San Francisco's Tenderloin District in June.

Lift Austria is featured on this month's Doors of perception newsletter:

"Gone is the time where can just focus on technology, or political change, or personal change. The challenge of the times require tackling all aspects of change simultaneously". Thailand-based Michel Bauwens, founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation, always has something wise and interesting to say. His keynote talk at the Lift conference in Vienna on 19 March is about "an integrative approach to enabling open infrastructures (and) value-driven social practices...we need to change ourselves, as well as our ability to cooperate in groups".

Link

We proudly received the confirmation of the City of Geneva Administrative Council support for Lift10.

Nouvelles technologies: la Ville de Genève apporte son soutien à la Conférence LIFT

Le Conseil administratif a décidé d'apporter son soutien à la cinquième Conférence LIFT, qui se tiendra à Genève du 5 au 7 mai 2010. La Ville de Genève, cité innovante et tournée vers les nouvelles technologies, financera notamment vingt «bourses» qui seront accordées à dix étudiant-e-s en Suisse et dix étudiant-e-s à l'étranger, qui pourront ainsi prendre part à cette conférence.

Du 5 au 7 mai prochain, l'association LIFT organisera au Centre international de conférences Genève (CICG) sa cinquième conférence internationale, qui devrait accueillir un millier de participant-e-s provenant d'une quarantaine de pays. Les thèmes abordés seront les défis actuels et les solutions créatives en rapport avec les nouvelles technologies de l'information et de la communication.

Créée en 2006, LIFT existe désormais en Europe et en Asie. L'association a pour but de permettre aux acteurs et actrices d'un monde qui n'a jamais changé aussi vite de se saisir du potentiel transformateur des nouvelles technologies. Chaque conférence offre la possibilité de comprendre les effets de l'innovation sur la société, et de transformer le changement en opportunité.

Thanks to Pierre Maudet and his colleagues for recognizing and supporting our work to make our city and region more dynamic, creative and attractive!

Our friends of Lumens8 (the team behind the Audio/Video of Lift) are running Geneva's festival of electronic cultures called Electron. Friday evening was the opening of the expo that will last a month and present the work of several media artists, among the the fascinating "Other side break" shown below:

^{Other side break by Cléa Coudsi et Eric Herbin.}

Yesterday in Lyon, Emmanuel Rondeau and I organized a Lift@Home about gestural interfaces. We (Lift) partnered with Imaginove, a French cluster of companies, research institutions and universities focused on video games, audio-visual, cinema, animation and multimedia. Several other Lift seminars will be organized around various topics such as the Social Web, 3D virtual environment, networked objects and locative media. We'll focus on the uses and practices of each of these technologies, to reflect upon how they are appropriated by users and how this information can be fed back into the design process.

Yesterday's seminar focused on how gestural interfaces such as the Nintendo Wii, new kinds of accelerometers and (3D) cameras are used in the context of video games. There were around 50 participants, mostly game designers, interaction designers and Human-Computer Interaction academics.

After a quick introduction about the evolution of video-game peripherals over time, I described the pros and cons of these kind of interfaces as shown on the following slide:

In addition, I mentioned some of the projects we carried out when I worked at Phoenix Interactive, a French video-game studio based in Lyon. These projects showed how we studied the various ways to transmit/explain gestures to players, a project in collaboration with a laboratory in Cognitive Psychology.

The next presenter, Emmanuelle Jacques, a sociologist from the University of Montpellier, described some results from an ethnographical study of Nintendo Wii usage. She described the discrepancy between the gestures that game designers expected to be made and people's practices. As shown in the following picture, the movement amplitude of gestures is indeed quite different with expert players (the smaller girl) and novice players who think they must replicate real-world gestures. Emmanuelle discussed the implications of such notions, showing that playability is a much more complex notion than simply replicating what is done in the physical world.

The following presenters, Timothée Jobert from Litus/CEA and Etienne Guerry from XPteam in Grenoble presented an interesting case study of user-centered design. They described the results of an ethnographic study about how people use two sorts of gestural interfaces (the Nintendo Wii and the Bodypad). They then showed how these results were used in the design of video game prototypes, based on a new kind of technology (a combination of an accelerometer and a magnetometer designed by Movéa). They ended their presentation with a demo of their prototypes, leading to a lively discussion about how new technologies can overcome the problems game designers encountered with the Wii and the notion of realism.

We're getting closer to conference time, with exactly 2 months before doors open!

As we mentioned in an earlier blog post, Lift10 falls in the same week as a large international aviation expo with 10,000 participants. Therefore we recommend that you book your hotel as soon as possible.

We have put some rooms on hold in a selection of convenient hotels for you. Quite a few of these options expire on the 31st of March, so the quicker you book, the greater your choice :)

Below is a quick overview of the hotels. Geneva Tourism has set up a dedicated Lift10 booking website through which you can conveniently make your bookings. You can access these offers on this link in English and in French

Most of these hotels are close to the Geneva Main Station, which is a 10-minute tram ride from the conference venue (the CICG).

Geneva Tourism is happy to help should you have any issues using the system, or should you wish to extend your stay beyond the conference dates :) They can be contacted on:
reservation@geneve-tourisme.ch
fax : +41 22 909 70 21
tel : +41 22 909 70 20