One of the upcoming Lift@home will happen in Vienna on March 18, an ambitious event gathering 100 participants to talk about enabling changes and innovation in society. Join us for our first Austrian event!

The lift@Austria team is happy to announce a distinguished mix of speakers to drill down the theme "Enable" from a wide range of perspectives: Florian Brody from Silicon Valley, internationally acclaimed digital media specialist, Stefan Camenzind, architect and designer of the Google Labs in Zurich, Felix Oldenburg, CEO of Ashoka Germany, the biggest social entrepreneur network worldwide and many more!

The entire 3-days are designed as one piece. The first day will be devoted to explore existing enablers, such as the HUB, StartUp Weekend and the metalab. The insights from this exploration tour will be fed into the the second day, where we start with selected speakers to frame the topic of the conference. Thereafter, you can expect a full day of intense workshops, trying to work out the different dimensions of Enabling. The results will be illustrated and displayed in a gallery.

For more information, go to the website and read the propositions or see for yourself how we want to reward excellent input/people.

Cheers!
Thomas for the organizing team!

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post about UXconference, a conference organized by Lifters Diana Malerba and Luca Mascaro in Lugano later this year.

I am writing to present you UXconference, a user experience conference we are organizing in Lugano, Switzerland. The conference is about innovation and new ideas in user experience strategy, mobile site and application design, playful ux and agile design.

Starting on December 3, we want to create a first "Swiss" appointment to talk about innovation and to let people meet and know each other and generate new ideas, to contribute to the future user experience.

We believe in people, in innovation, in experiences. What about you?

See you at UXconference! Check the programme, speakers and register!

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.

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post about the World Usability Day, an event organized by Florian Egger in Geneva.

World Usability Day was founded by the Usability Professionals' Association to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use.

Join us on Thursday 12 November at Hotel Bristol, Geneva, to participate in World Usability Day 2009.

This year, the event will have two parts:
1. Usability training courses in the afternoon
* How to integrate User-Centered Design into your projects by Mary Mooney, MBA (Telono)
* How to set up and run your usability tests by Florian Egger, PhD (Telono)

2. Presentations by invited speakers and our traditional networking apéro.
* Achieving Usability with Interaction Design Patterns by Ahmed Seffah, PhD (EHL/UNIL)
* TRIL : Technology Research for Independent Living by Claire Somerville, PhD (TRIL Centre)
* Apéro sponsored by Telono

Cost
Training (course materials included):
* Regular price: CHF 240
* Student price: CHF 100
Guest Speaker Presentations & Apéro: FREE

More Information & Registration

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is food for thought about privacy and the internet of things shared by Italian ICT and privacy law expert Nicola Fabiano.

We are living in a globalized era and the fast process of technologies evolution modify our lifestyles. In fact, with reference to the Internet of Things (IOT hereafter), there are issues related to privacy, with security and responsibility.

IOT system leads to the transfer of information over the Internet, using for instance RFID technology. Personal Information may be transmitted only when the subject where is installed the microchip is linked to a person.

Obviously, there are two possibilities regarding the connection to the person: (1) We could have a direct link when the user is aware of the possible transmission of personal data and lend consent to this. (2) Alternatively, the connection may be indirect when the object is not linked explicitly with the user but only through the use of information that belong to the person. Imagine if the person buys a object with RFID or similar technology, but it isn’t linked to the object. In the purchase process, if the person can be identified through payment with credit cards or loyalty cards that indicate the type product purchased, you could have an indirect connections.

In fact, the person may have previously provided his or her consent for the dissemination of data relating to purchases (the simplest example concerns the supermarkets or big chains) for advertising purposes. In this way, a connection could be achieved with the indirect result of the person connecting to those purchased.

In terms of privacy, may a person be protected? Who manages personal data? Where will this data be stored? Hence the responsibility to set and adopt appropriate security measures. Regarding the legal framework, IoT hence generate a privacy system sui generis, because we will have a system with a sum of single privacy right. Which is why we should talk about privacies instead of privacy.

Lift Asia's traditional venue is located in Jeju island via Google Maps, a famous Korean tour spot. Its nature is very beautiful and one of top world tour spots although people don't know well.

Jeju is a volcanic island far from 130 km from the southern coast of Korea. The island contains the Natural World Heritage Site entitled Jeju Volcanic Island and Lava Tubes.

Mt. Hallasan, the tallest mountain in South Korea and a dormant volcano rises 1,950m above sea level and 360 satellite volcanoes are around all of island. You can feel different kinds of plants by level from subtropics to cold zone. (Volcanoes were already dead and not dangerous. They are covered by green glasses and trees with some of volcanic outcrops.)

It also has beautiful emerald colored beaches with black volcanic rocks and white sands. I have been in Miami beach in US, but both is almost similar except length of beach.

Recently Jeju island was listed in a finalist of New 7 wonders of Nature that includes top 28 natural spots in the world. If you visit Jeju via Seoul, you can also experience the 3rd. busiest routes in the world.

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post from Jan Ondrus, a veteran Lifter who is now working in Paris and wants to pick up your brain.

Dear Lifters,
we need your help in order to diffuse a survey.

Some academic research colleagues and I are conducting a survey to assess the work-life balance (WLB) perceptions of distributed professionals in the IT sector. In today’s (globally) distributed work environment, assessing work-life balance (WLB) perceptions of employees is critical to ensuring the well-being, productivity, and commitment in the workplace. We hope that the survey will result in the identification of actionable items that will make a positive impact on the WLB of distributed professionals in the IT sector.

This survey, conducted by independent academic researchers, is designed to provide a diagnosis of the employees’ WLB (or lack of) along with relevant antecedents and consequences. Since this study is on work-life balance, some of the questions are about your “work” characteristics while others are about the “life” aspect.

We need respondents based in Europe working on distributed project ("offshored") in the IT sector (i.e., people in Europe with teams abroad). We have already collected data from India and USA. Now it is the turn for Europe.

Click here to fill the survey!

This survey has 4 sections and should take about 15-20 minutes to complete. I know it is long but we really need complete surveys. Otherwise, we cannot use them for our research. Please forward this link to any relevant person you might know. We need a fairly large number of respondents in order to be significant.

Thank you very much in advance, best regards.
Jan Ondrus
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Information Systems and Decision Sciences
ESSEC Business School, Paris - Singapore

Last year Lift and AlpicT partnered to organize a venture trip in Korea. We helped emerging start-ups from Western Switzerland such as Poken, Arimaz, KeyLemon, Secu4, Lighthouse, Pixelux to develop and promote themselves. They had the opportunity to meet-up key people in Korea, potential clients, suppliers, partners, or investors and show their project during the Lift conference in Jeju.

In the context of Lift Asia next fall, we renew this partnership for the "Asia Venture Trip 2009" in Seoul and Jeju between September 14 and 19. The project targets entrepreneurs based in Western Switzerland (Vaud, Valais, Geneve, Fribourg, Bern, Neuchatel, Jura) in the field of information and communication technologies and with a strong focus on interactivity.

More details and information can be found in the documents below (in french):

It has been a tight two hours - but the participants of the blurredworld workshop actually achieved some nice results... check out blurredworld to see more of what they've done!

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post about elearning, one of the topics that will be addressed during the upcoming Business School 2.0 workshop.

E-learning is expanding worldwide and is deeply changing teaching modes and knowledge management practices. We agree that e-learning may lead to positive changes in facilitating circulation of knowledge and access to education of people with social or financial difficulties. Moreover, we may admit that younger people may find in the ICT a funnier way to learn, closer to their habit of social networking on the web.

However, and as any radical innovation which is both technological and social oriented, e-learning does not always reach the expected objectives. And in a more severe way, we postulate that, when mis-implemented and misused, e-learning may undermine knowledge management and teaching modes. Such “dark side” or negative aspect of e-learning are often neglected. We present the main results from a qualitative and inductive research which has been conducted at Euromed Management two years ago around the general topic: “what is ideal course?” and “what are the very appropriate ICT to learn?”

We found that students were facing difficulties, not only in using the "tools 2.0" (collaborative tools, shared resources, ...) but also in understanding and challenging the different resources available to them (Wikipedia-like web sites, online courses, dedicated databases such as EBSCO...).

Before going further with even more complex tools and procedures, those two basic issues point out that the successful e-campus needs to at least address the following: