LIFT Conference 2008 (Geneva) Day 1 - Workshops + Venture Night
Published by robinw February 17th, 2008 in Social Media, web 2.0, Trends, Innovation, Startups, Events Tags: conference, events, fearless city, innovation, io agency, lift, lift 2008, lift conference, lift08, mixin, pixelux, pixelux entertainment, social media, startups, Trends, venture night, viewdle, web 2.0, workshops.

LIFT08Last week marked the third edition of the LIFT Conference in Geneva, a 3-day ‘festival of ideas’ attracting visitors from all around the world. A particularly diverse audience too with people from the internet, academic, fashion, artistics, media and design industry. mTrends was there and saw that it was good; Robin Wauters (from Plugg) wrote a wrap-up for you!

Day 1: Workshops + Venture Night

Workshops

The LIFT organization team made good use of the facilitites of Uni Mail, a complex of the University of Geneva, for a day filled with workshops about a variety of topics. We heard, for the first time, about the Fearless City project, an ambitious initiative from a couple of young Canadians who are trying to aid the marginalized downtown center of Vancouver by supplying its inhabitants with an arsenal of technological ‘weaponry’. Through a combination of (subsidized) wireless and mobile connection infrastructure with devices, open source applications, a social medai platform and the construction of a physical cultural center where all operations will be centralized, the filantrophic initiators want to better the future of Vancouver’s homeless, drug and alcohol addicated and poor. A sort of online/offline self-help group, who wants to leverage the upcoming attention around the 2010 Olympics to raise awareness for the project and set an example for other world cities.

The afternoon was reserved for an enjoyable session about today’s teenagers and how they fit the internet / mobile into their daily life, and how important (or not) it is for them. The interesting part about the session was having 4 actual teenagers, student from Geneva’s international school, join the discussion. This was a way for the attendees to get live feedback about the opinion and facts of the teenager’s internet usage, social network habits, online video, privacy, downloading music, etc.

Venture Night

In the evening, all attendees gathered for the Venture Night, and listened to 8 ‘elevator pitches’ from start-ups, who got live feedback from a series of professional judges.

This is what we thought were the most interesting:

The Italian iO Agency creates interactive objects for use in retail, hospitals, public facilities, events, etc. Quite impressive to see, but difficult to explain without actually seeing what it’s all about. Check their website SensitiveFloor.com for a showcase of one of their product lines, an interactive floor with motion sensors triggering spectacular special effects.

Viewdle is an American start-up who developed an innovative technology to make online videos searchable based on facial recognition. The service isn’t yet publicly available, but you can see how it works on Reuters Labs.

Mixin is sort of a microblogging application + social network + calendar with a clear focus on activities. It feels like Twitter but with the question ‘What are you doing tonight?’ instead of ‘What are you doing right now?’.

PixeLux Entertainment is a Swiss company specialized in digital effects for games, who has developed a technology to significantly decrease the production costs of video games. Thanks to DMM (Digital Molecular Matter), there’s now an automated process simulating hyper realistic effects when bending, breaking or fracturing digital objects.

The rest of the pitches came from coComment, Clipperz, Holistis and Wua.la.

For LIFT video material, check Nouvo.ch.