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!

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

On March 18, while our international community will gather in Vienna for the first Lift Austria, Swiss Lifters are invited to the amazing Rolex learning center for Lift Presentations @ ThinkData. The conference will explore data under all its form: social, semantic, real-time, mobile, geo, etc. Click on the image below to learn more and register for this free event!

See you at the EPFL learning center

Probably one of the most impressive building of the year. Learn more on the official website.

We love having students at Lift. This year we are even actively working on bringing high-school scholars to make our audience as diverse as possible. We know our tickets are too expensive if you are still at university (see our pricing policy for an explanation), so we organize various initiatives: a contest, the opportunity to be a volunteer, and individual partnerships with schools in Switzerland and now internationally.

These partnerships work in a very simple way: we offer a discount on the ticket, the school/university pays 80% of the remaining price and the student 20%. This is how 40 students from the ENSCI, University of Geneva and CERN (see full list) attend the conference. We are currently developing more of these partnerships, and we are asking our community to give us more contacts inside academic institutions. If you are studying and would like your school to help you attend Lift, please get in touch, introduce us to the right person and we will work on making the conference accessible to you.

Our partner Redbull will give you wings, but Air France will actually fly you to Geneva for Lift10 :)
Air France will be offering Lifters a CHF 50 reduction on any flight (to any of their destinations, not just Geneva) for a limited period. We look forward to this new partnership and having them on board...

Have a look here for more details, and the discount code. Please note that the code only works on the Air France Switzerland site, and that this is only in French and German. The site will be available in English in April.

To give you an idea of the current rates and savings, here are some example fares for the conference dates:
- From London (direct): CHF 210, discounted to CHF 160
- From New York (via Paris): CHF 890, discounted to CHF 840

The first ever Russian Lift event has just been announced! Organized by Council members Vadim Chekletsov (Institute of Philosophy Russian Academy of Sciences) and Rob van Kranenburg (Fontys Applied Sciences), the event will take place on Friday, Sept. 24 and talk about the Internet of Things:

New trends of NBIC-convergence, Human Enhancement Technologies on the one hand and Smart Environment (Ambient intelligence, Ubiquitous computing, Internet of Things) on the other prepare us to a future paradigm shift blurring Anthropology and Social Philosophy borderlines. We believe the "winning solution" to making the most open, inclusive and innovative Internet of Things is to transcend the short-term opposition between social innovation and security by finding a way to combine these two necessities in a broader common perspective.

Lift Presentations @ Moscow

Lift@home's schedule looks quite busy, with a series of six events in Lyon, Lift@Austria and now Lift Presentations @ Moscow!

We have been pretty quiet lately, working on developing and implementing partnerships with several organizations: the HEAD for the scenography and experience, Alp ICT and other partners for a massive startup operation, etc etc. During that time, registrations continued nicely, and we passed an important milestone when our 450th participant registered today.

Our efforts to convince you guys to register early - and at a better price - have worked. At least if we compare to other years where 80% of registrations happen in the last sixty days! So in the name of the team, thanks to all those of you who registered early, you make our life much easier and less stressful :)

Note: you might have noticed the difference between the Amiando participants count (currently 300) and the Lift website count. The reason is simple: on liftconference.com we take into account the tickets that will be used by our partners as this is the effective number of attendees we should expect, and therefore prepare the logistics for. Currently, we have 150 such tickets, with Alp ICT buying more than forty tickets for Swiss startups. Until the partners register all their guests, the counts diverge. They then reconcile the day of the event. Now you know the inside of our little processes a bit more ;)

Every year we work hard to promote entrepreneurship during Lift. With journalists, investors, bloggers, potential clients and partners attending, the conference is an ideal platform for young companies, and our track record shows how powerful a platform Lift can be. See Fontself (now a startup after being featured in the 2007 Lift experience), Poken badges in 2009, GenevaLunch (founded after Ellen Wallace attended Lift06 and thought: "I could start a media!"), coComment's accidental launch in 2006, TagCrumbs (whose founders met at Lift), the conferences we inspired (SHiFT, GoingSolo, ICCM), Ozwe's QB1 getting hundreds of articles after launching at LIft09, etc etc.

We are very proud of all this, and consider these to be tangible proofs of the strength of our concept (NOTE: contact us if something like this happened to you and you never shared your story!).

This year, we want to go even further, and offer startups an improved way to introduce their products to the world. We have teamed up with Alp ICT, TheArk, Creapole, the CTI and the State of Geneva to do the following:

• discounted Lift tickets for Swiss startups
• organization of a venture night, similar to what we did in 2008
• creation of a startup zone where projects will be demoed

The call for projects will launch in the coming weeks, and you can already contact the project coordinators on info@alpict.ch to learn more.

Actually there are many Lift conferences, the longest standing being the Long Island Forum For Technology. These days we get a lot of alerts in our ego-search system (monitoring keyword #lift10) and as you will notice, the various Lift have very, very different focuses ;)

^{London International Festival of Theatre}

^{Lift10, "training young leaders to stand up for Jesus.}

^{Long Island Forum For Technology}

Lift10 is in 3 months time, and we are posting profiles of the confirmed speakers. Don't forget to have a look at the program!

We are happy to announce Mercedes Bunz as one of our Lift10 speakers. Mercedes will be speaking during our session entitled "The old new media": Newspapers are struggling, TV is not sure of what the future holds. What is at stake nowadays when informing, reaching and involving people?

Mercedes is an experienced and optimistic new media strategist for journalism currently working as the Guardian’s reporter for digital media. As a motivating managing editor experienced in print and online journalism she has been editor-in-chief of the online version of the Berlin-based daily newspaper Tagesspiegel. Before, she was the editor-in-chief of zitty, the oldest and best-known Berlin city-guide magazine. Mercedes also co-founded de:bug, one of the leading magazines for electronic culture in german-speaking countries. She holds a PhD in media science and is a visionary writer and speaker on new technology, creative industries and society.

Her last book was about the history of the internet (in German), and got published at the German Kadmos Kulturverlag tracing the transformation of media from saving to distribution. She is currently working on a new one, and yes journalism and the internet occur.

We're excited to listen to Mercedes speak in May. Have a look at her website or her blog on the Guardian for more information.