After Richard Hutten's cloud chair we featured at Lift09, we will again partner with Ormond Editions to bring the work of the world's best designers to our main stage. Our choice this year went to the AT-AT Walker, a Star Wars inspired lamp by Lifegoods.

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!

Maria Sipka, CEO and Founder of Linqia, will be hosting a Lift10 workshop entitled: The heart of the conversation: challenges brands face to edge their way into this sacred space.

Maria is interested in social media and on-line communities. She is driven by sparking conversations across many communities fostering meaningful, transparent and authentic exchanges. Before starting Linqia, Maria spent 2 years at XING initially as their COO responsible for the company’s international strategy and then as the Director of Community Development building and monetizing their groups and premium group offerings.

Maria's workshop will focus on the realities surrounding communities and groups online. Key themes such as how communities and groups have evolved, and the the opportunities and challenges facing brands and their agencies will be addressed. After examining some case studies on how brands are moving from campaigns to conversations in the social media space, participants will dive into an interactive workshop, where they will be tasked to develop their own community-based conversation for a given brand.

Do you want to be part of the conversation? 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!

Stephen Graham will be speaking at Lift10 in our opening session on the redefinition of privacy. We invited him to speak because of his investigations into how networked technologies redefine the notion of surveillance. His perspective as a geographer adds an important dimension to the discussion around the evolution of privacy.

Following a period at Durham Geography Department, Stephen is now Professor at the Global Urban Research Unit at Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. He has a background in urbanism, planning and the sociology of technology. His research addresses intersections between urban places, mobilities, technology, war, militarization, surveillance and geopolitics. He writes and lectures in many countries and across a variety of disciplines.

Stephen has authored, co-authored and edited a range of books, including Telecommunications and the City (1996), Splintering Urbanism (2001) (both with Simon Marvin), The Cybercities Reader and Cities, War and Terrorism (both 2004). His most recent books, Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructures Fail (Routledge), and Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (Verso), were published in December 2009 and January 2010 respectively.

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

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.

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

Alexander Osterwalder will be hosting a workshop at Lift10. Alex is an author, speaker & adviser on business model innovation. You can download a 70-page preview of his bestselling book: Business Model Generation.

Before (re-)focusing on business models Alex was partner at strategy consultancy Arvetica, helped build-up and manage a globally-active NGO based in Thailand working on HIV/AIDS & Malaria, did a PhD on business models, consulted as a freelancer, wrote as a journalist at BILANZ and launched a start-up in the field of finance.

Given his background and experience, Alex is hosting a workshop entitled: Business Model Innovation for Start-ups, Corporations and Social Entrepreneurs.

Workshop participants will interactively learn about a business model development methodology that is applied by leading global organizations such as 3M, Ericsson, Telenor, Deloitte, Capgemini, Public Works and Government Services Canada, and start-ups alike.

Participants will start “practicing” the design of a business model during the workshop and the group will work on a challenging case study.

Sign up for the workshop here.