Laurent Haug and Cristiana Bolli-Freitas welcome the attendees to the LIFT08 conference. There are 700 people, 4 locations, 60 journalist 30 volunteers... at the LIFT08.
Laurent talks about the importance of the discussions and the support they get from partners followed by an introduction to the conference program.
600 People at the fondue night? Incredible!
Christiana talks about the LIFT Experience. There is a LIFT song contest, the "not so empty book", people can send entries to editor@liftconference.com.

The "Online Environments"-session starts with a keynote from sci-fi author, tech journalist and design critic Bruce Sterling. Bruce is predicting that 2008 is going to be a crap year. Economic down-turn, selection year in the USA, China with the Olympics, Europe is still pretty well because there thing are getting done slowly. And the worst problem the world has right now is already 200 years old: global warming. And this is not going to be solved in 2008.

Instead of predicting the future of our tech world Bruce is showing 4 different scenarios of a occurrence which came out of nowhere and now gets a lot of media attention: the relation and marriage Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy.
Using the two parameter ambition and publicity he is drawing 4 scenarios of which the last, he calls it "Empress of Europe", is given a chance of 35% by him.
Finishing his weird speech, which is really hard to recap for me, he says 90% is just about surviving to see our future.

Bruce's speech is followed by Pierre Ballanger, CEO and founder of Skyrock.
He is going to speak about future and visions in social networking entitled :"the social network: future of telecommunications". Pierre gives a short view on what they do at Skyrock.com, which was first blogging platform in Europe. Some numbers: 20.2 million visitor per month, 7.7. billion page views per month, 21 million accounts, 12.5. million blogs...
They have the ambition to become the #1 social network in the world. Change is necessary to grow and he uses the concept of "netamorphosis".
The digital identity is becoming the center of all electronic exchanges. Profiles arebecoming more important than mail addresses, and values are shifting from bandwidth to programming code. Physical identity merges with virtual identity, while mobile instant messaging merges with social network to become a social messenger.
In future all teenage users of skyrock.com will access their social network with mobile devices that constantly feed the social messenger.
Pierre goes on talking about mobile cloud computing where each mobile is going to be a server and the distribution of tasks is scattered to the networked devices.
Terminal and distance software will merge, as well as the OS of personal computers and mobiles will merge and the mobile OS will be dominant in the future.
If everybody would have a mobile server the conference would be a server farm right now.
The meaning of the name "social network" is going to change itself.

Finishing the first session is Jonathan Cabiria from Fielding Graduate University with a speech entitled "Permeability: Real Life + Virtual Live = One Life".
Jonathan starts talking about identity. That we have a lot of different facets we are presenting in our daily life. The reason for all this identities is our struggle to survive.
People need to feel connected and to belong somewhere. So when people don't feel connected one tents to rebel or another one becomes depressed and starts to hide from society.
Jonathan researched those depressed people who started going into the virtual worlds. In their virtual life those people started to turn around. In what he calls the "save harbour" they regained self-confidence and they were able to transfer their change into the real world.
What does it mean to people who create those virtual platform and social networks:
Think broader and deeper about the impact of your creations.

All three talks were great views on our future, from abstract to concrete. From weird scenarios to hard facts of the reality we create.