Younghee Jung, Senior Design Manager at Nokia, recently moved to London from Tokyo. Learn more about Younghee's groundbreaking work by viewing her LIFT08 video.

Many will remember her presentation in the User Experience Track where she shared research performed in shanty towns around the world. The purpose was to capture input from users with a view to analyzing trends for future development.

Younghee's well-known colleague and Principal Researcher at Nokia, Jan Chipchase, will be attending LIFT08 in Korea. We'll be back with more about Jan's contribution soon.

Every year in April we know if we did a good job or not, if you guys liked the event or not. We anxiously await Glenn O'Neil's post-conference survey he has been doing for LIFT for the past three years (see LIFT06 and LIFT07 surveys).

As usual the community massively answered our call for feedback (thanks to the 272 attendees who took the time to answer), and as usual you were kind enough to give us a good grade, with 89% of attendees having a good or excellent overall appreciation (and nobody called LIFT08 very poor which I'm quite proud of). FULL REPORT HERE (pdf).

The report indicates we achieved some of our main goals (networking, learning and exchanging) with room for improvement on a few things like the venue. Some formats will be improved, like discussions (we really need a more quiet place, you will have that in Asia and next year) and Open Stage (I hope more LIFTers will get involved when voting time comes).

Read the full report here (and be sure to check page 5 to see the evolution over the three editions), and I will soon post my thoughts and the things that will change as a consequence of all the feedback. Thanks to all, and congrats to the team who deserves a big praise after such a plebiscite :)

For some reason I missed Guy Vardi's talk when putting all 30+ videos online. Sorry Guy, here is your talk now available in streaming, download, 3gp and podcast.

The TSR got 100'000 views in 3 weeks on the LIFT08 content, but as our videos are hosted on numerous platforms (Nouvo, Google, Vpod, YouTube) it is not the only place where our speakers get a lot of online exposure. We are about to pass 100'000 views on Google Video:

For each person visiting the conference we get 150+ views on the online videos, which confirms there is strong interest in the ideas expressed at LIFT all over the world!

Every year we go through hundreds of adventures when organizing a large scale event like LIFT. Here are a few stories you've never heard about LIFT08:

• Everybody thinks that all LIFTers come with laptops, and the prospect of hosting the conference generates a few sleepless nights for the IT manager of our conference center. Some pictures might easily let one think that there is a one to one relationship between attendees and laptops. But I got the real number, and we only has 240 laptops at the event this year! That's right, a mere 35%... that generated 28'000 connections. It seems some folks tried to finish their downloads, and the mandatory wifi blackout happened. Next year we should have all p2p traffic blocked and I hope that for the first time ever we will have reliable wifi service :)

• The caterer had an extremely hard time serving everybody - and came up with unfortunately deserved mixed reviews - because we had a last minute problem. The person in charge of the kitchens at the conference center resigned four days before LIFT. He had promised we could use the kitchens to cook, but his successor had other plans and didn't allow us in. Our caterer had to cook the meat at a remote location, driving it just in time for lunch. Add that to the fact the bakery didn't find the delivery entrance on Thursday and you have a recipe for disaster.

• We delivered 6 visa letters to participants coming from eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Half of these were accepted, with unfortunately three attendees were unable to attend for administrative reasons.

• For the second year in a row we received a proposition of someone who wanted to pay to speak. For the second year that was an easy decision for us - a loud no! - but we had a sign that being on stage at LIFT creates more and more value for the speakers. At some point we will be forced to think about channeling all this, just like the creation of the venture night allowed us to give all entrepreneurs a tribune to express themselves, which resulted in less pitches and less "aggressive" networking during the conference.

• Last year we had 100 tshirts remaining, among them 80 S-sized women tees. This year all that remains is 150 M-sized women tshirts. Not sure what conclusion we can draw on the population from this, but if are coaching a women soccer team just let us know we are happy to sponsor your jerseys ;)

• We had a small problem with a (fake?) journalist who had forgotten his press card and said he was working for a magazine called "nectars and flavours". More than the absence of a press card, we had a hard time finding any relation between LIFT and hid magazine ;)

• As we had around 80 people showing up unregistered on Thursday (most of them from our partners, some journalists, a few late registrants) we suddenly had 700 people attending the conference, which means we had a potential overbooking at the fondue as the venue could accommodate 600 persons. I quickly called Fabien - who was in charge of the evening's logistics - and he found a way to create 50 more seats. Fortunately - or unfortunately ? - "only" 550 persons showed up, and we had some spare tables which gave the impression the fondue was less crowded than it was.

We are gathering some figures about the impact of LIFT for a meeting we have scheduled with the LIFT08 partners next week, and here is another impressive number: since we launched the new version and enabled community features, the LIFT conference website has received 1'371'896 visits from 416'832 different sites. Our servers have sent 6'380'092 pages or 192GB of data.

After the numbers we got on our videos, this shows that the conference's impact is not only happening inside the CICG but also everywhere on the planet. If you are interesting in the liftconference.com evolution of traffic stats click here.

I updated the view counts of the videos and here is the top 10 all time. 7 LIFT08 videos (that's the TSR effect!), 2 from LIFT07 and Cory Doctorow's legendary LIFT06 speech.

These 10 talks account for close to 125'000 views! Thanks to all our viewers, and to Google Video for the bandwidth ;) See all the LIFT videos in one page here.

I've recently added some pictures from this year's edition. You'll find theme either by searching the tag "LIFT08" on Flickr, or directly thru my account: here.

I just received the stats from the TSR regarding their LIFT08 videos mini-site, and the numbers are... beyond impressive! One video got around 50'000 views in three weeks, and overall the 100k bar has been passed. I will receive the precise figures soon but these numbers are a testimony to the quality of our speakers, and to the quality of the whole setting we managed to create around their ideas :)

Thanks to 60 journalists who covered LIFT08 we are getting amazing press coverage! We had more than 50 articles since the beginning of the year (and these are the ones we found) from our local medias (Le Temps, RSR, TSR, etc...) but also the likes of BBC News, Business Week or Wired. Here are a few excerpts from the international coverage:

LIFT is one of the highlights of the technophile calendar, an opportunity to meet up with some of the most interesting people around and engage in debate about the future with those who are actually building it instead of waiting for it happen.
BBC News

Yes, everyone may be talking up the news and happenings coming out of the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas [...] but some insanely interesting ideas also came out of the LIFT conference held early last week in Geneva, Switzerland.
BusinessWeek

LIFT 08 -- where you learn something new every day. It would have been worth coming here just to hear about "Citizen Cyberscience" and "Powerpoint Karaoke."
Wired blogs

Events like the World Economic Forum at Davos, TED in Monterey and Pop!Tech in Maine are often placed in this conference superleague. The LIFT Conference in Geneva, has been steadily climbing the ranks of the elite [...]
The Journal

Thanks to all those who took time to share their thoughts in the press, on their blog, in video, or any other form of expression. And don't hesitate to forward your articles to info@liftconference.com if we missed it. We use Google News (what else?) to find articles which means we miss 90% of what is not in English or French.