Lift Asia 09 is in two months, and we are posting profiles of the confirmed speakers. Don't forget to also have a look at the program!

Trained originally as a semiologist, Rafi's a remarkable entrepreneur who used to be a pioneer of the French Minitel in 1984, the founder of the very first Internet Company in France in 1994 and the founder of Ozone (Pervasive Networks in Paris France). He is now the founder and chairman of Violet, a company that develop products and services which aims at import the characteristics of on-line interactions to everyday objects: flexibility, customization, interconnection of things, renewed functionalities and content, permanent enrichment by the community, magic…

Their most acclaimed product as the Nabaztag, a multipurpose, Internet-connected mini-robot in the form of a rabbit which talks, hears, smells objects, blinks and moves. Violet now develops a more diverse set of products ranging from Mir:ror (a wifi reader that detects the objects you show it and allows users to gives them powers) to RFID stamps that can be stuck on everyday objects and make them communicant and connected.

In the great Lift tradition started by Aram Armstrong at Lift06, Philippe Méda has taken some notes now available on his blog.

It is Friday morning and LIFT has one more day and night to go according to the plans. I just woke up at one of the nicest addresses in town in a flat where one can easily get lost and am all happy that on my third year attending this conference I finally made it to the fondue. I do not eat cheese fondue and went yesterday for the company. I sat across Nada and next to Francesca at the end of one of the tables, engaged in fun discussions and then left much too early so as to not arrive at my host's residence too terribly late.
I like this year's format. So far every year the format has been different, and I have no expectation in the world that the experimentation with the format will ever slow down. Humans love to play and tweak things, nothing is ever perfect and we are always drawing from utopia. As resistant as we all are to change, we love it! It is like having a natural schizophrenia that amounts to seeking the safety of the known while desiring the excitement of the new.
My experience of LIFT this year so far has been a lot more relaxed than in the previous years. There are many reasons for it, one being that this is a community that is starting to mature and where the relationships are beginning to rest on firmer ground. Other reasons are more personal and hang around my own decisions as to how to be present here this year. I like what I observe about the dynamics of community around this conference.