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.