I am happy to announce our latest partner: the Swiss confederation Innovation Promotion Agency (CTI) will assist us for both the Venture Night and the conference!

For more than 60 years, the CTI has supported the transfer of knowledge and technology between universities and businesses. Its aim is to convert the knowledge acquired in the laboratories into products and services.

Some CTI coaches will be at the conference, and if you have a research project you want to turn into a company they are the right people to speak to!

Migros is a legendary Swiss cooperative active in almost every aspect of Swiss society from groceries stores to insurance, from golf to travel.

Migros dedicates one percent of its turnover to cultural project via a foundation called Migros pour-cent culturel, and for the second year they will support LIFT!

Thanks to Raphael Rogenmoser for making this possible :)

We are proud to welcome the city of Geneva as one of our event partners. The city provided us tremendous help, most notably for the Venture Night and the Fondue by giving us access to the wonderful Salle Communale de Plainpalais.

LIFT is doing a lot to promote, connect and inspire the local economy, so we are proud to get help and recognition from the local authorities! Thanks to Pierre Maudet, Nicolas Erdos and Eric Favre for making this happen!

The TSR (our national television) just partnered with us to take care of the capture of the presentations. We will have an elaborate setup in place to tape the speeches and put them online on our video portal with the best quality ever.

The TSR has been a key partner of LIFT over the years, first with their online activities (TSR.ch and Nouvo), now by putting their know-how in terms of producing great images at the service of our community. Thank you and welcome to the LIFT adventure!

This press release made my day:

GenevaLunch announced it is completing its transition to the Lake Geneva region’s only news site produced entirely in English, published and edited by professional English- language journalists. It will end its first full year 31 December with well over 12,000 returning visitors, 78,000 total visitors and 140,000 pages viewed.

Why is GenevaLunch special for us at LIFT? Because Ellen Wallace started the company at LIFT06! From that same press release:

GenevaLunch grew out of the Lift06 conference in Geneva, initially as a pilot project that used blog technology in a new way to create a low-cost community newsletter. In mid-2007 the site began to accept advertising from companies active in the English-speaking community and it is now seeking sponsors to strengthen its reporting team.

And since 2007 GenevaLunch is a close partner of LIFT, sponsoring our pre-conference drinks and now joining the ranks of our media partners. This is really nice. If you can't find sponsors invent them ;)

For the third year we are proud to announce a partnership with the HEC School of the University of Lausanne (my alma mater) who will bring ten students to the conference at a reduced price.

If you study at the university of Lausanne, email elisabeth.fournierpulfer@unil.ch and you will get a code reducing the ticket price to only 200CHF!

Thanks to professor Yves Pigneur for his ongoing support (and for teaching me computers and Internet back in 1994, but that's another story ;)

For the third year, our friends at Rezonance will support LIFT by promoting the event to their members. Rezonance is Switzerland's oldest business network with around 20'000 members active online and in regular events across the country, covering topics like entrepreneurship or innovation.

Welcome back :)

We are proud to announce a new partner: Ads-Click!
Ads-Click is one of the key player on the online market of Geneva. A market leader in solutions for search and contextual advertising, the company offers a wide range of original ad formats and serves over 5 billion (!!) pages views per month.

Thanks to Pascal Rossini, Fabien Spina and Beatrice Guth for making this partnership a reality :)

Starting tomorrow, TED will start broadcasting some of our videos via their amazing video podcast service (see announcement here).

Simply put, TED is the world's best conference with speakers like Richard Branson or Bill Clinton, and a Texas-sized waiting list. Their TED talks platform is an imperishable source of inspiring presentations delivered to your desktop, now featuring some of LIFT's best talks!

Seeing LIFT on TED's site makes me very proud, but more importantly it shows that we are doing pretty good on our self-appointed mission of promoting discussion around the changes and opportunities brought by technology in our society. Enjoy the show :)

We are proud to welcome a new partner to the LIFT adventure: WattWatt!

WattWatt is an independent community website set up by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), a Geneva-based, non-governmental and not-for-profit organization, leader in electrotechnical standardization. IEC believes that the question of electrical energy efficiency is one that needs to be addressed and that everyone of us, as individuals, has a part to play.

WattWatt and LIFT will organize a special evening on Thursday, February 7th to discuss sustainable development and the role of electricity in it. That means we will add a new track to the conference program, and more great speakers will join us in Geneva. The free event will be announced next week!