We love having students at Lift. This year we are even actively working on bringing high-school scholars to make our audience as diverse as possible. We know our tickets are too expensive if you are still at university (see our pricing policy for an explanation), so we organize various initiatives: a contest, the opportunity to be a volunteer, and individual partnerships with schools in Switzerland and now internationally.

These partnerships work in a very simple way: we offer a discount on the ticket, the school/university pays 80% of the remaining price and the student 20%. This is how 40 students from the ENSCI, University of Geneva and CERN (see full list) attend the conference. We are currently developing more of these partnerships, and we are asking our community to give us more contacts inside academic institutions. If you are studying and would like your school to help you attend Lift, please get in touch, introduce us to the right person and we will work on making the conference accessible to you.

The 20 free students tickets will be attributed Friday, and we will announce the selected persons on Monday. Last call to participate by filling the student pass request form!

The student passes (20 free tickets given to motivated students from around the world) will be attributed on January 15.

We have 19 submissions so far from:

Aline Raymondon, Switzerland
Jung-Un Jang, Switzerland
Loïc Le Guen, France
Stéphanie Klebetsanis, Switzerland
Thierry Blancpain, Switzerland
Simona Sofronie, Netherlands
Marco Sgrignuoli, Italy
Stéphane Matteo
Sandra Davila, United States of America
Amy A Baker, Canada
Juergen Seitz, Germany
Arlon Stok , Italy
Daniel Truninger, Switzerland
Ben LaMothe, United Kingdom and Northern Ireland
Patrick Meier, United States of America
Sachin Gaur, Finland
David Puippe, Switzerland
Michael Wirz, Switzerland
Gracia Pérez, Mexico

Request a student pass.

• We have 194 registered participants and hope to pass 200 by the end of the year!
• Early bird closes in 3 days. Tickets will go from 650 to 850chf on January 1st. Register for Lift10.
• We have fifteen applications from Mexico, UK, Switzerland, Finland, USA, Italy, Germany and France for the free students pass. We need more before the January 15 deadline, there are twenty tickets up for grab don't miss that chance! Apply for a pass.
• On the press front, we have received thirty requests for accreditation. Ask for a press pass if you are a journalist or blogger.

Now is the time to ask for your free student pass. Submissions close on January 15, and we only received around five at this point. Each year you have approximately 50% of chance to get a free ticket via this process so give it a try. Five minutes of your time and you might attend Lift free of charge!

You must have a Lift account (create one, or login) then head to the corresponding form.

Reminder: for press/bloggers, the press pass request form is here.

A few days after the end of Lift09, here is a first video which is actually a condensed of the short interview we made.

Only one question: "Where did the future go?"

And the answer from Nicolas Nova, Fabio Sergio, Daniel Kaplan, Remy Bourganel, Charles Nepote, Juliana Rotich and 5 other people we're missing the name so please don't hesitate and add it in a comment.

Lift Interviews - Where did the future go? from Axel Morales on Vimeo.

Thanks to all those who played the game.

Other videos are coming .... soon.

We are closing submissions in 12 hours. So far we have received 28 submissions from more than 10 countries, and more than 60% of them will be accepted. Hurry up if you want to have your chance! The selection committee will review all submissions and we will publish the names of the selected students on this blog during the week.

As scheduled we closed the propositions for the Geber Rüf Fellowship. Thanks to all those who participated. The twenty lucky students chosen by our panel (Professor William Cockayne, Nicolas Nova, Sylvie Reinhard, Bruno Giussani, Cristiana Bolli-Freitas and Jean-Daniel Sciboz) will receive an email next week announcing them the good news.

Thanks to all those who submitted a request, and get ready for a huge student influx next week :)

a couple of friendly questions from me:

- I was a bit surprised when I saw the conference price in comparison to the price last year... what happened ?

- What happened to the student discount ? I mean do you plan on only having 20 students at the conference - who has to write motivational essays to go ? - there's isn't enough students there allready I would say.

I am afraid the Lift is gonna be yet "another european creative tech conference" for companies and not as much for entrepreneurs and students. In my opinion they are the ones that you learn from in the network - not the participants from the larger companies. They are often also the must enthusiastic and creative.

all in all, to me it looks like you're professionalising the conference... which is good.. but please - do keep some chaos...

guys - you know I love Lift dearly =) - but where did this come from ?

Henriette Weber Andersen