At Lift France 09, Elizabeth Goodman spoke about Changing the Planet. You can watch the video here.

We caught up with Elizabeth this week. She's been quite busy since we last saw her in Marseille. She was awarded an Intel PhD fellowship, and was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research New England. At the moment, she is organizing City Centered, a festival of locative media and urban community, to take place in San Francisco's Tenderloin District in June.

Jean-François was a member of the original CERN team that invented the WWW a few years ago. He presents his new project, the vizta.com website.

We shot a short video to introduce lift10 at the recent Lift@home event in Geneva. Get the latest on the upcoming Geneva conference in five minutes.

Thanks to getdocued's co-founder Julian Müller, our talks are now featured on this platform whose aim is to spotlight legally available documentaries freely available on the internet. The first talk to go online is Gunter Pauli's speech on biomimetism:

Here is a short video showing the atmosphere of last year's Lift Asia in Jeju.

This year's early bird tickets (195€) will close in 24 hours, so register now to attend Lift Asia 09. Coming is much cheaper than you think, especially now that Finnair sells tickets to Seoul for less than 700chf!!

Here is coverage of Lift France 09 from Tiburon.tv, a great series of interviews of participants and speakers captured in Marseille.

Intelligent robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction. They are walking into everyday life and are in widespread use performing jobs cheaper or more reliably than humans. But before using a robot in the real world you want to test it in many situations and repeat the situation over time modifying the environment.

„Most of the time robots are used in dangerous situations or complicated environments so testing in simulation saves a lot of time and money. We create easy-to-use simulation editors to help people use simulation“ explains Bertrand Copigneaux, COO and co-founder of SimplySim. „I’ll give you an example: One of the projects of French robot constructor robosoft is to have an autonomous vehicle in a city. To test it you would have to block the city in order to have a situation which is close to the use cases of the robot.“

Bertrand and his two co-founders Nicolas Dalmasso and Nicolas Oudit started SimplySim in April 2008 when they were still students. For now the 3D Simulation Experts are mainly a service company but they are also working on offering products like a robot simulator with a more realistic way to simulate robots, especially with regard to physics simulation. Bertrand wrapped up his interview with Viktoria by giving a presentation of a 3D simulation they have developed for Microsoft Imagine Cup Competition.

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Here is coverage of Lift France 09 from Tiburon.tv, a great series of interviews of participants and speakers captured in Marseille.

Luckily there are some people out there who are looking for ways to help save the planet. Romain Vailleux, co-founder and community manager at Paris-based Hop-Cube, is one of them. His startup offers a new approach to sustainable development by providing ecological scoring on a wide range of consumer goods. The service is specifically designed for online marketplaces and will be displayed next to each product referenced in the product catalog.

„Hop-Cube gathers information that is already accessible to the public, analizes and ranks it with a specific score out of ten given by our HopScore indicator“ explains Romain. „All kinds of criteria like conception, transport, usage of the product and its recycling are applied. We also collaborate with eco-labels to bring their labels to the consumer.“ E-commerce companies pay based on a monthly subscription - around €5 per product for the scoring service, but Hop-Cube also makes different offers depending on the company size and the number of visitors on the website.

There are some eco-portals providing information on the web, but other than Hop-Cube’s service at one glance, these portals oblige the users to come to their portal and choose their products through it. Anyone interested in providing more support for Hob-Cube: They just started two months ago and still need consumers to help them continue as well as funding in order to grow further...

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Here is coverage of Lift France 09 from Tiburon.tv, a great series of interviews of participants and speakers captured in Marseille.

„The biggest hurdle we have is that we teach our entrepreneurs the MBA courses. With our core business and core competence thinking we have been generating an awful lot of waste, unwanted consequences and collateral damage“ finds Gunter Pauli - founder and director of the "Zero Emissions Research Initiative" of the United Nations University in Tokyo. „Natural systems are so efficient that there is no one unemployed and there is no waste - everyone is put to work with pleasure. Evolution is really all about doing much more with less, building up social capital and having everyone contributing to their capabilities. The entrepreneur can also see in the natural system ways that this reduction of material requirements comes even to the point where you can do something with nothing.“

„Nature is on a continuous path of improvement, that is also what entrepreneurship is all about. You can be competitive in the market with a new idea even if you have no experience because you can envision very clearly how you can achieve the same service or product with much less.“ Gunter hopes that future entrepreneurs raise hell for the existing economic profile and accelerate economic innovation. For him, the condition for innovation acceleration is that the players have no experience and that they accept the fact that they will make mistakes but will correct them on route.

According to the founder and former President of Worldwatch Europe and author of eight books, the experience on the ground is the key to success: „We have to bring us to such a high level of emotional intelligence, motivation and perseverence that we can start without seeing the big picture, because we’re creating it. Generate multiple cash-flows by responding to multiple needs with one system and get multiple results by resolving multiple issues. Keep on searching for connections that make sense and then create partnerships. Once you have made a connection the logic sticks with you forever.“

Sorry for the mistaken title in the middle of the video...

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...with the singing half robot half furby thingy in the back!

The Fing teams shot several interviews during Lift France, I paste a few below and you can find many more on Dailymotion.