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The LIFT Conference is a 3-day gathering in Swiss Geneva with a clear focus on the impact of technology on society (and vice versa), and much like last year, the 700-headed audience witnessed an impressive set of speakers on this third editon of LIFT, all with the ambition of leaving an inspired impression on everyone present.

Breaking through boundaries

Kevin Warwick opened the second day of the LIFT Conference with a spectacular keynote and video. Warwick is the British professor in Cybernetics who dared become the first ‘human cyborg‘ by implanting a computer chip directly into his nervous system. This procedure not only allowed him to link his brain directly to a computer, but he was also able to do certain activities over the internet or through other human beings. Warwick’s research, in time, is expected to lead to ground-breaking developments in the fields of robotics, medicine and biology.

Holm Friebe from the German Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur, together with a co-worker gave an expose on their visions of future work environments. The self-proclaimed ’socialist-capitalist’ agency introduced 7 rules who are supposed to make work not only more fun but also more productive, by discovering new ways of collaboration without the need for offices, fixed costs, hierarchic employer-employee relationships, delay in payments, etc.

Games

The session about video games was opened byElectronic Arts’ Robin Hunicke, academic and developer of a number of popular games for the Nintendo Wii. She talked about the increasing influence of social software on video games and vice versa, as well as upcoming trends in game design.

Guy Vardi from Oberon Media (also related to the legendary Israeli entrepreneur and investor Yossi Vardi) made quite an impression with his forecasts for the ‘casual gaming’ industry, which is much larger and growing more rapidly than the traditional console video gaming industry.

Paul Barnett, Creative Director at EA Mythics, spoke enthusiastically about the evolution of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games or shortly MMORPG’s (see video below), followed by Bruno Bonnell who ended the gaming session with a keynote about robotics in the gaming and leisure industry, in which he pioneered himself during the eighties.

Working the web

After the lunch it was time for some more internet entrepreneurs and their stories, opened by David Sadigh from IC Agency who delivered a keynote on retention in e-commerce applications, followed by David Marcus from Zong who talked about the possibilities of getting revenue out of mobile applications.

Kevin Marks gave a keynote on Google’s OpenSocial initiative and the SocialGraph API, followed by François Grey from CERN, the Swiss research center where the World Wide Web was invented. He talked about ‘volunteer computing‘, citing examples such as SETI@Home, Folding@Home, etc.

Looking forward

The final session of the LIFT Conference was a discussion on how companies can detect and adapt to upcoming trends and changes. The session was divided into 3 parts: futurists Scott Smith (Changeist), Bill Cockayne (Change Research, Inc.) and Francesco Cara (Design Strategist for Nokia) talked about past and future trends.

More videos of LIFT 08 can be found at Nouvo.ch.

Robin Wauters for mTrends.