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At the end of a decade during which the internet revolutionized our lives and organizations, the network is now moving beyond the browser, invading objects, cities, toys, cars or medical devices. Where will the next big changes happen? What are the world’s most innovative people working on right now?

LIFT Asia is a three-day event taking place in Korea on September 4, 5 and 6 to answer these questions with a global community of doers and thinkers, featuring an innovative format made of scheduled talks, open sessions, and artists creating a special atmosphere to facilitate inspiration and networking.

LIFT Asia will take place at the international Convention Center ICC on the beautiful Jeju Island in Korea (located in the center of Northeast Asia and lies equidistant between South Korea, China and Japan).

The event will feature:

• Talks covering topics like urban technologies, online worlds, virtual money, new lifestyles and robots, featuring speakers like Joonmo Kwon (CEO of Nexon, the world’s largest online games company), networked cities visionaries Jeffrey Huang (EPFL), Yang Soo Yin (The Living) and Adam Greenfield (Nokia design), I-mode inventor Takeshi Nastuno, Takeshi Natsuno who works on the robots of the future, Gadget loving and Emmy award winning American guru Dan Dubno, and legendary LIFT speakers like Bruce Sterling, Bruno Bonnell, Frédéric Kaplan or Jan Chipchase.

• Community speeches where participants can freely present their works and ideas inside one of the open rooms.

• Interactive art installations curated by the Nabi Art Center, creating a unique experience based on inspiring and engaging activities to explore the new reality of social interactions in the digital world.

The full program is available here:
http://www.liftconference.com/lift-asia-08/program

Kudos to the organizers for putting such a neat line-up and program together.

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.

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.

Internet & Society

The first day of the actual conference - after the Workshops and Venture Night the day before - was kicked off by Bruce Sterling, cyberpunk and science fiction author, who tried to convince everyone within 30 minutes that the most spectacular event of 2008 had already happened: the marriage of French President Nicolas Sarkozy with singer / model Carla Bruni.

Pierre Bellanger, founding CEO of the popular French social media platform Skyrock, shared his vision on trends in social networking, followed by academic Jonathan Cabiria, who explained how virtual worlds like Second Life can help marginalized people to regain self-esteem and hope.

Design & User Experience

Anthropologists Younghee Jung and Genevieve Bell, respectively from Nokia and Intel, explained how the internet can influence mocking up desin & user experience concepts for the future. Jung talked about Nokia Open Studio, a product launch event that incorporates stimulating people from developing countries to contribute their ideas and vision on the mobile phone for the next generation. Bell, from chip maker Intel, gave a compelling speech about secrets and lies on the internet. A must-see:

Entrepreneur stories

After lunch, the audience listened to some inspiring stories from the following entrepreneurs:

Rafi Haladjian - the French internet pioneer who wants to change the world with a connected rabbit, the Nabaztag, one of the creations from his last company Violet.

Eric Favre - the Swiss visionary who brought espresso to the masses as inventor of Nespresso and its patented coffee caps, gave a very inspirational talk about innovation and ‘intrapreneurship’.

Jasmina Tesanovic - the Serbian political activist, feminist, author, translator and film producer shared her visions on blogging in times of war.

The Far East

EPFL-researcher Marc Laperrouza guided us into Asia with an expose on the recent trends in the Asian telecommunication landscape, followed by academic Heewon Kim delivering more insight into every day life in the Far East thanks to her research on the use of social software in South-Korea.

Gen Kanai, top executive with Mozilla Japan, discussed open source in Asia, and why the general perception of Asians not contributing much to the open source community is false. Here’s the video of Kanai’s keynote:

Technology for the good and the bad of our climate

After the coffee break, there was one more special session about global warming and the innovative technologies countering the phenomenon. Tom Taylor from the British agency Headshift explained how social networks and ‘peer pressure’ can raise the general awareness about global warming as well as actual deeds for the benefit of our environment. One example he gave was DoTheGreenThing.com.

The online community focused on raising awareness on efficient usage of energy resources WattWatt was introduced by its makers, followed by Nobel prize winner Andy Reisinger, who gave a fascinating expose about the worldwide social challenges global warming entails.

Last but not least, watch this video from Guy Pignolet (Sunsat Energy Council), who invented in innovative way of amassing more solar energy from outer space and beam it back to earth for our benefit:

More videos are available at Nouvo.ch, pictures here.

Robin Wauters for mTrends.

Last week marked the third edition of the LIFT Conference in Geneva, a 3-day ‘festival of ideas’ attracting visitors from all around the world. A particularly diverse audience too with people from the internet, academic, fashion, artistics, media and design industry. mTrends was there and saw that it was good; Robin Wauters (from Plugg) wrote a wrap-up for you!

Day 1: Workshops + Venture Night

Workshops

The LIFT organization team made good use of the facilitites of Uni Mail, a complex of the University of Geneva, for a day filled with workshops about a variety of topics. We heard, for the first time, about the Fearless City project, an ambitious initiative from a couple of young Canadians who are trying to aid the marginalized downtown center of Vancouver by supplying its inhabitants with an arsenal of technological ‘weaponry’. Through a combination of (subsidized) wireless and mobile connection infrastructure with devices, open source applications, a social medai platform and the construction of a physical cultural center where all operations will be centralized, the filantrophic initiators want to better the future of Vancouver’s homeless, drug and alcohol addicated and poor. A sort of online/offline self-help group, who wants to leverage the upcoming attention around the 2010 Olympics to raise awareness for the project and set an example for other world cities.

The afternoon was reserved for an enjoyable session about today’s teenagers and how they fit the internet / mobile into their daily life, and how important (or not) it is for them. The interesting part about the session was having 4 actual teenagers, student from Geneva’s international school, join the discussion. This was a way for the attendees to get live feedback about the opinion and facts of the teenager’s internet usage, social network habits, online video, privacy, downloading music, etc.

Venture Night

In the evening, all attendees gathered for the Venture Night, and listened to 8 ‘elevator pitches’ from start-ups, who got live feedback from a series of professional judges.

This is what we thought were the most interesting:

The Italian iO Agency creates interactive objects for use in retail, hospitals, public facilities, events, etc. Quite impressive to see, but difficult to explain without actually seeing what it’s all about. Check their website SensitiveFloor.com for a showcase of one of their product lines, an interactive floor with motion sensors triggering spectacular special effects.

Viewdle is an American start-up who developed an innovative technology to make online videos searchable based on facial recognition. The service isn’t yet publicly available, but you can see how it works on Reuters Labs.

Mixin is sort of a microblogging application + social network + calendar with a clear focus on activities. It feels like Twitter but with the question ‘What are you doing tonight?’ instead of ‘What are you doing right now?’.

PixeLux Entertainment is a Swiss company specialized in digital effects for games, who has developed a technology to significantly decrease the production costs of video games. Thanks to DMM (Digital Molecular Matter), there’s now an automated process simulating hyper realistic effects when bending, breaking or fracturing digital objects.

The rest of the pitches came from coComment, Clipperz, Holistis and Wua.la.

For LIFT video material, check Nouvo.ch.

I wanted to thank my readers, collegues, online buddies and friends for sharing some great moments with me this year. Some of you I just met but already left an impression, and others I enjoyed working together on innovative projects and events, or just exchanged opinion on the mobile phone and its interaction between people and objects.

One of the main drivers in my work is to innovate through collaboration, meet wonderful and diverse people that keep things interesting, dashed with spirit and surprise and truly unique… it really enriches my life.

From the Peer Awards in Barcelona, ¡nnovate!Europe in Zaragoza, TechTalk in Menorca, the Global Summit in Helsinki & St. Petersburg, Mobile 2.0 in San Francisco, Under The Radar in Mountain View and LeWeb3 in Paris, there were man great moments and events, not to forget the many MobileMonday events we organised this year in Barcelona and launched in Madrid … I enjoyed every bit of 2007.

I’m already looking forward to some new projects starting in 2008 and events like DLD Munich, Lift 08 in Geneva and another Peer Awards in Barcelona, stay tuned on mTrends!

Special kudos to Kelly and Lisa at gotomedia, Russell and Carlo at MobHappy, Caroline, Carles, Francesco and Gabriel, Jari and all MobileMonday chapter organizers, Carlos and his team, Debbie and her team, Peter and his team, Markus, Barcelona Media, IE Business School, Gregory, Mike, Peter and Daniel from Mobile 2.0 Conference, Steve and his team at Taptu, Prash, Raimo and last but not least my collegue bloggers and anyone working on innovative mobile technology.

I wish you all a very happy new year and a prosperous and successful 2008.

Enjoy! Enjoy! Enjoy!