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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.

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.