Thursday, February 10, 2011

2. Lift Conference

The blog headline: "Conférence LIFT : un grand moment de poésie geek" just about says it all.

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In general, Lift11 was my primary reason for heading to Geneva. A) I'm a Lift fan, and having been to the Lift Asia 08 in Korea, was keen to attend the Lift 11 in Geneva while living close (enough) by in Austria! B) Even more reason came about when my proposal was chosen to be a speaker on the open stage. Crikey.

I really enjoyed meeting awesome people in meatspace with whom I had only sometimes an online acquaintance. Sometimes the thing about these connections is that they can go on for years without ever being in the same physical room. My first night during the informal mixer at La Scandale in downtown Geneva, I mentioned online that it was nice to finally put some profile pics to bodies. :) Reminiscent of the good ol' modem meet days. But in Switzerland.

The next day we were down to the official conference, where we had luminaries such as Don Tapscott (author of Wikinomics) speaking on Macrowikinomics, Steve Portigal on how people innovate, Steffen Walz starting off the Games session with a song, Brian Solis' thought-provoking talk on social currencies, Hasan Elahi's compelling story of giving his privacy away, Kevin Slavin's insights on how algorithms govern our lives, Tara Shears on particle physics... and those are just the highlights. The jam-packed speaker list is here>>

In between these sessions, which were captured by video livestreaming (so if you didn't go, you can still access them here) there were also some workshops that took place for more specialized discussions. During one on serious games, I learned "how to kill a game."
Additionally, there are "visual notes" (mind maps) of talks that were drawn real-time during each presentation. Now on flickr. Super cool.

There were lots of startup/entrepreneurs present, people who believe in what they do, and those grappling with the challenges of monetizing what they're passionate about! To this end, a key presence was Robert Scoble, who gave an overview of the moment's best ideas and startups from the Silicon Valley during the Alp ICT Venture Night.

A special shoutout goes to the Mobino crew, who I got to know especially tearing around Geneva during some of the down time. FIVE's company.

Get well soon, Elton (he was supposed to play Geneva one of the nights but he has rescheduled to *5*.26th. :)

Sir Elton John

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