happy new year 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdpvDX9Dams

Lift happens thanks to partnerships with local and international organizations who support the conference. We will introduce 5 of them every week. Check the full partners list, and contact us if you want to partner with the conference in Europe or Asia.

Media Partners

ICT JOURNAL

ICT Journal is a new platform for business news in the IT world. The monthly magazine and website informs Swiss readers about the current events in information technology, communication, the internet, and business.

CHARGED MAGAZINE

The human creative spirit is limitless. Charged is a celebration of that creativity in the mobile age. It’s about the people, companies and ideas behind the profound social changes of the mobile revolution. Charged is not about the technology, the devices, the networks, or the carriers. It’s about the way we live. We live mobile lives — always-on, and on the go.

Juliana Rotich is a blogger (Afromusing, Afrigadget), digital activist, citizen journalist and environment editor of Global Voices Online. With Global Voices, she helps to aggregate, curate and amplify online conversations, with particular focus on technology, the environment, renewable energy, and digital expression in Africa and the developing world.

Juliana is also the Program Director of Ushahidi.com, an innovative non-profit web startup that is creating a tool for mapping crises by gathering reports via mobile, e-mail and web. She is focused on using new media tools to create a network of environmental bloggers from around the world, elevating and encouraging more conversations and engagement on environmental matters.

Holding a BSc Degree in IT from the University of Missouri Kansas City she also has several years of experience in database administration, application development and project management. We are very much looking forward to hearing her speak on the solidarity theme on February 26th which she will bring alive together with Ramesh Srinivasan. Learn more about Juliana on her LIFT page.

Lift happens thanks to partnerships with local and international organizations who support the conference. We will introduce 5 of them every week. Check the full partners list, and contact us if you want to partner with the conference in Europe or Asia.

Main Partners

ALPIC T

The cantons of Western Switzerland announce the setting-up in 2008 of a cluster for the promotion of Information and Communication Technologies. This platform, called “AlpicT”, will be led by the canton of Geneva. AlpicT is entirely part of the economic development policy of Western Switzerland that aims at enhancing the economic, technological and industrial potential on a national and international level.

BREAD & BUTTER

At Bread and Butter we build the best branding solutions for your projects. No matter if your project is a start-up, a brilliant idea or a new department in a large-scale organization. You want to transform your vision into a strong, future oriented and efficient identity. And you want the buzz too.

Anjalika is an experience, graphic and furniture designer, ethnographer, artist and photographer. A participant in LIFT07, she will be back for LIFT09.

She is currently working as a designer at Philips Design (Healthcare), in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. During her studies she wrote papers on a variety of topics: using experience protoyping to gather feedback on interaction design, the history and trends of flexibility in in habitats and new approaches in learning environments for kids.

Anjalika graduated in 2007 from the Master programme in Interaction Design at the Umeå Institute of Design Umeå, Sweden. She also has a Bachelor’s degree in Interior Architecture from the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology, India.

To find out more about Anjalika feel free to visit her LIFT profile.

We are glad to have David Rose on board as one of the speakers for the second part of the change theme on Thursday morning. David is a product designer, technology visionary, and social entrepreneur.

Currently he is Chief Executive at Vitality, a company that is reinventing medication packaging with wireless technology.

Before that David founded and lead a variety of organisations reaching from Ambient Devices, a company that embeds digital information into everyday objects, Viant's Innovation Center, Opholio, an online photo-sharing site and Interactive Factory, a company that is best known for developing the LEGO Mindstorms Robotic Invention System.

Rose taught Interaction Design at Yale, and Information Visualization at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He received his BA in Physics from St. Olaf College, studied Interactive Cinema at the MIT Media Lab, and earned a Masters Degree from Harvard University.

To learn more about him please visit his LIFT profile page.

The Lift team is helping other conferences with their program, advising on speakers and format. Daniel Kaplan (CEO of the FING, who brilliantly wrapped up Lift07), David Orban (of the Open Spime project) and Jean-Louis Fréchin (ENSCI and No Design) will be speaking at the Transformeurs 2009 event in Sierre on January 30 on the topic "Internet of things, internet of the future?"

The event will also feature workshops and start ups presentations in Pecha Kucha style! Check the event's homepage, and register to join us afterward for a ski week-end in Valais!

Would you like to be part of our passionate team in making Lift09 a unique experience? We are looking for outgoing, friendly, 100% reliable, hard working, English-speaking people supporting us as volunteers.
Read more about the volunteer positions available and how to apply here . We are looking forward to hear from you :)

About
Mitch Free is a serial entrepreneur, founder and CEO of MFG.com, an online marketplace which helps in sourcing manufactured parts by matching the requirements and specifications of the buyer with the skills and savoir-faire of a supplier. Prior to that, Mitch founded 3DATUM, a provider of technology solutions for the manufacturing and engineering communities. He began his career as a machinist on the shop floor, got his hands dirty and literally learned the manufacturing industry inside and out.

He's been widely recognized as an inspiring and ground-breaking entrepreneur who follows his instincts. He also is an avid speaker at technology conferences and at universities including the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University, Harvard and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. At LIFT09 Mitch will be a participant. We're looking forward to seeing him there.

With an interdisciplinary background as engineer, designer, social scientist, and ethnographer, Ramesh researched topics as diverse as the relation between indigenous and local knowledge systems and new media or the use of design and social-science perspectives to analyze the impacts of information technology on global education, health, economics, politics, governance, and social movements, and infrastructure.

Ramesh earned a doctorate in design from Harvard University, a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT Media Laboratory and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University. He currently is Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies and Design|Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles. Amongst others he has given talks at the World Bank, UNESCO, Government of India and Microsoft Research. Please find more info on his LIFT profile.

Why LIFT
Ramesh is interested in the divergent notions of futurism and utopia with respect to every layer of media and technology. His thoughts on diverse cultural domains around media and technology presents some very different notions of pastness, and future aspirations, ones that are very much locally grounded in environment, family, cosmology, and landscape.

What Ramesh expects
The 2009 edition will be Ramesh's first LIFT conference and he'll be curiously heading to Geneva in February for an animated exchange on where the future went.