One of the great pleasures (and reasons) of organizing Lift is that we get to spend some time with some people we look up to as role models, great innovators and thinkers like Bruno Bonnell (that I used to watch on TV back in France when I was a teenager), Bruce Sterling, or Pierre Bellanger. It is an immense pleasure to announce we will have the privilege of welcoming Vint Cerf at Lift09. He is often referred as the “father of the internet” and talks about the future of the network like no other. He joins a program themed around a simple question: where did the future go?

Tickets are selling at the super early bird price of 650CHF right now. Save your seat on liftconference.com.

Poken is probably the most exciting Swiss project I have seen since I started Lift three years ago. It is a cool little device with one goal: connect people. Just Poken your friends and you’re connected to them on any social network both of you are using.

This would be really cool at Lift. Let’s see what I can do…

I am off to London to attend SeedCamp where I am a “mentor” for the entrepreneurs. Seems I got marked as working for Google by mistake, it should be a lot of fun to see how many guys have “sell to GOOG” as their exit strategy ;)

I changed my phone number. Please use +41786966480 to reach me when I’m in Switzerland, and +821035949525 is my Korean number.

It’s extremely weird to be in the news in a language you don’t understand. If these articles say “Swiss-French loser comes to Korea to organize his crappy conference” I don’t even know it ;)

Thanks Channy for the press clippings, we found around 50 articles in blogs and media (there is no longer a difference in Korea) and are adding them progressively to the Lift press archive.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is in the news these days as the CERN just turned it on. We discussed this ambitious experiment at Lift07 with Brian Cox at Lift07, a member of the LHC team, and nuclear science’s sexiest doctor if you listen to the women who met him.

Check his speech where he explains what the LHC is all about, what it might prove, and why if there is a black hole we won’t have time to feel earth disintegrate anyway ;)

I visited Ewha university and they have some “U-Classrooms”, with “U” standing for Ubiquitous. Seems “U” is the new “i” (iPhone, iGoogle), which in its time was the new “e” (eBusiness, eLearning).

My friend Marc Laperouza, one of the world’s most interesting experts on Asia ICTs (blog, Lift08 talk), digged some interesting stats about the number of patents per country.

 

Link

The total number of Asian patents is stable (44.1% in 2000, 46.2 in 2006) but Korea and China are rising to compensate Japan’s slowing innovation. Europe is kind of worrisome, while the Swiss are keeping up with the big guys and living up to their reputation of one of the most innovative crowd there is on this planet. Africa is nowhere to be seen, maybe hiding in the “Others” category somewhere?

Of course these figures do not represent reality - many innovations never get patented - but they are an interesting indicator of the economical forces fighting for consumers money on the planet, and of where you should be looking at to find the next big social changes.

A lot of tools, a lot of noise, a lot of brain time. This visualization is uselessly beautiful.

Found on Brian Solis’ blog (I can’t write PR 2.0 without a sarcastic grin sorry)

Wow. The odds were against us. Most people thoughts I was really crazy when I took the decision to do a Lift in Asia. It has certainly been the most challenging and dangerous project I have ever done, and three days before the event I was still having nightmares of being alone in the room with the speakers. But Asia is like that. It is a place where things work out differently, where you get 200 registrants in two days. And all the hard work and sleepless nights are nothing compared to the satisfaction and pride of having done what was probably our best ever conference here under the sun of Jeju Island.

We had 400 participants, some of the best social events we have ever hosted, at least 10 speeches that will certainly get thousands of views once they will be online (in 7-10 days I hope), and some completely magical moments like lifters playing the games of Jury Han with their phones during a session, Bruno Bonnel singing german songs on stage to prove the french had invented Karaoke (sorry Bruno, my fault ;), Tomoaki Masuga’s robot enteraining the crowd with its amazing acting, Sarah Marquis telling us the story of her walks, etc, etc, etc. I have so many memories that I will need a bit of time to digest all this. I will take a few days off, fly back to Europe, and start working on Lift09 as soon as my body is done recovering from this adventure.