In partnership with our friends of Nouvo, we organize debates about the evolution of society and technologies. Events are free, in French, and followed by informal drinks. We simply ask you to register by emailing julie.bauer@tsr.ch.

De la carte cumulus à Facebook: la fin de la vie privée?

De nos achats quotidiens à notre comportement sur le Web, les traces que nous laissons sont de plus en plus nombreuses. Et les caméras qui nous observent sont presque omniprésentes, qu’il s’agisse de vidéosurveillance ou de particuliers équipés de téléphones portables.
Ces informations sont exploitées par d’autres: employeurs potentiels, équipes marketing ou même forces de police. Sommes-nous en train d’aller vers une société totalement transparente? La vie privée va-t-elle disparaître? Comment gérer cette situation nouvelle où nos moindres mouvements sont surveillés?

Le débat est animé par Bernard Rappaz, rédacteur en chef de TSR Multimédia.

Intervenants:

Sami Coll (Département de sociologie de l’Université de Genève). Il aborde dans son étude les risques de surveillance induits par les cartes de fidélité de type Cumulus. Le chercheur s’intéresse à de thématiques telles que la protection de la sphère privée et la protection des données.

Stéphane Koch (intelligentzia.net). Consultant dans le domaines de l’intelligence économique, la veille stratégique et la confidentialité de l’information. Il intervient dans des cas liés à la gestion de la réputation, la protection du “patrimoine informationnel” de l’entreprise et de sa marque sur Internet, ainsi que sur d’autres problématiques liées à la cybercriminalité.

Infos pratiques:

L’événement se déroulera le 19 Mai de 18 à 20h à la Télévision Suisse Romande, 20, quai Ernest-Ansermet, Genève.
Entrée libre mais inscription obligatoire par e-mail à julie.bauer@tsr.ch

Beyond the Web we know, online for a better society, towards a Networked City, from robots to networked objects, the near future of social worlds, ubiquitous Computing Progress, techno-nomadic life, virtual money and sustainable development/green technologies, all these big questions will form the program of LIFT Asia where we will be exploring the potential big changes ahead.

What will replace the world wide web as society’s biggest driver of change? Come and find for yourself, registrations are opening soon (delays are due to the fact we need to accommodate Koreans who use different payment system) and will happen as usual on the LIFT site. And if you have some names to suggest as speakers now is the time!

After four trips to the land of the morning calm, I finally started to get a feeling for how we should adapt the LIFT concept to this continent. I must admit I was getting a bit nervous and felt like the LIFT Asia project was not moving much. The main reason is that it is extremely hard to get feedback from the locals on the different questions I had. Can we do a three days conference here? Can people convince their boss to pay for the ticket? Can we hold open sessions managed by the communities? Will Asians travel to attend a conference?

^{My pictures of Seoul and Korea are on Flickr.}

I had - and still have - tons of questions I needed to find out about, but the local culture - which basically consists in never contradicting anyone - did not make my life easy and forced me to reformulate every question. The only way to get a true answer is to allow from the start the possibility of a diplomatic no.

For example, three days ago I visited the Raemian gallery to see a housing of the future exhibition created by Samsung and Microsoft. My friend Jean Morin was driving, and when we approached the gallery we quickly called our host to inquire about parking possibilities. We asked if we could leave the car in front of the building (because both of us are lazy and French). The answer was “yes of course no problem, but maybe the Police will take the car. The other solution is to use the parking lot further down the road”. Very elegant way of avoiding a negative answer.

So it takes time to get a strong intuition about anything in this country because relations are very subtle and different from the loud and clear feedback we get in Europe. Four 20′000km trips later, I finally have a strong feeling for what LIFT should be here. We will not replicate the Swiss event, but use the lessons learned over the past three editions to grow the Asian project.

We will start slow, with a two days conference featuring simple social events (i.e. fondue might be for next year), reduced community activities (I am thinking about keeping only open stage and discussions) and boasting a clear, interesting and easy-to-sell-to-your-boss theme. We will rely on strong local partners for all logistical, editorial and financial aspects. This should allow us to work around the various constraints we have (LIFT brand not yet known, lower salaries, less participatory culture, etc) and achieve our main goal: give lifters access to all the innovation and trends that are flourishing all around Asia. I got a demo of Naver (Korea’s leading portal) a few days ago, and it looked like Yahoo in 5 years, both from a service design and business model perspective. There are tons of ideas to be exchanged between Asia and the rest of the world, and this is what we’ll do.

I am heading to Seoul and Jeju Island for ten day to work on LIFT Asia. The BBC reports a tensed political situation but I hope it will be business as usual out there. This trip should be an occasion to try to pass level three in local food tasting. After octopus sashimi and rotten fish I was promised there was something even more… original waiting me for. Keep an eye on my YouTube account ;)

^{Taking off from Seoul Incheon airport}

If you are around Seoul send me an email! My phone works when I am at my hotel so sms if also fine.

The next LIFT events’ dates are announced:

LIFT Asia
3-4-5 Sept 2008, South Korea.

This event will create a bridge between the continents, introducing the best of South Korea and
Asia to the rest of the world and reciprocally. We will talk about the latest social developments (like the Internet real-name system), mobile technologies, gaming, collaboration, teenagers, and much more.

LIFT09
25-26-27 Feb 2009, Geneva, Switzerland.

For once we have the dates of LIFT09 one year in advance, and as you can see the event is moving back in the month to create a bit more time between DLD, Davos and LIFT. Save the date, and prepare for a few early announcements as we already confirmed a few speakers who couldn’t make it to 2008 but promised to be with us in 2009.

You could not make it to Geneva last week? Stayed in bed with a bad flu? Get the vaccine next year, and check the following resources to experience LIFT from your sofa.

Blog /press coverage

Some bloggers did an amazing job and it is hard to link to all of them. Head to LunchOverIP, liip, the LIFT community blog (where we had 20 students covering the talks) or Aral Balkan, then there is always Technorati or Wikio for more. And the LIFT press center has links to most articles from the printed press.

Videos

Check liftconference.com (downloadable, embeddable, mp3 and mobile versions) or nouvo.ch (embeddable, with great interviews of participants), subscription available via RSS and iTunes. The talks are getting thousands of hits a day (Paul Barnett’s video got 13′000 views in 24 hours…), check them out and pass the word! And there were so many podcasters out there (even Mobuzz TV) I can not link to all of them, use the comments to point us to your videos folks.

This year we got the question again: “why are you guys putting all the talks online, you are killing the need to attend!”. Answer is simple: our goal is to spread good ideas as far as we can, and the videos play a big role in that. And let’s get real: the value you get from a conference is usually 20% from the stage (even more when like at LIFT the talks cover a large variety of topics), 80% from the social events/networking/experience. No video will ever replace the LIFT fondue! They simply allow those who can’t come or pay the ticket to access an important part of the conference. Win win.

Interesting discussion during Dave Brown’s Generation Y workshop at LIFT08. It seems asking a few teenagers how they use the Internet is always going to produce a few findings like these:

• Wikipedia is not seen as a very good/valuable source in school when it comes to usage in school work.
• They don’t like to buy online much and as a result don’t do it very often, whereas especially for these kids finance is not really a problem. It’s a trust issue.
• Although they consider their online friends and real friends to be the same (even if that’s talking about 300 people), the ‘real world’ is very important for them and don’t want to spend too much time online.
• Facebook is definitely still very hot! It’s used for planning of the immediate future and also for homework. Email within Facebook is used, but for totally different reasons as regular webmail such as Windows Live Hotmail.
• Last stunning fact: The images you find within the results of an image search are free to use for whatever reason, why else are they there? That’s the reaction when someone talked about Creative Commons. So we told them these images still are owned by someone and have some kind of copyright applied to it.

Link

We need such a panel on stage one of these days.

LIFT is over. Seven hundred attendees. Three days. Sixty presentations. I am now dealing with the ensuing emptiness, and started digesting some of the most intense days I have ever gone through. I met hundreds of people, entered countless conversations, was stressed, interviewed, photographed, applauded, sick, thanked, pressured, hugged, and even threatened by a guy who had more than abused my kindness at the entrance. LIFT is a roller coaster, where the highs and low come in rapid succession, and when the train stops you suddenly feel empty and bored. I know the team feels the same, and I will quickly schedule a diner to allow us to exchange and sort all of our emotions.

A few days after LIFT, I like to think the event was a success. I say it carefully because I am the least objective person to judge that. Two main reasons: 1) everybody comes to me with praises and thank you, afraid of me breaking their arm if they don’t say something positive ;) 2) as the master of ceremony I am over-exposed to problems and have to deal with hundreds of them that, most of the time, don’t make it to the community, or only to one or two persons. So my perception is somehow very distorted until I get the post-conference survey.

Anyway, I am happy to see that some of the bets we made worked, like the 600 persons fondue or the venture night. Overall I think we managed to keep the spirit of LIFT alive through an impressive growth and a lot of conflicting interests. I see room for improvement in almost every part of the event, but let’s let the dust settle a bit before talking about that.

Thanks to all who made LIFT08 possible! I am working on uploading the videos than will head for a few days of rest.

The TSR is uploading the LIFT08 speeches in almost realtime on nouvo.ch/liftvideo

Enjoy and pass the word :)

Here is the day I just had:

• 8h: Meeting at Hotel Intercontinental to hammer out last minute details with a LIFT partner
• 9h: Meeting to prepare press conference
• 9h45: LIFT08 press conference starts, we welcome around 15 journalists, more than twice the number of people who showed up for LIFT06.
• 11h30: Press conference ends, I open my gmail to find 55 messages
• 12:30: lunch
• 14: Final meeting at the CICG to check everything is fine.
• 15h30: Interview on World Radio Switzerland, followed by a meeting to review potential stories in the program.
• 17h: Email and accreditation of journalists.
• 18h: LIFT Nouvo debate starts, third time I talk about LIFT in public, I try to avoid repeating the same stuff all over again.
• 20h30: I listen to my voice mail to find the RSR calling for an interview. I call back and it’s (fortunately) too late.
• 20h45: Cool, we have 499 participants! I update the website with the latest info (workshops, venture night, etc…)
• 22h: Review of the program before it goes to print.
• 0h43: Still reviewing, train tomorrow at 8, and I just thought I would blog this just to show what kind of work it takes to put together LIFT. And I am only one member of a team of 25 people.

Have a good night :)