After attending several technology, business and innovation related conferences in recent years I have had a fair share of good and bad experiences.

While the speakers are definitely important at a conference, in times of live-blogging, live-video streams and online video one might think that it becomes less and less important to actually attend a conference. Just look at the archives of TED, POP!TECH and even LIFT and you will find hundreds of ideas.

With this ubiquity of conference speeches the only reason to still attend a conference is to meet people, to have a chance to talk with them in a relaxed environment where people are willing to get into a conversation and are not just looking for the next opportunity to pitch their startup or spread their own opinion.

Maybe it is the reason that the conference is in Geneva (the French speaking part of Switzerland, where people are said to be more relaxed), the lounge area with the artistic shows or the traditional cheese fondue in the evening – last years lift conference has been one of my best conference experiences so far.

I attended the conference the first time last year after somebody told me that I definitely have to go there because “the atmosphere is amazing, it is like meeting your friends”. Skeptical about this statement I have to admit that my conference experience was fabulous. Smart conversations with people who are interested in more than exchanging business cards, openness of participants to even start conversations and the possibility to connect with people through the “conference platform and social network”.

The conversations I had at the conference convinced me that it is worth to continue working on this website (if you check the archive you can see that there was a significant increase in posts after lift08) and I contribute a lot of insights, inspiration and motivation to the people I met there last year.

No money for a conference in a recession?

Of course budgets are tight in a recession and businesses have to cut their budgets for attending conferences. At the first glance this might be bad for a conference like lift – less people could mean a less interesting conference. Nevertheless, it is not about quantity, it’s about quality -  the number of new contacts you can make in a conference day is limited. Additionally you can be sure that participants attending a conference this year are influential enough since they still have a budget to go to a conference.

From my perspective this is good selection which increases the share of people who are indeed interested in the topics of the conference instead of just attending it to be there. So even if you budget is tight, you will probably get more out of a conference in tough times than in  hype times.

Despite the currently economic environment it looks like lift09 is going to be a great event again (548 registered participants, 3 weeks before the conference starts) and I wish the organizers and the participants that this year will not just be another quantitative conference highlight but also a qualitative highlight like the years before.

Going to lift 09?

So if you are going to attend lift09 which takes place in Geneva from Febraury 25th – 27th,  send me an eMail – I would like to meet up.

If you are not yet registered you can register for lift 09 or find more information at the conference homepage.

See you at lift09.

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I have an account on Facebook for quite a while now but I actually don’t use it a lot. The main reason for this was that I didn’t get it – I just didn’t understand why I should poke or superpoke someone.

On the other hand I could see the benefit of a huge number of friends (like Robert Scoble, who frequently complained about the limit of 5000 friends) because by “friending” you, they give permission to receive updates from you which can be used as a new communication channels. Nevertheless this reasoning didn’t explain why millions users spend time on Facebook when you are not trying to sell something or spread ideas.

And then I heard the speech from Robin Hunicke at lift08, a researcher at Electronic Arts and suddenly it made sense. When you play computer games like World of Warcraft your fantasy is to be a “warrior who wants to fight in a land of war”. Facebook also helps its users realize a fantasy – the fantasy is “I am a person living a fun life……and I am loved”. And just like in other computer games where you can collect points and stars for for certain activities, in Facebook your score is determined by the number of friends, graffiti, gifts, hugs, laughter, wins and photographs on your Facebook profile. The most important aspect is that everyone of your friends can see whether you are “living a fun life and are being loved”.

How many other applications do you know that make you feel loved?

Watch the speech online:

 

 

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Nokia OpenStudio is a project by Nokia Design which is based on the concept of exploratory design research. The Nokia Open Studio took place in three communities in India, Africa and South America where Nokia together with local teams staged an event to gather design ideas for mobile phones that match the lifestyle of people in their environment.

Nokia designed entry forms and provided writing equipment so that local people are able to write down their ideas and participate in the contest. Additionally the teams performed interviews how the design of their mobile phones actually relates to the people’s life.

At the end an award ceremony was organized and the winners were awarded. The most promising  ideas were an intuitive and instant weather forecast, a solution for creating awareness of the environmental problems as well as a four Simcard holder.

This is a good example of how to identify latent user requirements especially when you are dealing with customers that have a totally different cultural and environmental context.

 

Here is the speech from Younghee Jung

 

For more scientific information about this you can read more about sticky information in a paper written by Eric von Hippel titled "Sticky Information" and the Locus of Problem Solving: Implications for Innovation.

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Another highlight at lift08 was the talk from Pierre Bellanger, founder and CEO of Skyrock.fm. Skyrock.fm is the leading social network in France with approximately 20 million users. From his perspective the biggest opportunity for growth is by bringing social networking and instant messaging to the mobile phone. Simply transferring concepts from the desktop to the mobile phone won’t do the job – the context when using your computer as well as technology and interface are completely different from mobile phones. You can see his speech here:

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