I came across this very nice and colorful cheatsheet that summarizes pretty much all functions and methods of jQuery 1.2 on one page.

Big thanks to Rick from Colorcharge for this :)

Yesterday's morning talks were dominated by various topics on gaming and robotics. The first talk was held by the famous British "cyborg" researcher Kevin Warwick who implanted himself a neuro-surgical microchip into his left arm in order to link his nervous system to an outside computer from which he could then send and receive orders to and from his brain. He even went to New-York and managed to remotely manipulate objects through the network. His wife took part in the experiment and implanted herself the same kind of device. Through those implants, they managed to connect both of their nervous systems, so that one could actually feel what the other was sensing. In some sense, both brains were connected through a network. Whether this is ethical or not is anyone's guess.

Behind the scary deviations this kind of experiment could lead to, Kevin said that there were lots of potential applications for this technology. For instance, we could give humans new senses besides the five they already have, like for instance ultrasound capability for sensing distances or infrared capability either for detecting heat (clearly a military application) or for remotely controlling a TV set ("why can my dumb TV set do it and not me", he said). There is also ongoing promising research in the medical field for detecting symptoms of the Parkinson disease. A recent documentary was broadcasted on Swiss TV.

Next was Holm Friebe, from what he calls the socialistic-capitalist joint-venture Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur (The Hedonistic Company) in Berlin, whose goal is to establish new forms of collaboration (video). ZIA is a unique and very original company in the way it works as best described by their rule number 1 "The 7 NOs": no office, no employees, no fixed costs (only 15 Euro/month for Internet hosting), no pitches, no exclusivity, no working hours, no bullshit. They have very original products like the Powerpoint Karaoke.

Then followed another talk by Mieke Gerritzen who provided different views on visual and natural culture that new networks brought to us (video).

The next two open stage sessions were led by Henriette Weber Andersen on enjoying the chaos and Kushtrim Xhakli on how innovative projects can transform education.

After the break, I had the chance to attend a talk by Robin Hunicke, an academic and practitioner working for Electronic Arts and someone who's very passionate about what she's doing. Everyone could actually feel it and her passion transpired through her presentation. No more words, just watch the video.

Next Guy Vardi, from Oberon Media, gave us insights about casual gaming and the evolutions in that field (video). He explained the difference between casual gaming and hardcore gaming by making parallels to food. Basically, if hardcore gaming is a lunch, casual gaming is a snack. And her mother once said that "a snack is not a lunch". From this, you can deduce that casual gaming should not be enough for the majority of people. The conclusion is easy, but well... this was an entertaining talk nonetheless.

Another passionate guy was next: Paul Barnett, the creative director for Electronic Arts Mythic and the guy who oversees the design of the upcoming MMORPG Warhammer Online, described the evolution of massive multiplayer environments. He made a comparison with the movie industry where they saw 5 changes (sound, color, etc) over the last 50 years while the gaming industry would undergo 50 changes every 5 years. That talk is an absolute must-see, check out the video.

The next talk by Bruno Bonnell, founder and former CEO of Infogrames and Atari, was about the implications and opportunities of robotics in the leisure industry (video). Bruno firmly believes that in the not-so-distant future we will see a growing popularity and demand for interactive objects in the leisure world. He also foresees a future for "robots", not necessarly Terminator-like robots, but robots that will simply get to interact with humans in their everyday tasks, what he calls the "robolution". In our anthropomorphic world, we've always tried to give robots a human appearance and behavior. According to Bruno, it might neither be necessary nor desirable to reproduce human behavior with robots. Maybe other ways of interacting would be enough and less complex for developers to create and users to learn. He also doesn't think that any of the current toy companies or consumer electronic companies or gaming companies will succeed in the robotics industry (3-digits growth in the 10-15 years to come according to him) because the robotics industry is a new industry that will need new actors playing on the cutting edge with a different mindset.

After the lunch break, the afternoon sessions were clearly web-oriented. First on stage was David Sadigh, managing partner of IC Agency, who showed us how organizations should better focus on user retention rather than acquisition to boost their trafic (video). According to David, the Internet is young (much like a 2-3 months foetus) and many innovations (personalization software, etc) will need to take place in order to increase the 2% conversion rate that most online e-commerce websites are experiencing nowadays.

David Markus, from Echovox/echo6/Zong, talked about the new business models opened by mobile channels (video). Comparing the current Internet market (1.3 billion users) with the mobile market (3.2 billion subscribers) reveals that the mobile market is much more evolved than the Internet one. He mentioned that in China there were four new babies born every second but 25 new mobile subscribers during the same time interval. He futher went on explaining that the mobile market was much more profitable than the web market because all the content had to be paid for in contrary to the web were the content is mostly free. For the last seven years, he has been trying to make the best out of the mobile market and the result is Zong's Open Mobile Platform (nothing to do with Google Android's Open Mobile Platform).

Kevin Marks, from Google, gave us nice insights into how the Open Social initiative came to life (video).

The last presentation titled "from volunteer computing to volunteer thinking" was held by François Grey, Head of IT Communications at CERN Geneva. François talked about volunteer computing and what this technology means more widely for society: for the Web, for science, and leisure. Scientific and research experiments usually produce enormous amounts of data that are most of the time impossible to digest with a couple servers only. For instance, he cited the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project whose main goal (among many others) is to reproduce the universe as it was only a couple nanoseconds after the big bang and to hopefully discover the Higgs Boson. The LHC will soon come to life (May 2008) and when it does it will be the largest data producer on earth. To give an idea, the LHC will produce 15'000'000 GB of data a year (~40M images or 1% of all digital and analog data all humans and machines will produce during the whole year). For this reason, scientifics often need to resort to grid computing in order to let everyone extend the computing power of their servers. The data produced by the LHC will be crunched by a global grid of 100'000 CPUs.

François then cited a couple existing volunteer computing initiatives that he calls the poor man's grid. The SETI@home project of course with more than 500'000 CPUs. Stanford's Folding@home project with more than one petaflop of computing power for folding protein molecules. The LHC@home project which will provide more than 3'000 CPUs years and which is set up using the BOINC framework. The GalaxyZoo project whose main goal is to let volunteers classify galaxies through a web-based interface. The Herberia@home project where people catalogue digitized plant archives from the 19th century.

He finished his talk telling the audience that he was going on sabbatical in Asia for one year to launch the Asia@home project and at the same time create the Citizen Cyberscience center, whose goal is to get people to be interested and passionated in science and to actively contribute to scientific projects.

The last open stage talk for the 08 edition was held by Matt Colebourne, CEO of coComment, on the importance of social networking and "conversations" are having for companies and bloggers.

It was the first LIFT edition I attended, but I already feel I missed the first two. LIFT is actually the only conference where topics are dissected by so many different people coming from that many different backgrounds. It's very rare to see a topic being presented through many different perspectives. It's really fun, entertaining and enriching to hear about gaming from a designer's perspective or an anthropologist's perspective or a software developer's perspective. And this is why LIFT is great and a genuine breakthrough in the way conferences are composed and created.

Big thanks, thumbs up and kudos to the LIFT team. You've set the level very high, I wonder how you're gonna impress participants next year, but I have no doubt you'll succeed!!!!

Related posts:
LIFT 08 - Day 1
LIFT 08 - Day 2

Yesterday's sessions shined by their diversity. We got the chance to listen to people coming from various backgrounds, such as designers, ethnographers, anthropologists, full-time bloggers, science-fiction writers, inventors, entrepreneurs, etc, all in the same room talking in turn to a very heterogeneous audience.

The first keynote was held by science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling (video), who narrated what he envisions as one possible scenario for the year to come. He made up a nice science-fiction piece featuring the newlywed French president Sarkozy and his ex-top-model, singer wife Carla.

Then, Skyrock's founder and director Pierre Belanger hopped on stage to talk about social networks as being the future of telecommunications (video). He explained how he thinks mobile devices will merge into what he calls a common social operating system and how Skyrock is not only going to play a role in that but also foster innovation towards that goal.

Psychologist Jonathan Cabiria then took the mic and explained his concept of permeability or how real life and virtual life were going to naturally merge into one single life (video). Through his psychological lenses, he also touched upon how identity in *that* life was going to evolve.

Then, two on-stage short talks (i.e. talks chosen by the community) took place. First on was the famous blogger Stephanie Booth, who briefly talked about her new venture called going solo. Then came Ewan McIntosh talking about how they managed to create an open education community and bring schools and teacher online using social media.

After a short break filled with lots of coffee and discussions, the show went on with Younghee Jung from Nokia Tokyo (video). She talked about Nokia Open Studio, a Nokia design competition initiative that took place simultaneously in India, Brazil and Ghana and whose goal was to let local people create new mobile phone designs according to their needs. They got plenty of design proposals, some of which were realistic and some, well to be honest, not really :) The bottom line for Nokia was to let end-users speak and express their needs.

Then came the part where I got quite lost. Genevieve Bell, a famous anthropologist from Intel Seattle, shared her thoughts about what she calls "Secrets, Lies and Digital Deceptions" (video and some notes by Thomas Purves) and Paul Dourish provided his thoughts on ethnography & design (video). Even though the speakers were brilliant, I must admit that the anthropological lenses through which the topics were presented were looking quite opaque to me, but I'm sure lots of other people enjoyed those talks.

The first afternoon sessions were dedicated to real stories from the trenches. The first talk was held by Rafi Haladjian, THE Minitel guy back in the early 90's, and now co-founder and director of a French company called Violet. He explained how they got to create a Wifi/RFID/Internet/NameYourTech-enabled rabbit and why they think it's a great achievement (video). According to their tagline, "Let all things be connected" (somehow closely related to the first workshop I attended yesterday), their dream would be to diminish the gap between the virtual and the real worlds by empowering every singular object with ubiquitous connectivity and allow them to interact. According to him, most of the "smart-home-of-the-future" endeavours that have been undertaken to date by major vendors have been remarkable failures, because of several reasons, such as, the proposed solutions were not appealing, there were no killer apps, realizing them would cost too much, or things were too complex to use. What Rafi proposes is to create affordable, useful and well-designed widgets based on open-standards, let the users be in control of their widgets and create a community that can build new killer apps on top of the widgets (re: using open-standards). That's how they came to create their first product, called DAL lamp, that was indicating the amount of traffic on Paris' peripheral highway using different light colors. The lamp would even turn red upon receiving an SMS saying "I love you". Their second product, called Nabaztag, is a smart cyborg rabbit who can do pretty much anything. This year, Violet made a joint venture with Gallimard Jeunesse (in French) and will launch new product lines using ZStamp technology (in French), which they claim is the first widespread use of RFID technology that can be used by 6 years-old. Basically, the nabaztag rabbit will be able to interact with any Zstamped object that gets near it, like for instance read a book.

Next, we had the chance to listen to Eric Favre on how Nespresso came to be a success story (video). Contrary to popular beliefs, Eric Favre is not the inventor of coffee capsules, but he's the inventor of the formula that brought foamy capsuled coffee to the masses. The first coffee capsules had been invented back in the 1930's but never made it through because one ingredient was missing in the formula. Eric Favre explained the process that led him and his wife to discover the right way of encapsulating coffee and how he arrived at the correct formula: foam=AIR+water+coffee oil. In fact, aromas (coffee or whatever) only have a perceivable odor if they are oxydated, which only became possible when the AIR variable was brought into the formula. He went on explaining why he left Nespresso in 1989 and founded Monodor in 1990, a successful venture that is selling 500M coffee capsules a year and is collaborating with more than 200 companies around the world. Finally, he gave us some insights about the next product they will bring to the market: Tpresso (you can guess what the capsules will contain this time).

Finally, Jasmina Tesanovic, a famous blogger from Serbia Montenegro and also Bruce Sterling's wife talked about her blogging experience in a country at war (video)

During the open stage session that followed, Noel Hidalgo narrated his fascination for the number 7 and Markus Peschl form the University of Vienna, Austria, talked about his research on enabling emergent innovation.

Other talks I did not attend:

• Marc Laperrouza, researcher at EPFL, on the current state and latest trends in chinese telecommunication
• Heewon Kim, researcher at Yonsei University in Seoul, on how teenagers use social software in South Korea
• Gen Kanai, business developer for Mozilla Asia and director of marketing and partner relations for Mozilla Japan, on the state of open-source in Asia

You may find many more videos of other LIFT happenings online on the Nouvo website.

Tomorrow, I'll report my impressions of the last conference day. Stay tuned...

Related posts:
LIFT 08 - Day 1
LIFT 08 - Day 3

Yesterday was the first day of the LIFT Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. The LIFT Conference is a one-of-a-kind conference where people actually get to decide who gets to talk and what gets presented for at least half of the program. This is a kind of "social conference" in some sense, which is perfectly in line with its objectives.

Today was the workshops day. There were 10 AM workshops and 10 PM workshops to choose from. And, of course, those had been previously selected by the participants, remember? Anyway... All of them were probably quality workshops, so the choice was quite tough. I decided to go to the one called "Upgrade your company - Industrial Opportunities for the Internet of Things" by Vlad Trifa from SAP Research. The reason I chose this topic wasn't because I'm an expert in the IoT domain, which I'm not, but merely because I wanted to learn and hear about new things. The workshop was actually a thinking and brainstorming session about the technological, social, interactional and business aspects of intelligent, fault-tolerant, self-reconfigurable, name-your-uber-adjective-here sensor networks, where a sensor can basically be any kind of devices (cellphones, earplugs, cameras, traffic lights, GPS receivers, door actuators, etc). In other words, what kind of concerns consumers could have towards new ways of building ad-hoc sensor networks by connecting new or existing devices together in order to create new kinds of applications and collective intelligence. NB: by "consumers" Vlad actually meant both technology consumers (i.e., the developers) and end-user consumers.

Vlad then mentioned the "New Songdo City" project, a multi-billion dollars project whose goal is to create from scratch a brand new futuristic city located west of Seoul in Korea using all kinds of cutting-edge technologies around and see in which ways it could affect people. According to him, this would be a great opportunity to test the above sensor networks ideas in real-world settings with real people having real activities, and not in some kind of lab were researchers and inventors have no clue of the real needs of end-users.

Of course, the discussion digressed a little bit (pretty natural and sane for a brainstorming session, isn't it). We came to speak about a couple cases were technology was not used for what the inventors had initially intended to. The first memorable case was the one of Uganda fishers who are using cellphones as an e-payment system, but not as a communication medium. It basically goes like this: after getting back from fishing, the fisher sells his fishes to buyers who "text" him some credits by SMS. The fisher would then go to the bank and "cash in" the credits he received by SMS.

A second case: someone can unlock a bicycle by "calling it", and he gets billed for the whole time during which he has unlocked the bicycle. Third case: in Amsterdam, people can pay their parking spot by calling a number and typing in their spot number.

Although, I was a little skeptikal at the beginning, this actually turned out to be a very interesting session, during which I could even identify a couple potential business ideas... I'll probably talk more about that in a later post ;)

The PM workshop, "Online Communities Clinic" by Pedro Custodio, was all about online communities and how to build them correctly. Pedro is a web developer and in the course of his work, he came up with what he calls "Community Design Patterns", sort of like the GoF equivalent for designing online communities. I could unfortunately not attend the practical part of the session, but the presentation was quite good and the slides were nice and polished.

The patterns he presented were divided into four categories and for each pattern he explained when to use it and what kind of potential problem to look for when using it. Here is a quick enumeration of those categories and the related patterns (available here):

• Community support: quick registration, login, welcome area, user profile, user gallery, buddy list
• Group support: group building, invitations, shared editing, reputation, voting
• Communications: messaging, chat, comments, forums/blogs
• Awareness: neighbors, interactive user info, activity logs, timeline, periodic reports, aliveness indicators

All in all, this was a very interesting day. I'll provide more feedback today about the conference. Stay tuned...

Related posts:
LIFT 08 - Day 2
LIFT 08 - Day 3