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