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