While TED talks are now widely spread over the Web, reaching a total of 250 million views in April, one sometimes tends to forget about other sources of highly inspirational videos.

With LIFT conference starting on Wednesday in Geneva, we would like to bring the excellent LIFT Talks to your attention, recorded over the last 4 years at the different editions of the conference (LIFT, LIFT Asia, LIFT France). There are some really good pieces, some on which we already reported in the past like Vint Cerf’s talk on the future of the internet and Rafi Haladjian’s talk about connecting all things to each other (and not just computers).

There will be a lot of Sandboxers attending in Geneva this week; we are looking forward to seeing everyone there! Drop me a line if you want to meet.

Antoine is a Co-Founder and the CEO of Sandbox. He will be at LIFT from Wednesday to Friday and will give a workshop about corporate culture, presenting some intermediary results of the latest Sandbox HR study.

Lift is a series of events built around a community of pioneers who get together in Europe and Asia to explore the social implications of new technologies. Each conference is a chance to turn innovation into opportunities by anticipating the major shifts ahead, and meet the people who drive them.

This year, Lift will explore the most overlooked aspect of innovation: people. Known in techno-parlance as users, consumers, clients, participants, prosumers, citizens or activists, people ultimately define the success of all technological and entrepreneurial projects.

They adopt or refute, promote or demote; embrace, reject, or re-purpose. Their approaches are unique, influenced by cultural and generational diversity. A decade after the rebirth of user-centered design and innovation, it is time to explore the myths and uncover the reality behind the “connected people”.

Sandbox is all about connected people under 30 and we are therefore happy to announce LIFT as a new community partner. As a first opportunity emerging from this partnership, Sandbox members can request a discount code for the conference to cathrin.lesslhumer [at] sandbox-network [dot] com.

]]> http://www.sandbox-network.com/events/lift10-connected-people/feed/ 0 http://www.sandbox-network.com/events/ivy-league-fondue-in-geneva/ http://www.sandbox-network.com/events/ivy-league-fondue-in-geneva/#comments Fri, 29 May 2009 17:40:15 +0000 Sandbox http://www.sandbox-network.com/?p=159

I had the pleasure to organise a dinner in Geneva on Tuesday to meet a delegation of 15 Ivy League students in a historic and diplomatic trip to Belgium, Switzerland and Turkey (the “Ivy Europe & Middle-East Summit”) – and introduce them to some local Sandbox members.

As most of them were for the first time in Switzerland, I decided to invite them at the Bergerie du Gruyérien, a traditional Swiss restaurant serving the best Fondues in town. We had interesting talks about US Universities expanding to the Emirates, like Carnegie Mellon Qatar or the Harvard Medical School Dubai. We exchanged views on international politics and talked about how the “Change” in the US looks like in reality. One of our local Sandboxers demonstrated to them the Poken devices, and gave them some insights into the Swiss startup scene.

The delegation should be in Istanbul by now for the third part of the journey. Good luck for the end of your trip and looking forward to seeing you again soon!

Thus, it was clear that the Sandbox team would be back in lovely Geneva for the LIFT 09 conference. But this time, we wanted to contribute something. Together with the LIFT team, we decided to throw a small dinner to bring together some young attendees of the conference as well as people from the Sandbox network.

Photo by Dominik Grolimund / Wuala

On Wednesday evening, after the first day of conference, a group of 30 hand-selected people met at the beautiful Restaurant La Broche. Despite some initial resistance, we managed to mix up the people so that everyone would meet new people. As usual at Sandbox dinners, the crowd was a diverse one, ranging from entrepreneurs to NGO people and researchers.

Equally broad were topics that were covered in the discussions at the five tables: One group immediately dived into the big debate of money vs. freedom and why being a poor entrepreneur might make you happier than being a rich employee. Another table discussed intensively the business model of Poken, the very successful Swiss startup, with its founders.

As the evening went on and the wine bottles were slowly emptying, the debates moved on to the advantages of Islamic banking, the future of journalism – and medieval propaganda. Over coffee and dessert, some people discussed how innovation can actually flow from less developed countries to the developed ones, as it happened with the concept of microcredits, while others got into a heated argument on the Swiss banking secret. And before we even realised, it was 1am in the morning… Time, at least for some, to start discovering the bars of Geneva

The dinner was, in our view, a great success – it allowed us to spread the word about Sandbox and, more importantly, meet some of the smartest and most interesting people at the conference. Thanks to everyone for attending – and see you at the next conference!