Liip's Zürich offices recently got featured in TEC21, a renowned Swiss architecture journal, under the title of "Atmosphäre des Digitalen". Apart from discussing some special features of our operating base, the article critically ponders the notion of "intellectual sensualism" as well as aspects of the relations between architecture and the kind of stuff we do - we use architectural design patterns, they give us software-generated tapestry (picture above). If you're interested: here's the PDF of the entire article - enjoy.

Credits: OOS (architecture), Dominique Wehrli (photography).

Anybody who is anybody in the world of Drupal is in Paris this week. With over 900 participants, DrupalCon 2009 is the largest Drupal Conference in Europe to date. Besides the opportunity to network and to exchange best practices, it's the approaching code freeze for the release of Drupal 7 that is drawing developers. As Dries Buytaert mentioned in his opening keynote address, the conference marks the kick off the first phase of the code freeze. So until Monday, it's code code code!

Liip is present with two members (Philipp Schroeder and Adrian Schwaller, make sure to meet them if you're there and read this blog!), who've come to Paris to deepen their knowledge of Drupal and make contact with friends and potential partners. And of course they will try to kindly entice the one or the other Drupal king or queen to take a closer look at our little company and its open positions.

We should use this blog more often to showcase the crazy nerdy fun stuff Liipers are building every day. Like Penny with Mahara, Silvan with etoy, Lukas with PHP, and so on - with now over 40 guys and girls there's quite some stories to tell.

In this spirit, today we have Sandro, Sandro and his Tweetr: the Open Source ActionScript 3 twitter API library. Sandro initially built it to work with his phidgets, a hardware collection of USB sensors and actuators (see twitter LED above). From his desk Tweetr found its way around the world, it's now being used for example in:

• The Good Conspiracy (presented at the the 6th edition of La Biennale de Montréal) is "a co-creative event that will transfuse the city with positive energy. Citizens are invited to discover elements of the conspiracy on public grounds and become conspirators themselves by sending positive messages by means of contemporary communication networks, electronic and otherwise."
• Tweepjob (by Douglas Reynolds), bringing job seekers, organizations and recruiters together using "tweets".

Sandro is going to present the whole phidget/Flash story (can he bring Flash's rapid prototyping capabilities to the hardware world? What would you build?) at Flash at the Lake (FATL), the fine Flash conference Zürich will see in June. FATL is yet another example of awesome crazy stuff done by a Liiper - will blog about that soon.

As you might have heard, Liip won quite a bunch of awards at this year's Best of Swiss Web contest, including the night's awesome-sounding overall prize "Master of Swiss Web".

Concerning the aftermath of that evening (which involved a healthy dose of beer, see images 1, 2) there's the following things to say:

• WE DID NOT FORGET ABOUT THE PROMISED PARTY - we'll keep you posted on that one.
• Marc and I did a rather long interview with Netzwoche, which was quite funny.
• The special women-only prize spurred quite some discussion, see for example Penny's blog entry. Difficult topic.
• Gottago and Picok, the two apps winning in the categories "Technology Innovation" and "Technology Quality" both are Free Software projects. Open Source wins.
• As a little bonus for all the passion put into Gottago, we'll send Marc on the Silicon Valley Tour organized by fellow Liiper Philipp. He will definitely have to blog here.
• Yes, sure, the Swiss web small and that award thing might be a bit provincial - but as a winner you just do not care :)

So many thanks to everybody that supported us, remember we're hiring .. and see you at that party.

2009 promises to be a fun year again in terms of Best of Swiss Web awards: both Gottago and RAIweb 2.0 are nominated for the jackpot, the most awesome title of "Master of Swiss Web".

What you can (and should) do now is going to vote.liip.ch and vote for us, preferrably for Gottago (your favourite 'public transport 2.0' iPhone app). The voting process is rather cumbersome, so here's a short how-to.

So the plan is this: you vote, we win, and then we throw a decent party, with you - and this is a most official promise. Ok? Thanks, and we'll sure keep you posted through this blog and through twitter.com/liip.

Hi. I'm currently at LIFT09 in Geneva, and after the workshop I moderated yesterday, I could start enjoying - if only the whole thing wouldn't be slightly disappointing overall.

Well, the workshop was about asking the conference's motto questions "Where did the future go?" with regard to that meta-utopia we call the Semantic Web. Slightly too technical at times, the discussion went pretty well indeed, the Café Method proved to be helpful once again. The participants, among them folks from Mozilla, DFKI, Swisscom, UBS etc. etc (and of course the Dreamlab guys), were pretty hard to stop discussing - a good sign. In the discussion, the actual usefulness of many of the standards and ideas around in the Semantic Web space were heavily challenged, I'll have to reflect a bit for giving you a good summary.

The disappointment comes mainly from the impression of declining density, compared to the three LIFT conferences I attended before. More repetitions of topics previously covered, again a seemingly lower number of presentations, and an overall level that does not seem to rise. Maybe the future just went away, on holiday. Or maybe it's just me.

Instead of liveblogging or such, I'll just be mentioning a couple of pointers here over the next couple of days, all the content of LIFT is going to be online very soon indeed. A very nice presentation this morning was the one by David Rose of Ambient Devices showing us .. ambient devices (or rather "enchanted objects"), actually working ones, like the 1-Pixel-Browser and so on.

After that Lee Bryant had 5 minutes, and he was good. Explained how the 20th century was basically and generally wrong, told us that trust is cheaper than control, told us to stick with a traditional mode of organizations: social networks. Network-based models are proven an aggregation and links beats coercion. Yes indeed.

Spent the last couple of days in the US, in New York, Palo Alto and San Francisco and had a blast indeed. Over the next days I'll be summarizing the most important events of that journey to all those places I knew but from the movies and those voices and faces I knew but from the web. This risks becoming rather verbose, so I don't expect you guys to read all of it - but I can't help sharing this :)

So.. the first 4 days were the holiday part of the trip, doing what you do on your first NYC visit, exploring Manhattan and Brooklyn with big eyes, enjoying the view from the Empire State at 2am, and so forth. Apart from the usual tourist stuff I met formidable geow***kers Bernhard and Gregor (he, talked him back into blogging ;)), both at Google New York and working on Google Maps. Great guys, like them a lot. The free food at their in-house restaurant was remarkable, their infrastructure is pretty nice, notoriously. The playground area the company's offices are known for seemed definitely underutilized, but as Berni remarked: just having those rooms makes a real difference. Google and their maps actually stayed with me all along the trip: this visit in the Meat Packing District, then in the Valley helping to find my way around, and finally to my last scheduled appointment, WhereCamp2008 at Googleplex, their mighty mothership. But more on that later.

The schedule was too tight for my preferred liveblogging mode, and with Geneva's Linuxdays today, the local Atlassian User Conference on Monday and the Internet Briefing Conference on Wednesday and Thursday the pace will stay rather high - so thanks for hanging on.

Next in this series: The first day in Stanford, at the Center for Internet & Society of Stanford Law School, meeting amazing folks like Bruce Cahan, legendary Bill Moggridge and Bill Cockayne, all in one day.

We're currently preparing for (or already recovering from) a whole lot of cool/funny/interesting events, hoping you join us for at least one of them:

• 2008-03-11: Best of Swiss Web 2008 Award Night (more on that soon)
• 2008-03-12/13: OpenExpo
  • running the Liip booth that is also the PHP booth
  • Chregu's presentation on BXE2 (to be released these days)
    
  • the legendary Social Event - with Google and FreeBeer
• 2008-03-14: The Liip-LerNetz client event
• 2008-03-19: /ch/open Event with Cédric's "Digitale Identität und Datenportabilität im Web"
• 2008-05-07/08: Intranet Summit, where we show off our internal toys tools
  

Last session before party!

Scott Smith (Changeist)

On "Human Foresight". Basically all commonplace - or maybe I'm too tired (and he says "have your eyes open and think about what your're seeing"). "Modal Fluency", "Massively Parallel Emotion", "Information Vertigo" are all nice terms, though.

Bill Cockayne (Stanford, Change research)

On "Foresight to Innovation: Roles", on things that are 1-2 product cycles ahead - not a futurist and not doing futurology, he says. Showing a great graphic he calls the "ambiguity curve" - 1) Prepare, 2) Sense, 3) Form, 4) Analyze, 5) Integrate, 6) Develop, 7) Ship - 1-2 is foresight, 3-4 is research, 5-6 is design. Has a very well reflected model of the roles in foresight and what commonly happens in small teams /big companies with people taking these roles. Hope the slides get posted.

Francesco Cara (Nokia)

Francesco -a local guy- has a gorgeous title - 'Design Strategist' does sound cool. Talking on "A staged approach to innovation", inspired by Jean Piaget, his genetic epistemology, structuralism, constructivism and the concept of empirical/reflective abstraction. Identified 3 stages in the development of mobile ecosystems: device-centric, content-centric, network-centric, with many new actors becoming much more important, like media companies, network operators etc.
Showing map-like visualizations of device capabilities (connectability/calling capabilites/personalization capabilities/..) Explaining current metaphores for accessing the internet on mobile devices:

# "Enabled"
# "Specialised door" (Blackberry)
# "Multi-Channel" (Sony-Ericsson)
# "Desktop" (Apple)
# "Dynamic Portal (HTC)

And Nokia likes to combine. What could new metaphores be about, helping us to structure the way we work with online tools on mobile handsets? "We are at one of these key moments where a new interaction metaphore could change things dramatically". "Innovation is fresh thinking that creates value".

Bill Cockayne's summary of LIFT08

Broader range of professions - not just a bunch of kids anymore. Talks were about complex issues, and they were optimistic. The world is complex, and getting much more so - but it's ok and we'll deal with it. Definitely an event that is on "european turf". Now Laurent's last words :)

I'll do my own summary these days, got a lot to think about. Many many many thanks to the Lift08 team so far!

David Sadigh

Extended sales pitch for holistis, waste of time mostly. I don't trust his numbers, rather difficult to judge, though. He's right that mobile media usage is to boost personalization.

David Marcus (Zong, 'The Open Mobile Platform')

David on 'The Mobile Opportunity'. How big an opportunity is that? Currently: 1.3b internet users, 3.2b mobile users. 25 new mobile phone subscribers per second in China alone - personal mass media, and a huge content business (and there everybody pays for everything - why is that?). These 2 worlds, monetization through advertising is much harder. And there's the 1000 clients problem, which this guy promises to solve.
Predicts a paradigm shift: mobile operators as content providers won't work. ITMS & Co., but also Qik and friends - interactive multicasting.
Mass market monetization of such stuff? Case studies: stardoll.com, faceparty.com .. the cloud.. facebook apps?
And now: world-changing Zong, promising to take multi-device/multi-protocol/multi-device complexity out of mobile app dev.

Kevin Marks (Google)

On Google Open Social, that framework for building cross-site social apps. On URLs are people, too, the Social Graph, social network fatigue (more friending networks than friends), etc. "Take your application to where the people are" with Open Social. Second speaker quoting Danah Boyd today, on the complexity of relationships in online social networks. Showing many sweet graphs such as a Pride and Prejudice Character Map and explaining intricacies, and connecting the issues with online networks. Can all this be actually mapped to software, can managing trust, friendship and social context actually externalised? Open Social tries to abstract away social network handling complexities away, but remember these things are all.. very touchy-feely human.

François Grey (CERN)

From volunteer computing (like Folding@home etc.) to volunteer thinking, engaging both scientists and the public - "citizen cyber science". Examples: GalaxyZoo, Herbaria@Home, etc. This is not reCaptcha or crowdsourcing (Mechanical Turk etc.), this is actual science done by everybody. See also: Africa@Home and AfricaMap. What matters is passion, not degrees.