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.

Hi all, this is Marc again, this time no iPhone topic.

A short while ago, Liip gave me the opportunity to be part of this years Silicon Valley Tour. Silicon Valley Tours provide various people from Switzerland the opportunity to visit companies in the Silicon Valley. With Liip actively supporting the organization and our Philipp Schroeder co-leading the program, I had a perfect opportunity to visit all famous companies in The Valley.

What should I expect? On the list were names like "SAP", "Sun", "Google" and "NASA" to just name a few.

Although I live in a country which adopts to technology very fast and has a handful of very nice and promising start-ups, the Bay Area still had an image of being the "Holy Grail".

With a bag full of expectations, I went on that trip.

The first thing you notice is: this is not like the industrial district of San Francisco. It's not like all those big companies are at the same street and have the same neighborhood. It's more like you occasionally see names you recognize when you drive down the suburban streets.
Because of that, I decided to take the bike to ride from Palo Alto to a bit south of Cupertino. Of course I went to take pictures at Apple and Google and I almost got arrested for it. "Private Property". So, those guys really didn't want me to take pictures of their shiny office buildings. Ok, bad start..

On that bike ride, I saw a lot of office buildings, a lot of companies everybody knows, something you really don't have in Switzerland. But the thing that really jumps into your eyes when you drive through those villages is: except of that one big company, there is not much more. Just the same people and families as in any smaller city/village in Switzerland.

The week went by.. I collected a lot of impressions, had a lot of very nice chats and was perfectly accommodated by the Silicon Valley Tour organization.

So, those impressions - you go there, young, naive and very excited. They say "don't expect too much, you're just gonna be disappointed". I wasn't really disappointed, but wasn't blown away either. Why? Well, first of all, the days when you had that amazing technology in the US and nothing even vaguely close in Europe are history. The internet and the ongoing globalization accelerated dissemination a lot, in all directions. And second: A lot of ideas are not ground-breaking "innovations", they are either normal evolution or "wow, did they also finally realize it?".
For example, the day at Google - you'd think this must be one of the most exciting experiences for a young developer, just in the middle of his studies. Well - it was not.
I had the same tour at the Google Zurich office - and they seem to have that speech that gets indoctrinated into every (Z/G)oogler's head on their very first day.
Usually, you get a guy that talks about the big products he's working on - feeling really cool about it. You get the feeling that, if you think a bit different and a bit "I want to change something", you don't work at post-IPO Google anymore. It looks like yet another corporation with a lot of money, desperately trying to suck up coolness. I may be all wrong about this - it's just an impression. On the other hand, you have companies like SAP, trying to get into a new market segment (Blue Ruby etc.) - but not with real innovation, just evolution and translation.
What also didn't help get my "excitement" back, was the fact that a lot of companies seem to be very hypocritical indeed - in a way you instantly realize.. That's a bit harsh, yes. But if some guy talks about how they make everything green, environmentally friendly and so on and you sit in an room with temperatures almost below zero because of the A/C - well, it makes you think.
So, basically, it's the same as everywhere. You have big companies, trying to survive. 

There were some signs of hope. For example Twine - a really nice and smart product, just taking off as we speak. Or smaller presentations from comparatively smallish companies, like LinkedIn which seemed to be pretty honest or the Engineering Department of Stanford University - truly open minded.

A few question came up in my head: what is so different that almost everything I use in my daily life as a developer has it's origin in the Bay Area? And what does it take to have the same in Switzerland?

Technologically speaking: Nothing. The developers are not smarter, they are not more experienced or more skilled. But, they think they are. And that what makes the difference. In Switzerland, you usually develop a product until it's done and perfect, because you are afraid of competition. In the U.S. everyone thinks he could do better and they just do, release and iterate. And when enough people think that way, they move the others as well. We are lacking that drive here. We are scared of failing. We are scared of losing security. We are scared of criticism. I had a nice chat with someone who really went through all the big and small companies who told me: "Here [USA], you don't get VC if you haven't failed at least once." Well, here, you probably won't get financed as a failure, a looser .. . Don't ask me which one is "right", but we definitely need more chances to fail and of course more acceptance. It's never nice to fail, but it happens - and it's mostly not even someone's fault.

For me, this journey was a great experience. It's the fact that my expectation were not met that made it so great. It's the fact that all you need to have is self-confidence, because you got everything else on your hands and in your brain. This was probably the right trip in the right time. I lost my fear of failing, I lost my fear of not being perfect and I lost my fear of the Silicon Valley companies. This is one of the best experiences one can have during studies and at the beginning of life. I'd recommend this trip to anyone in my field.

In this sense: "We can do the same - even a bit better, or we do it better next time."

Thanks again to the SVT 2009 organisation who did a great Job!

Related articles:

• http://techblog.tilllate.com/2009/05/18/20-notizen-zum-silicon-valley/ - by Silvan from Tilllate
• http://blog.nektoon.net/archive/2009/05/18/smaller-organizations-the-sum-of-the-parts.html - by Dorian from Nektoon

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.

Back for the gaming track. I'm putting this online like 3 minutes after the last talk, this live blogging thing is really fun (ha, at least for the writer :))

Robin Hunicke

Both an academic and practitioner, working for Electonic Arts. She's an AI researcher moved into gaming, designing games for the Nintendo Wii (such as My Sims), tells us about user-generated content and the importance of social software for the gaming industry. Some take-away points from my p.o.v:

# Vocabulary: Fun = Problematic - what does fun mean, generally? The M-D-A rule system: Mechanics, Dynamics (Player + Rules), Aesthetics (the resulting experience). Dynamics is the difficult, unpredictable part.
# Why kill games to make digital games?
# Digital Games are usually just cycles of effort - gratification - effort - gratification. What progression? Traditional forms of gameplays often don't have such linear(-like) graphs.
# What about Play 2.0? Connection "Where I am going / who I am / who I am becoming / where I am" - no, not always "I'm a warrior in a worn-torn land", making that feel more and more real and engaging is a lot of work, griming work. But aesthetics can also drive dynamics, small games, simple, quick and easy to get into can be extremly magical, too. Like the Wii games. Or Facebook, seen as a game. Chatty, social, a little automatic, fast, repetitive - and rewarding. Adding friends / chatting / adding friends as a classic reward cycle, as usual in digital games. But it lets me choose what the games is about, I gather my own rewards, reflecting my personality. Facebook is about me. The aesthetics of Facebook? "I'm a person living in a cool world and I am loved". Love creates play, that's social software - Flickr, Dopplr, and so on.

Game Design is a literacy. An art form.

Guy Vardi (Oberon Media)

On casual gaming and its evolutions. See: Solitaire. If a hardcore video game is a full meal, a casual game's a snack. Snacks are the future, bite size content is king (tracks vs. albums, youtube clips vs. movies, ..) Different demographics, many females, not the typical male college kids. Playing minutes at once every weeks, not hours per day. Yes, the attention span is shrinking. Tells us about the amazing this they do in Korea, where 25% of the population played a pet racing game

Paul Barnett

Brilliant speaker, you'll have to watch that one!
He's the Creative Director for Electronic Arts Mythic, overseeing the design of the upcoming MMORPG Warhammer Online. He compares the gaming industry and his job to what they do in the movie industry and at the casinos in Vegas. All of them are rather old-fashioned compared to all that fancy online stuff - entertainment games are classic entertain business. Just changing at a much faster pace.
The single-player gaming area is more or less mapped. The online gaming area is mostly an ocean of unknown, many insular people sending out explorers on boats made of money. Just very few come back, having discovered new lands with 20 more boats made of money, full of money. Coordinating such efforts with intuition is his job, omg. He's to open game makers to new thinking, stop them being so insular, and to bring them to places like LIFT :)

Bruno Bonnell (founder and former CEO of Infogrames aka Atari)

Spent 25 years in the gaming industries, thinks about its next revolution, the implications and opportunities of robotics in the leisure industry. Example Playing with a smart soccer ball, reacting to your skills?
The computer industry is going to be just a small part -the brain- of a much larger industry, the robotics industry. Constan reinvention of a lot of interfaces and paradigms will of course be key, not only for gaming. In the early 80ies this guy talked about the video game industries becoming a mass market industry (sounded weird), now this.
He talks abot to be surrounded by machines, mostly for fun, about creating new vocabularies, new relationships, new systems of communication between man and machine. And about how when the video game indusrty got invented and started working on design, possibilities were extremely limited, and how still they enabled interesting interaction - robotics is exactly at this stage this very moment.
It's all about the evolution of toys. This is a new field, where new players will arise: none of the huge movie or entertainment companies made it into the video game space, same situation is to be expected for the huge computer/software businesses: they most probably won't make it to the robotics age. TBD. Great to have such experienced folks here.

Will link to videos / image later. Now lunch :)

So.. back for the "New Frontiers" track. We had:

Kevin Warwick (cybernetics professor)

The one man with a microchip in his nervous system, working on neural implants and linking neural tissue from rat brains to robots - robots with bio-brains. That research is partly therapeutic (spinal injuries, Parkinson, epilepsy), partly about improving the body, basically, to extend the human sensory range (vision is ok, but the other senses.. :)). He connected his nervous system with his wife's, with his wife's jewellery, with robots on the other side of the ocean (stretching his body over thousands of miles), and so on. Big impact for artificial intelligence too, for cultivating neural networks.. Awesome presentation, definitely that kind of crazy genius research to be afraid of and fascinated by.

Holm Friebe and Philipp Albers (ZIA)

Two folks from Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur (inventors of powerpoint karaoke) talking about the changing nature of work, the relationship between individuals and organisations - and about the end of work as we know it. Question: how to integrate people with a strong sense of self-determination, that would not function in an ordinary, hierarchical company - into a working, productive company? Call themselves "capitalist-socialist joint venture, designed to establish new forms of collaboration".

7 rules of working together and staying friends:

1. The 7 NOs.
   • No office,
   • No employees,
   • No fixed cost,
   • No pitches,
   • No exclusivity,
   • No working hours,
   • No bullshit.
2. No Work-Work Balance
3. Instant Gratification (money as an incentive, distributed immediately after a job is finished. So: obviously no salaries.
4. Pluralism of Methods
5. Fixed ideas - live up to your intellectual obsessions.
6. Shared Responsibilities - no central decision makers
7. The Power of Procrastination

Ah, that might work in Berlin, the capital of the bourgeois bohemiens. What should be added: None of the 7-50 (depending on how you count) individuals lives from that company. Also note that the company seems not to take any risks (no salaries, just payment depending on project success) but keeps 10% of all revenue - will have to ask those guys what they think about sustainability and scalability of such a model.

Mieke Gerritzen

Talking about 'The Next Nature'. Images of mobile phone cell antennas camouflaged as trees, of the artificial islands of Dubai: Nature becomes Culture. God created the world, except the Netherlands - that the Dutch did themselves. Images of gene-manipulated hypoalergic cats, of meat modelling machines and square tomatoes. Nothing new so far, but then: Culture becomes nature. The technological world becomes so complex it forms living structures - nature changes along with us.
http://fakeforreal.com/ - what is real nature? She shows wonderful animations and short movies, you'll have to watch this. Nature is is real nature - go check http://nextnature.net/.

Henriette Weber Andersen

Henriette telling us to 'Enjoy the Chaos'. We're part of a silent revolution: a consumer movement about what we consume why and when - (how) does consumption influence the happiness index. Can chaos increase revenue? What are companies afraid of? What she says, basically: Markets are conversations - I guess she's wonderful at implementing these thoughts.

Kushtrim Xhakli

From Kosovo:http://ipkoinstitute.org/lift, http://trajnimi.com

Keynote: Bruce Sterling about a crappy year

Bruce Sterling (quoting as he speaks, video will be online in some days): "I'm a writer and futurist, so basically a motivator responsible for morale. But: it's going to be a crap year. .. Global warming is a multi-hundred year issue. It's not a problem, it's a way of live. .. Prophecy: A phenomenon you'll certainly be confronted with, and defines the very character of our times, more than you ever wanted to see, be prepared. If you anticipate the developments there, you won't understand very much, but be prepared for the impact. For: Carla Bruni.
Carla Bruni has become the First Lady of France because of a tech summit, a tech summit about preparing artists for the digital age, about civilizing the internet, from a French perspective, repressing P2P networks. So Carla should definitely be here. Futurists would refer to her as a Black Swan, an unpredictable, unsenseable major event. She, the Madame du Barry of a French Digital Renaissance. He, having multiplied his options dramatically, with Carla, carismatic and poetic, untroubled by bourgeois morality, capable of anything .. A story that writes itself, the most single interesting story - there's no choice about a black swan.
A futurists scenario: Let's delimit the possibilities. What are the driving forces? Ambition and publicity. They can not make the press go away, but they can feed it. Not turn the faucet off, but turn it up. So there are two axes: mild/bold and loudly/quietly. What will happen?

#1 Low ambition, low publicity The forces of convetionality overwhelm her, Sarkozy is too much for any woman to handle, another public divorce is unthinkable, it ends in tears.

#2 Low ambition, high publicity She'll take part respectably in G7 and UN events, release a new pop album, she's pretty and talented, all other First Ladys look like potato sacks - she's the first diva of France, but that's it.

#3 High ambition, low publicity Carla becomes the power behind the throne, the Bruni family as european industrial aristocrats, she's already 6 times richer than sarkozy. She want's to make industrial policy, and he's just a hyperactive politician - she will rule, that's why she married him.

#4 High ambition, high publicity This scenario's the weird one - the most useful scenario, as the future tends to be weird. She'll be the empress of europe. Currently Sarkozy is the king maker for Tony Blair as President of Europe, Sarkozy will follow him, as the the blingbling president. Glamour has its uses, glamour can be a weapon. There'll be world-sweaping Carla Bruni campaigns, she'll be bigger than Bono, bigger than the Rolling Stones. It'll be a hurricane of madness, and they'll be methodically stearing the hurricane. A supermodel and a statesman can never get enough power and publicty. All other political figures will be able to lead a normal live.

Probabilites:
#1 40%
#2 15%
#3 10%
#4 35%

Getting back to the internet. The internet was a Black Swan, too, big enough Bruni and Sarkozy go there, met because of it, got married because of it. The internet does not need political favours.

Keynote: Pierre Bellanger, "The social network: future of telecommunications"

Pierre, founder of Skyrock, started as pirate radio station in the 70ies. Want to become the world teenager social network, with a "mobile social messenger" basically. YASN, yet another social network, yawn.

Keynote: Younghee Jung (Nokia)

Working with folks like Jan Chipchase on personal and social aspects of mobile technology, to support design technologies and challenge current thinking. Telling us about their Nokia OpenStudio initiative, a on-site design competition in 3 communities: Mumbai, Rio, Accra. Challenges: weather, floods, sewage / gang crossfire, security / electricty, crowd / .. compelling presentation, here's the winners of the competition:

• Cloudy-buddy Mobile (Mumbai) - Instant weather forecast, just point it at the sky and it tells you if it's going to rain - which is essential in
• Eco-Cell (Rio) - Measures air pollution / ozone
• Four-Star (Accra) - 4 SIM Cards, to switch between networks easily to save cost

Other ideas: cellphone with suicide bomber detector, cellphone with a megaphone for political manifestations and so on. Shows many awesome drawings of competition entries, you should watch the video when it's online.

Keynote: Genevieve Bell (Intel)

Technology changes faster than people (culture, societies) do. One thing that does not change is the game of secrets and lies. What roles does lying and deception, proscriptions and prescriptions play in tech? Do the twin idead of secrets and lies offer new ways to think about privacy and security?

All videos of the event (plus interviews and other fine stuff) are coming up at the Nuovo Lift site currently.

I'm pausing my coverage here, switching to laid-back mode for the rest of the day. You'll get all the coolness via LOIP.