ISHAC BERTRAN

The first week of May I attended LIFT10, this year with “Connected People” as a main topic. I was invited to exhibit Linyl (a project developed together with Benoit Espinola, Shruti Ramiah and Natalia Echevarría at CIID) in Démo:Mode, an exhibition organised by HEAD Genève within Lift Experience. It was interesting to see the different approaches, design methods and finishings of the pieces depending on the origin (mainly RCA and Head Genève).

Linyl arrived Wednesday morning, coinciding with the inauguration of the event. It had been stucked on the customs for 4 days. Finally, despite the difficulty of calibrate the color sensor because the light conditions, the piece was settled up and demonstrated to Lift attendants as they came into the exhibition.

I got really good feedback from people. Some people wanted the piece for their home, some other commented the obvious relation with the VJ world, and a woman told me that she’d try to do something similar for her restaurant. “ingenieux“, “simple” or “beautiful” were common adjectives that people use to describe the piece.

Although I couldn’t attend all the talks I wanted to attend, the experience of these three days in LIFT10 was highly interesting. I’d highlight Russell Davies, Neil Rimer or Aubrey de Grey.

When I learn a lot of things in a short period of time I feel a strange sensation (which I love), like shivering – I felt it several times during some talks or the workshop Hacking Venture Capital, Fred Destin from Atlas Venture. The VC world is quite new for me, but I’ve been interested lately. I’m far from understand it properly, but this workshop was the best starting point I could have.

The workshop was divided in two parts: “Pitching and getting through the deal selection process” and “Negotiating the venture investment”. It was a hands-on workshop, with good discussions around the pitches and negotiations that groups of attendants were asked to do. People were quite into the topic, so I was mostly listening to them. In my group of 4 for example, they were 3 VC and me. I really liked the way they were dealing, sharp, to the point.

Some of the quotes I captured from the workshop:

“You need a pitch for your business – it’s not only for a VC but for selling or recruiting as well”

“The pitch should be able to be summarized in the back of a business card”

“The “price per share” is what matters, not the value or the % you sell”

“Don’t rely on anyone, is your job to know the rules of the game”

“Don’t over pitch, let the VJ feel curious about your story”

“The price of the company is a discovery process, don’t say a percentage or how much the company worth at the beginning”

“Nobody reads a business plan. Nobody reads the executive summary. Nobody signs an NDA. Don’t lose your time on them.”

“Repeat your high concept pitch (3 words) a lot, VC will remember you for this and your first impression”

“It doesn’t matter what you say, it’s how you say it. Practise!”

“Tell a story, talk about why you needed it, what people say about it.”

“Sell yourself and your team more than your company”

LIFT10 is a good place to extend a network both in business and design fields. People is open to meet each other, discuss and keep in touch. The program also enables and fosters this communication between the attendants, with numerous coffee breaks, cocktails, a fondue night and a proper closure. See you in LIFT11!

More pictures about the Lift Conference here.

Linyl is the project I developed during the second week of Physical Computing, together with Shruti Ramiah, Benoit Espinola and Natalia Echevarría. Linyl is a light player that allows to create an ambience by playing discs of color created from photos or images of past experiences.

The brief was to choose an electronic object and create a new way to interact with it, “A New Soul for an Old Machine”. Natalia found two beautiful artifacts in her backyard. I spent a few minutes just playing with the knobs and switches of the tape recorder. Smooth, feeling of robustness and amazing sound. Click, clack, precise. In every movement you can feel a bunch of mechanical stuff moving inside. A complete interactive experience.

Regarding the vinyl player, amazing external design and even more amazing engineering inside. After taking out an old condenser that would probably cause an short-circuit, we plugged the player in and… surprise! It was working. After pressing ‘Start’ the arm started moving gently to the plate. The rotation speed can be manually fine-tuned using the strobe tuner.

Nostalgia and admiration are mixed while looking at these old machines…

We decided to use the vinyl player for the project, changing the functionality but keeping the ritual and the slowness of the process of playing music. But instead of music, it plays light.

One of our premises (and a challenge too) was to keep the player working. We introduced the color sensor through the arm, and the Arduino inside the player.

We build a set of eight RGB led’s with the correspondent board to be embedded in the lamp.

We laser-cutted a disc out of acrylic, engraving grooves on it. On the other hand we generated the discs extracting the main colors of the pictures.

The toughest work was to calibrate the sensor, since it’s extremely sensible to ambient light. We added a white led pointing to the disc to help the sensor read through the acrylic. The distance to the surface to be sensed was also an issue, having notable changes on the values with small variations of height.

Linyl was exhibited in DKDS during the final presentations. Bill Verplank virtually attended the presentation, asking questions and giving feedback through Skype. Mary Huang made an ‘Arduino Cake’ to celebrate the end of this exciting week.