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Now a more complete bio that sounds official:
Laurent was born in 1976 in Reims, Champagne. After an uneventful first 18 years he moved to Switzerland to study at the HEC school of the University of Lausanne. He quickly got hooked on the PCs of the computers center and began surfing the web with Mosaic and Netscape 1.0, using webcrawler, yahoo.stanford.edu and the other early resources.
In 1996, Laurent joined a startup company called Netface as head of Web. During his two years tenure the company won projects with high profile clients including the EPFL, Bernard Nicod (largest real estate company of the region) and Frequence Laser (formerly the biggest music retailer of Switzerland and the first large scale ecommerce site of the country). After leaving Netface, Laurent moved to Frequence Laser for one year to finish the online store, then signed with Arthur Andersen Business Consulting in Geneva to work in the new technologies team.
For more than two years he served various organizations as a consultant then senior consultant, working on a main project for the United Nations in both Geneva and New York. Laurent designed and programmed the first version of OCHA’s Financial Tracking System, a reporting system using web technologies to facilitate information exchange between the field offices and the headquarters.
After the Enron scandal dismantled Andersen, Laurent opted out of the new structure that later became Bearing Point. After a year of travel and independent consulting, he then joined the eBusiness team of Pictet, the biggest Swiss private bank. There he worked on the bank’s technological projects, including the website, intranet and extranets.
On May 2005, Laurent decided to launch his own business and founded LIFT lab, a service company whose mission is to help organizations understand and anticipate technological changes. In February 2006, LIFT lab organized the first edition of the LIFT conference, an event to discuss the social impact of technologies that went from 2 days and 350 participants in 2006 to 3 days and 700 participants two years later. LIFT has been called “one of the highlights of the technophile calendar“ by the BBC and is consistently rated as good or excellent by more than 90% of attendees in independently run post conference surveys.
In 2008, after a successful Lift08 and a mini-event in Seoul on Sept. 2007, Lift’s first large scale Asian event is set to happen in Korea around the theme “beyond the web browser“. Organized in partnership with local organizations like Daum, Nabi Art Center or the Jeju KIPA, the Korean conference is the first step in Lift’s international strategy whose goal is to spot the latest and most interesting social trends around the world.
Laurent is a blogger and contributor to publications like Le Temps (articles archived here). He speaks regularly on television and radio, at conferences (Picnic, ICCA congress, Leweb, First Tuesdays, AdTech, SHiFT, Inforum, etc…) and at various institutions (IMD Alumni Club, Mc Kinsey, United Nation, University of Korea, University of Lausanne, University of Geneva, etc..) on topics ranging from Web 2.0 to the impact of technologies on business and society.