Dave Gray, founder and CEO of Xplane, will be in Geneva to host a workshop on “Making the Complex Clear” on March 18 at Arvetica (full workshops schedule here).

Dave and his company have brought visual techniques to major companies like Credit Suisse, Nokia, Apple, IBM, Bank of America and many more, to help them with topics such as improving strategic thinking strategy development and communication, streamlining change management or clarifying their communications with clients.

In this podcast Dave explains the value of visual techniques for businesses and private banks and outlines what we will be doing during the workshop in March. He particularly stresses that mediocre communications lead to misalignment in management and hence result in poor implementation. Dave invites entire management and project teams to participate in the workshop so that they can directly work on concrete business problems. That’s quite an opportunity to be able to benefit from individual coaching by one of the leading thinkers in visual business communications.

If you are interested in participating in the workshop download the flyer (pdf) and send us the registration form.

We offer a 10% discount on the workshop fee (normal price is 1650CHF) to the members of Lift community (you simply mention LIFT when you register)

One of the presentations at LIFT08 that hit me the most was this presentation by Younghee Jung at Nokia about Nokia Open Studio. The great thing about the outcomes of her project were that you could really see local culture reflected in the designs that were posted by local communities. Local challenges like weather, criminality or lack of money found their way in design features of the phones.

This keynote offered me great insight in the importance of getting in touch with communities. From a crowdsourcing perspective I am highly interested in what the implications would be when taking this online. Culture on the internet might be not that diversified as the cases in Open Studio, but when approaching communities online, culture will definitely be important.

Thanks to Younghee and many others who really LIFTed me. I am gratefully whirling down again, looking back at a great experience.

What makes LIFT so much more that a meeting for techno-visionaries? As a perfect metaphor for Web 2.0, LIFT has succeeded in creating a new community made up of those of us who want to stay in tune with the world & to connect.

I came away from LIFT 07 and LIFT08 with the certainty that the Geneva get-together is not only a thrilling platform for the discovery and confrontation of new concepts, but is also fast emerging as a spearhead for a “New Switzerland”, a place that creates and attracts bold minds.

Laurent Haug – your imagination, zeal and zest are the driving forces of this venture. By merging with the daring inventiveness of Cristiana Bolli Freitas and Laurent Bolli, together you have allowed creativity to flourish, a formidable component to a gathering which might otherwise have been just ... another conference.

Sylvie, David, Sonia, Nicholas(s), Marc-Olivier, Mathias and so many others whose thoughtful dedication brought it all together, you too deserve our thanks!

The greatest compliment we can offer you is to consider that we are all now part of the vibrant community that you have created. Vive le LIFT! And say hello to all our new South Korean friends when you are there…

I want to thank the whole LIFT organization for making this event already one of the highlights for me this year. Absolutely amazing what you guys pulled off, and hope to be back next year.

I wanted to let everyone know that I'm organizing a conference of my own, dubbed Plugg, which will be held 19 March in Brussels (Belgium).

More info: http://plugg.eu

Short and sweet: Plugg is a web & mobile 2.0 conference focused on raising awareness for European start-ups and investors willing to support emerging technology companies from this continent.

If you're interested in coming to Plugg, register using couponcode 'LIFT' to get 25% knocked off the regular entrance price!

http://plugg.eu/practical-info/register

Thanks to the organization for allowing me to plug Plugg here, and see you all soon!

Florence Devouard is the chairwoman of Wikimedia, the foundation behind Wikipedia. She speaks on "Wikipedia: a social innovation?" at the LIFT07 conference in Geneva, Switzerland, on February 8, 2007.