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 is one of the most interesting and respected specialist of a new kind of consulting that aims to turn complex processes into easy-to-grasp illustrations. A picture is worth a thousand words, and this old truth can be leveraged inside organizations to communicate more effectively.

Join me on March 18 for a privileged day with Dave Gray to learn how to avoid letting mediocre communications lead to misalignment in management, and lead to poor implementation. Dave explains the aim of this workshop in an audio interview here. Arvetica - a company founded by my former colleagues and friends of Pictet - is offering a 10% discount on the workshop fee (normal price is 1650CHF) to the readers of this blog if you simply mention LIFT when you register!

“We used to fool ourselves,’ [Edgar Bronfman, CEO of Warner Music] said. “We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.“
Link

If I am working for Warner Music I wait 6 more months before printing my resignation letter, just in case this is finally the definite sign that this industry is waking up. The “inadvertently”part is a bit too much, not sure how you can sue hundreds of people without noticing but hey, at least the process started.

When you want to know what the next five years will look like, it is usually a good idea to listen a Doc Searls speech.

Doc - who I still hope to be able to invite one day at LIFT (he said he would love to come in 08 but since got buried under an overload of emails) - talks about Vendor Relationship Management, or the final step in the power transfer from vendors to consumers, what Doc also refers to as the intention economy. From his speech at Leweb3.

We will be able to manage vendors at least as well as they manage us. We are calling this VRM, Vendor Relationship Management. The project is being launched within the Harvard’s Berkman Center. The core concept is that the individual should be able to manage their relationships with their vendors and suppliers, based on the idea that they actually know more about specific preferences, updated data, etc.
Link

Imagine VRM on a large scale. You would have something even more powerful than stock markets: real time consumer-driven indicators, forcing vendors into behaving better because of this freely available pulse. Consumer dictatorship. It will happen, and probably create a whole new set of issues (consumers not reading the manual and complaining about things they should have known, competitors sending in fake reviews, etc…).

It finally looks like our political powers are on the verge of making a SMART decision in the Internet world! The European Commission will close websites who are misleading consumers within a year if they don’t improve.

BBC: Airline websites are ‘misleading’
At least 200 European airline websites are misleading the consumer, a study by the European Commission has found. […] Common infringements included:
• prices on the home page that don’t include taxes and charges
• free flights that aren’t in the end free
• compulsory purchase of insurance attached to an offer

Halleluyah.

More new technologies reinventing shopping.

Seeking the latest in the ultimate convenient shopping experience, the i-Fashion Clothing Technology Center […] has developed what it calls the i-Fashion system.

With this new technology, a ten-second body scan creates an avatar twin of a shopper saving the person the trouble of trying on clothes in future shopping trips.

This first-of-its-kind technology is expected to increase choices for customers and boost clothing sales.

Link (via Seoul Digital City)

Basing the model on the prospect of allowing shoppers to save “the trouble of trying on clothes” sounds a bit off target. I thought trying clothes was precisely what people - and especially women - like in shopping. But this should change the way clothes are sold over the Internet, and in that aspect it’s very promising.

Nowadays every organization seems to be tempted by crowdsourcing, this idea of outsourcing part of your processes (creation, promotion, conception) to the public using new technologies. It is surely appealing, and has worked for all different kind of companies like P&G or La Fraise.

But two of the most innovative and successful companies of our time use a totally opposite approach, actually hiding their products from the public eyes as long as they can. I am of course talking about Apple (who is regularly suing anybody talking about products before their official launch) and Google (who rarely speaks about a product before releasing it).

This shows there are ways to survive and try to be smarter than the masses, as “non-web2″ as this sentence might sound. Apple does it with common sense and design, Google by relying on workers who are usually the earliest of early adopters. As usual with these tech trends (2005: blogs, 2006: second life, 2007: communities, crowdsourcing) there is no automatic answer, each situation demands a different answer as disappointing as it sounds.

That right here is the future of online shopping (among other things) if this technology works as well as advertised and can become cheap enough to reach our homes.

A system that makes three dimensional images solid enough to grasp has been unveiled by Japanese firm NTT. […]

The prototype Tangible 3D system combines a 3D display with a “haptic glove”. The display creates lifelike images appear in just in front of a flat screen. It creates the illusion of depth by showing slightly different images to each of the viewer’s eyes. This means no special glasses are needed.

Attached to the display is a haptic glove. Once inside, a user’s hand is touched by numerous force-feedback components to make it feel as if it interacting with something solid.

Link

Nintendo’s ideas to reach new customers for its Wii game console have added another direction today: The company introduced the WiiFit software and the Wii Balance Board which effectively create a virtual workout center in front of your TV.

Link

The Wii is in my opinion still overrated, but it at least creates interesting business model innovation for Nintendo.

China is just two years away from catching up on Europe’s level of spending on research and development, a study showed on Monday.

Link (via IFTF)

We lost the workforce war. Will we also lose the ideas one?

Retailers have long developed an art of selling us more by using architectural and placement techniques in physical stores. They put cheap products at the front to attract bystanders inside the store, colorful products at the bottom of the racks so that kids can grab them and start pitching their parents.

This knowledge was brutally useless in the electronic world as in that case success was more about reading Jakob Nielsen and trying to fit a maximum number of products in a 1024*768 screen.

Now that 3D is back on the radars with the success of World of Warcraft or Second Life, it is not surprising to see retailers create shopping environments allowing them to reuse their hard-learned lessons.

In Germany Otto launched a 3D store – demoed back in January at DLD07 – that “offers functions that are not available or that are difficult to implement on traditional e-commerce Web sites, including the ability to see sets of clothing together or dynamically zoom in on image details”.

3D shopping as the future of ecommerce? Probably.