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About Luminous Group


Barton Friedland

A veteran of both Apple and NeXT, Barton Friedland has worked with and implemented leading edge technologies for over 20 years for companies such as American Express, JP Morgan, Elite Model Management, and Stüssy. From 2003-2006 he held the position of Director of Engineering for Spoken Translation where he developed technology for which he holds a patent. He holds a Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Computer Science from Mills College and was a senior member of the aMap HCI research project at Stanford University.

Barton’s postgraduate research employs an ethnographic approach to understand how people’s beliefs shape their use of tools, and how to this knowledge can be employed to maximize the benefits of computer technology. An established community leader, he is a founding member of Bay Area .NET Users Group and its first Group Chair. He introduced the vision of expanded and interconnected chapters across the Bay area and fostered diverse user membership through the introduction of working groups. Barton also served as a founding member of the Board of Directors for International .NET Association and has written several seminal articles on .NET technology.

Volker Frank 

Volker Frank supports the leadership teams of small and medium-size businesses to develop clear strategic visions and improve effectiveness. Volker's expertise lies in identifying key business processes and measurements, facilitating strategic planning with actionable goals for teams and departments, and providing leadership coaching for managers at every organizational level. Volker has 12 years of software consulting experience working with large corporations such as PeopleSoft, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, mid-size companies and startups. He has designed and implemented mission critical software tools that provide his clients with a competitive edge and increased organizational effectiveness. Volker combines his deep understanding of business processes and cross-functional collaboration with transformational leadership coaching. He assists his clients in finding congruent leadership stances and improving their personal effectiveness. Volker's coaching style is based on 8 years of experience working with systemic group dynamics rooted in the Systemic Constellation approach, and NLP-based personal-effectiveness coaching.


Antje Croseck

Antje brings more than a decade of experience as a senior manager at Kraft Foods Germany where her work focused on line and staff functions for international procurement, human resources and internal communication. For the past 7 years she has been working as an independent consultant focusing on leadership,team and organizational development.

The focus of her practice is end-to-end development of individual and group capability. This includes goal setting, monitoring of change, and management coaching, team development and leadership training. Her diverse range of clients have included Warner Brothers, eBay, Deutsche Bahn AG, Roche, and Bombardier.

Antje's educational background is in business administration with a focus on foreign trade and logistics. She carries additional certifications as a consultant and counselor from the Institute for Supervision and Organizational Consulting ISO Berlin-Cologne and is accredited as a TMS (Team Management System) trainer. She has also been certified for diagnostics such as: BarOn EQI; Leadership Effectiveness Analysis (LEA), Personal Directions (PD) of Management Research Group, Boston.


Jack Whalen

Jack has over two decades of experience -- including a dozen years at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) -- leading projects on user/customer experience, customer services, peer-to-peer sharing of user-generated content, and knowledge management more generally. In these projects Jack goes wherever customers or employees live and work, whether in the States or abroad, immersing himself in their environment, seeing the world through their eyes and advocating for their needs, translating those needs into design specifications, marketing strategies, and business innovations.

Jack's ethnographic research at PARC on how to support knowledge sharing practices in work communities was instrumental in the development of the Eureka ‘technical tips’ system for the Xerox service force. 15,000 service technicians across the globe currently use Eureka, solving over 750,000 problems each year for an estimated annual savings to Xerox of $20M. More recently, Jack has been working with an international marine conservation NGO on building an online community for sustainable fishing issues, one that will be based on user-generated content. He is also collaborating with the NGO on improving their internal organizational processes and communication strategy.

Jack received a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published research papers on a wide variety of topics and given talks about his work at companies and universities around the world. He is a citizen of both the United States and Ireland.


Nick Topolos

Since 1995, Nick Topolos has worked on branding and customer experience projects with major corporations such as The Gap, Intel, and WalMart, as well as creating effective solutions for wineries and food companies such as Joseph Phelps, Domaine Chandon, and Stone-Buhr Flour. As an early Web pioneer, Nick has always strived to provide high-quality visual and information design and has firmly established a reputation for delivering user-centered, well-architected projects on budget and on time-every time.

Before starting his own business, Nick worked at both Macy’s and The Gap, where among other duties he helped launch both their corporate intranet and Internet sites. He co-founded Evolve Design in 1995 and worked with major corporations like Gap, Intel, and WalMart, as well as creating effective branding solutions for technology companies like SBC, BEA WebLogic and Lotus.

In whatever he does, Nick has provides the highest quality visual and information design and has established a reputation for delivering user-centered, architected projects on budget and on time-every time.


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