Editor's note: Practically every week, a media organization throws an event or a conference built around doing business in new and creative ways. These gatherings certainly can be helpful and illuminating, but they can be tough to break away for and they can be pricey. Portfolio.com's editors and writers drop into several throughout the year, and we're bringing you highlights. Today's event: Fast Company Innovation Uncensored San Francisco.

9:17 a.m. What would the business conference circuit do without Reid Hoffman? The co-founder of LinkedIn and a partner in the venture capital firm Greylock Partners shows up as a panelist or keynoter at seemingly every big-picture event out there. Fast Company turned to Hoffman to kick-off its day-long chat fest and networking opportunity being held in a once-industrial loft space in downtown San Francisco.

And for good reason: Hoffman has the ability to impart the kind of entrepreneurial wisdom and counsel that every startup founder should sit through. He's kind of like Yoda or Mr. Miyagi or Mary Poppins for the startup age.

"You want new ideas that are structural and large and disruptive ... that create institutions that could last hundreds of year," said Hoffman, clearly the fan of the big idea and the grand gesture. "What's the product What's the idea? What's the game changer? What's the thing that changes and improves the lives of, in the consumer industry, hundreds of millions of people?"

Hoffman has a new book coming out next year, The Start-up of You, in which he tries to apply the lessons of his entrepreneurial experience toward helping people get better control of their lives. Hoffman sums up the book like this: "What is the business of me and how do I do that?" Something tells me this will be the topic of many panels next year.

9:52 a.m. Sometimes, it truly is a truly simple thing that can make a difference in the relationship between a company and a consumer. That may seem like a totally trite takeaway and something that everyone should just accept as true, but too often it gets lost in the noise coming from big corporations or entrenched executives.

That message came through from the tale of a note and a cookie. As she questioned Virgin America president and chief executive officer David Cush about best practices, Fast Company's Nancy Miller noted how she had taken a flight on the airline from Los Angeles to San Francisco this week. Miller said she got angry when there was a line of eight people waiting for an agent. But she quickly calmed down when offered a cookie and an explanation that the airline was going through a major technical upgrade. Crisis solved, Miller got on her plane calm and still a fan of Virgin America.

Her reaction was designed, Cush said. The airline knew it was going to have a big challenge in switching over its reservation and operation technology systems while still keeping planes in the air. But instead of just coordinating with technical and operations folks, they included the marketing department into the discussion.

Simple, right? Now, where's my cookie? That's ok, I'll settle for the new entertainment system Cush said was being installed on Virgin America's planes next year that would allow a user to peer beneath the plane in flight.

10:17 a.m. Cisco takes a very liberal attitude when it comes to its workers' use of social media and its employees choice of technology to bring to work. Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's chief technology officer and its senior vice president for engineering (not to mention someone with a killer Twitter following), said the company has had very few problems with either of those decision. The reason: Cisco trusts its people to make sound decisions with external communications and its employees don't violate that trust.

"It's common sense," she said in a session on the future of the social Web. "You have to know what you can share and you can't share."

Warrior said another idea that Cisco is advancing is to get further away from face-to-face meeting. The shift to more telecommuting and more virtual meetings helps with employee morale, but also a company's bottom line. At Cisco, Warrior said these moves have saved $300 million to $400 million a year.

Beyond those corporate cost savings, Warrior cited the findings of a Cisco report released today that showed how important the use of social media and issues tied to flexibility are to younger workers. For the Millennial generation, those who are under 30, 40 percent to 45 percent said they'd be willing to be paid less if they had more flexibility.

"This is going to be a reality," Warrior said of these generational shifts in attitudes, "so we'd better prepare ourselves."

11:10 a.m. It's no surprise that bankers are all tied into knots over what they see as lost revenue in a more mobile (and more regulated) environment. ATM fees keeping going up. Bank of America and others toyed with the idea of imposing a monthly fee on debit card use. They may have backed off that for now, but don't expect that to last. After all, the big banks are worried about lost profits and they have shareholders to worry about.

It's fair to say that if a banker had been in the audience today hearing Seth Priebatsch talk, that financial professional would have broken into a cold sweat. Priebatsch, the "chief ninja" at SCVNGR, gave a rapid-fire and often dense presentation on the $50 billion businesses (and consumers) pay each year in interchange fees on consumer purchases and how he thinks they can disappear.

What Priebatsch offered is a way to use some of the concepts behind designing video games to create a system where these interchange fees get brought down to zero.

"A couple of years back, a great guy named Al Gore invented the Internet ... and allowed information to flow frictionlessly," Priebatsch said. "Money is just another form of information and it should be able to flow frictionlessly."

His presentation was passionate, but dense. And the upshot he made was that if businesses and consumers get saved that $50 billion in fees, it will spur even more spending on and within those businesses.

But what about banks and credit card companies? Priebatsch wasn't as specific about how they can make up that $50 billion but he said he'd offer this message: "The shift is coming. It's actually very good for you guys, but you need to be at the forefront of how it's happening."