Microsoft Techfest

Next week I will be in Washington State. The trip is courtesy of Microsoft and I will be visiting the Techfest 2008 at Microsoft Research. As far as I know, this is a regular event that was initially started to allow Microsoft research to demonstrate their activities to one another and to a range to employees in the company at large. More recently, it has been opened up to include non-Microsoft attendees. The official description says it allows attendees to "exchange ideas with colleagues, show off their latest innovations, and shine a light into the future of computing". No matter what computing platform you prefer, there is no doubt that MS Research has an enormous group of very smart and influential people, and it should be interesting.