Micosoft UK annual conference

Yesterday was Microsoft's UK get-together, with about 1600 people coming together from the London, Cambridge and Reading offices to discuss the previous financial year, this financial year, and drink lots of free wine. There is a MS office up in Scotland too, but as there weren't any fights, I don't think that lot were invited. Just kidding guys, don't blame me, blame Ed Byrne's bad influence ;)

The talks themselves, whilst interesting enough at the time, aren't really worth recounting here, with two notable exceptions. The first, and probably my favourite of the day, came oddly enough from Steve Dunn, the Financial Director of MSUK. He added a nice bit of drama in, and also showed a flair for 'creative accounting', which is obviously a must when reporting back to head-office - very fun indeed ;)

Secondly, the research guys from Cambridge wandered up and blew us all away with Photosynth, a magical (literally, that's the only word for it) technology which takes a bunch of 2D images taken from around an area, and builds up a 3D model of that area. The example in point was images of Notre Dame trawled from Flickr, which were then used to make a perfectly accurate model of the cathedral, through which one could move, seeing it in clear detail from every concievable angle. They also had some very fun image editing algorithms, which allowed one to remove or add objects from/to a picture, without the end result being discernably changed to a viewer who hadn't seen the original. Amazing.

After all of this, some damn fine food was served, along with free drinks, whilst the Comedy Store Players, and then Ed Byrne entertained the audience. The Players did a lot of improvisational comedy, performing a 'set' scene, but with content from the audience. So, for example, they'd have a scene set up, and then edit it based on emotions shouted out from the audience. Naturally, fun ones such as 'lust' and 'disgust' came up, though I was very intrigued to discover that both 'orgasm' and 'homosexuality' are apparently both emotions nowadays. Their final scene was a large musical number, and they really picked the wrong audience for this, as the content of the musical revolved around jobs.

Some of you may not be aware of this, but job titles at Microsoft are very...descriptive - for example, I'm a developer & platform evangelist, and Will's a technical solutions professional. Try fitting either of those into a song. Even worse, try what they actually had to fit in, which was 'search multimedia strategist', ouch. This went on, and was side-achingly funny, I highly recommend these guys if they're ever near you. Ed Byrne was also brilliant, doing some more traditional stand up.

The event, held in the VIP section of Wembley (which is, by the way, staggeringly impressive - did you know the roof covers 11 acres and weighs the same as the Eiffel Tower?), cost a mere $900k, so I feel a bit cheated, classy though it was. Apparently last year's summer party cost Microsoft $6million, and featured Jools Holland and Groove Armada, amongst many other things.