Last night was the AC2005 Tech Night reception up at SAP Labs in Palo
Alto, CA.  It was a great gathering with an amazing set of
demonstrations.  A lot of fun.  Some of the things that I
really enjoyed were:

• Digital Identity – I got to meet Kaliya Hamlin – Identity Woman – in person.  She was at an Identity Commons booth, and I also spent time talking with Ajay Madhok – founder and CEO of AmSoft Systems – and saw his demonstration of using iNames with cell phones … some cool stuff.
• New Space Technologies – I met Michael Mealing of Masten Space Systems. 
  They are working on re-useable low-cost launch vehicles for taking
  smaller payloads (one cubic meter) into space.  They are looking
  to do a first launch in 2007 … so not too far away.  It was fun
  to see that this type of thinking – and work towards making it a
  reality! – is becoming so commonplace today.
• OpenCroquet – there was a great demo of the OpenCroquet system … something that I am going to go and check out more.
• IMSmarter – these guys have a very cool couple of products with their IMSmarter and pbwiki
  products … both are consumer extensions of existing technologies with
  cool spins.  The IMSmarter application is unique is that they are
  leveraging the power of Internet “proxies” to insert themselves in the
  stream of communications to add enhanced services.
• TroyWorks – Troy Gardner was there showing off some of his TroyWorks
  visual interfaces that were very cool.  I have some ideas that I
  am discussing with him … I really like what he is doing.
• Tactical Iraqi – this was an amazing example of how learning tools are evolving.  Tactical Iraqi is a combination of traditional learning and gaming to rapidly teach Arabic to people.

The conference is starting … I’m looking forward to being blown away …