Wow… exciting day here at Office Labs.  This morning, Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp., delivered his final CEO Summit keynote address titled “The Next Wave of Business Productivity and the Challenge of Continual Innovation” to more than 115 CEOs from around the world. Quick background: The Microsoft CEO Summit is a premier forum that unites the world’s business leaders to discuss and debate the most pressing economic, political, social and technological trends shaping the global business landscape.

You might wonder what this has to do with Office Labs?  If you had a chance to see Bill’s keynote, you probably remember the TouchWall / Plex demo.  This work is an example of some of the research we are doing as a part of our envisioning effort.  We are exploring new technology before people even know they need it, helping to paint a picture of what the future could look like.  We are evolving software solutions for people to work better and smarter. It was a thrilling opportunity to share some of our envisioning explorations with the CEO Summit audience here in Redmond and via the web cast with viewers like you from around the world!

So a bit more detail… what are TouchWall and Plex? TouchWall is a research project, developed in conjunction with our friends in Microsoft Research.  It is large format display prototype, built to more deeply explore collaborative multi-touch interaction scenarios. Plex is a research prototype from Microsoft Office Labs.  It explores an alternative experience for organizing, exploring and presenting content. Like a vertical representation of Microsoft’s Surface technology, it lets the presenter give an infinite tour of materials in a more dynamic format.  TechCrunch and CNet have already reported on the TouchWall and Plex in their blog posts.

Over time, you’ll likely see more envisioning explorations on officelabs.com. We know that some of you came across our future health vision video on popular video sharing sites. This video showcases real emerging technology concepts from Microsoft Research and partners. It provides a glimpse of what we believe is a possible scenario in envisioning technologies’ impact on the future of health. Office Labs’ work is based on comprehensive research of global social, economic and industry trends in light of emerging technology shifts and transformations. With close input from customers, partners and subject matter experts from around the world, our team is constantly evolving future productivity explorations. We hope to share more of those explorations with you on officelabs.com. Stay tuned.