After adding a few things to the new DIY Multitouch PC forum, I thought it would be good to point you to an historical multitouch document: Andrew Wilson of Microsoft Research published TouchLight: An Imaging Touch Screen and Display for Gesture-Based Interaction and presented a few years ago. Good reminder.

As Microsoft's Chairman, Bill Gates paints a vision of technology today and how those advancements can improve tomorrow and is a trusted advisor on how we can achieve these goals.

This week Bill Gates testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Science and Technology on the celebration of the 50th of the Committee. He answered questions ranging from the knowledge gap with students, fundamental problems with teacher professional development, the next big thing in technology, to inspiring kids to learn. Gates' message is consistent with prior speeches, but reviewing is worthwhile. "It starts with education," he stated.

Also this week, Bill Gates addressed the Northern Virginia Technology Council (March 13, 2008). In this he gave more specific examples about technology available to students today, including the WW Telescope project from MSR and Tablet PCs.

So if you put it on your computer and say hey, I’d like to see that for myself – you just connect up your telescope and boom, there you are. You can acquire information, add that to your database. So software touching all the sciences in a pretty deep way. So with these platforms there will be a huge variation in how creative governments are in applying software to their task, how creative businesses are to apply it to their task, how schools can take this and do new things.

Are you one of the lucky designers or developers attending Mix '08? Mix is more than a "web conference." It's been a great place for people to talk about interactive design.

This is the first year that I won't be attending Mix. That said, I couldn't stay away from peeking at the sessions list. In addition to the keynote, which I hope I can view online later, these two sessions would make my session list.

Lanac Technology is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Chicago that offers training for business solutions. This month they are offering a course on configuring Windows Vista, including:

Module 4: Configuring Mobile Computers

The RTM of Microsoft Silverlight Ink SDK is available on MSDN.

Microsoft and its partners' visions of how technology can be used by teachers and students are highlighted at Schools of the Future. At the Philadelphia SOF students, teachers and staff have been using Gateway Tablet PCs or Samsung UMPCs in one PC per student learning environment.

Silverlight.net links to Loren's Search TIP. Cool.

Jim, of HP's Worldwide Higher Education Philanthropy group, writes, "I often get asked, “What can you do with a Tablet PC?” So I have created a quick (<2min) and simple “how to” movie showing how easy it is to annotate PowerPoint slides while you give a lecture…."

Thanks, Jim. Demonstrations like these are very helpful!

Microsoft's Mobile PC News! newsletter is a monthly ecosystem update. Did you submit your company's recent mobile PC hardware or software product release for the October newsletter? What about that product review that you just published? Here's the information on how to get it listed:

By running Silverlight within Firefox on a Mac, it is possible to see Microsoft's latest handwriting recognition side-by-side with Apple InkWell handwriting recognition.