The Townsend Report

Although it was developed for the XBox360 game system to compete with the Nintendo Wii, the Kinect motion sensor also has serious applications. Developers have created drivers to use Kinect on your PC, enabling control of applications with large and small gestures -- no mouse or touch screen required. Here is a video that illustrates how you can manipulate an onscreen map with Kinect: I expect that many government conference rooms and situation rooms will add this to the touch screens on tables and walls such as Microsoft Surface. Unlike the touchscreens, however, the Kinect is quite inexpensive. A piece of the future is yours for $150. Does this look like something out of Minority Report? You bet it does.

Happy New Year to everyone. Now that the vacations are over, it's time to plan for a big 2011 at InfoStrat. Microsoft will start things off with a bang by sponsoring a series of events to promote the launch of its new version of Dynamics CRM. For a countdown time, event details and more, see the official Dynamics CRM 2011 Launch website . Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will be leading the event on January 20, 2011 starting at 9 am PST. Keynote speakers include: Kirill Tatarinov (Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Solutions), Michael Park (Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Solutions), and Brad Wilson (General Manager, Microsoft Dynamics CRM).