Enclosed is a picture of the panel last Friday I could be part of - it was more livley as it looks here :)

My personal highlight was Saturday morning's speech by Ray Kurzweil - probably the best analyst of the future. Ray has detected several patterns in the past that allow him to forecast what is there to come. He has forecasted the Internet and chess computers to be winning over humans quite correctly.

Now he showed a prototype of the 'Universal Translator' you speak to it in on langauge and it outputs the natural language translation spoken in another language with just a minute delay. It looks like scien fiction but he predicts that to be a standard feature of cell phones in just 5 years - so no jobs for translators anymore :(

Check out http://www.kurzweilai.net and take a look at his latest book The Singularity is near - it will help you find smart new business ideas (think of making Nanobots!).