Word Lens feels like magic and it's a good example of where the future could take us when we combine location, context, machine translation and a bunch of other tech. Right now, we're just at the beginning of something that could lead to an augmented reality world - built by us. 

Heirlooms are usually things like jewelry or family treasures but Richard Banks of Microsoft Research in Cambridge is exploring how technology can act as heirlooms. Should we be capturing our fleeting moments to hand down to our families or even historians? That's what Richard and a team in Cambridge are exploring. 

Long live the demo king - Blaise Aguera y Arcas gives good demo – that we know already. His first TED presentation remains one of the finest demos I have seen with a beautiful balance of nonchalance, humor and humility. I guess you could say he’s not your average Microsoft demo guy but then he’s not your average guy.

Force feedback systems and haptics have been around for a while...the Arc Touch Mouse got me thinking about what's next for this technology. When you take a look around at some of the explorations with haptics it's clear that we're only at the beginning of what this tech can do for us. 

Take Microsoft Lync, a micro controller, 36 holidays lights and you have the makings of an interesting presence notification system. Our man Andrej Kyselica decided to hook the whole thing up and now has the world's first holiday lights presence indicator. I have 100 holiday lights sat at home just waiting for this.