I attended the Centre for Next Generation Localisation’s Innovation Showcase event, hosted by Microsoft in Dublin, Ireland. A very well organized and attended event, it was encouraging to see such a huge turnout of enthusiastic, engaged people from the localization and information industries mixing it up with their counterparts in academia and thought leaders in the innovation and research space, generally. And, of course, it was great to meet new people as well hook up again with some people I hadn’t seen for a few years! The networking opportunities afforded by these kind of occasions should never be overlooked.

Standing room only for the intros in the morning, come the afternoon I was particularly impressed with the interaction around research demos about bulk localization workflow, personalized multilingual customer care, and social media. I came away with a couple of ideas I will follow up on as I’d love to explore further the practical promise they offer for the space I work in. That, for me, really is what these kind of initiatives are all about.

I encourage you all to check out the www.cngl.ie website and watch out for more events like this.