I’ve written before about The Garage at Microsoft, a grass roots creative community and a physical space here on our Redmond campus. While the movement began here it has now spread far and wide across Microsoft and encourages employees from across the company to build their own projects and collaborate with like-minded tinkerers. Last week Microsoft IT India held their third Garage Science Fair at the Hyderabad campus and it was another roaring success with over 450 attendees during the day.
The Garage community in Hyderabad has over 300 members who have created in excess of 190 projects over the last 3 years and it’s perhaps no surprise that this year the hot technologies that showed up in the 58 projects at the fair were Windows 8, Windows Phone and Kinect. The Times of India covered a few of the Kinect projects as did India TV news who focused on a project called Kinect Bridge that uses Kinect to enable seamless communication between speech impaired people and others using gesture tracking.
Two other projects that grabbed attention were Windows Phone applications. My Obstetrics helps expecting mothers by keeping track of vital information and won the people’s choice award while IndianRail, a guide to Indian Railway Trains is already available in the Windows Phone Marketplace.
For me, it’s great to see The Garage spreading across Microsoft and the enthusiasm for grass roots innovation at the company and although I haven’t seen the photos, I’m sure the customary volcano erupted at the winners ceremony. Hopefully I can make it there in person next year to witness first hand!
