The Microsoft Professional Developers Conference is a great chance to learn about Microsoft's next generation of development tools, including Windows Phone 7, Windows Azure, WPF, and Silverlight.  It will also be a great chance to make connections with many of the solid developers at Microsoft and give input to what Microsoft can provide to make us successful.  I'm really looking forward to this years conference, being held on the Microsoft Campus.

This is the second year of PayPal's dedicated developer conference and I'm going back!  During the two day conference, I will be meeting first hand with PayPal's developers and learn of many exciting new ways to use PayPal's current and soon to be released API's. What does this mean for you? Products produced by Spirit Led Development, LLC will be even more secure, will offer a variety of payment options, and will keep your financial information safe! We will also be looking into incorporating charitable donations into our products. You will see this first with SaveMyDocs.com, but the knowledge gained will be rolled into other applications, including embedded and mobile.

After a few delays we are finally close to releasing SaveMyDocs.com.  I feel this product offering will be a safe, simple, and very cost effective backup strategy for the general public and small business communities. Users will no longer be at risk of losing years worth of documents, photos, accounting records and other files currently only stored on one computer or locally. Expect to see much more about SaveMyDocs.com in the coming weeks.

Last year, Microsoft ran an embedded development contest and I was one of fifty semi-finalists in the professional category! I submitted my prototype but unfortunately did not make it to the final round of 5. You can check out the contest here: www.dreamdifferentcontest.com. My round two video can be viewed here. Once SaveMyDocs.com is comfortably in production we may pursue some of the ideas I came up with during the contest.

 We would like to thank to following:

• eDevice - for providing an embedded GPRS modem together with GPRS network service.  eDevice provides complete M2M (machine-to-machine) solutions including GPRS and worldwide network services.
• Device Solutions Ltd. - for creating an awesome board to develop on, the Tahoe II, and a great board to take your product to the next level, the Meridian/P.
• TechnoGumbo.com - Charles Palen at TechnoGumbo.com has some great articles which were very helpful in this project. Be sure to check out his site.
• Microsoft.com - And of course Microsoft for holding some pretty cool developer contests.

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