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Yes, next week I’ll be heading to Berlin along with 6,500 other reporters, writers and journalists to report on the IFA consumer electronics show in Germany. I’ll also be at three panels comparing and contrasting the U.S. and European high tech markets. One panel will be talking about what consumer electronics companies can learn from business to business information technology. I think I will focus on reliability and security and testing of products as business methodologies that would fit well in the consumer world. While most of the other journalists will head over to look at the latest flat panels, phones, etc, I’m going to head over to the section featuring white goods. You know washing machines and such. Europe is ahead of us on using energy usage as a measure of technical innovation and I want to see where they stand. I’m also curious about home networking. Not networking of entertainment devices but networking of appliances, heating systems and such. Missing those white goods and systems networks was a major miss for Microsoft, Cisco and the other big U.S. vendors. I’ll be keeping you up to date on my blog.