By far the most well-received keynote presentation was Kevin Schofield's. He is the guy that helps with figuring out what work data we can recognize and act upon. He is the Director of Microsoft Research.  His presentation was far from the Zen Presentation style that I am so fond of.  Kevin was an ok speaker, lot's of ummmm's in his speech.  With information this dynamic he could have done much more in delivering impact in the first 5 minutes.  

He pointed out this image as a good example of Information Density:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Minard.png

File server temperature Sensors for a data center for HVAC systems.   (YAWN).......

Pointing out how good data visualization can work to help understand complex data.  See here for an example: http://samiam.colorado.edu/~mcclella/ftep/shuttle.html

Visualizing Data in 3 Dimensions.  Kevin - It is called Bump Top http://bumptop.com/

GapMinder:  as an example.   Dude..... GapMinder is owned by Google - And Hans Roslings does a great presentation on this system - No More Boring Data.    http://www.gapminder.org/video/talks/ted-2007—-the-seemingly-impossible-is-possible.html  I would love to see this kind of research applied to customer segments, or product profitability over time, etc.  It would have been good to see this research applied to the business data. 

 
Almost but not quite for me.  I hope in the future they spend more time on the actual content as it applies to the 10,000 business people in the room.  It was cool but really missed the mark for me.