There are few things that can substitute for the richness of communication of a bunch of people around a white board. For collaborative and agile teams working on products where the folks are not representative of the ultimate customer, colocation is incredibly effective. Even better when they are colocated with their customers. I have heard of a number of financial firms in particular moving IT teams out of their silos.

Youch, I live in Seattle and anytime there is a large gathering of people, i.e. Bumbershoot, sports, there is very little chance of ATT data, 3G or Edge. Usually you can still get voice, but occasionally that fails as well. Also downtown in any of the big buildings has sporadic problems. Now ATT seems to have this fixed in Austin TX... Of course public venues there seem to have higher probability of free WiFi which may take some of the burden.

Imagine if her parents took her to Australia and customs confiscated her Teddy Bear...

I didn't see a link to the KB article in question. I assume this is the one: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975530

I was there. The last two in Seattle were at Adobe and Google. Many thanks for MS for sponsoring this. Other than to win the prize, I think everyone would agree it would be stupid to target Windows mobile phone users. The fan favorites actually did both a Palm Pre and iPhone version of their app. Both the MS sponsored prize (preannounced for best team on MS platform) and the incubator (most promising business model) sponsored prizes went to the SearchKick team on the MS platform. I think 13 or so of the 15 teams ended up building on the MS platform with lots of first time SilverLight developers.