Microsoft's 'Coffee Compass' research project

Picture You can't get much more Seattle than this. One of the more offbeat projects on display at the Microsoft Research TechFest event today was a "coffee compass" -- a mariners compass that uses GPS technology and an embedded database of Starbucks locations to point to the coffee retailer's nearest Seattle-area store.

Researchers Raman Sarin and Andy Wilson said they came up with the idea after they had a hard time finding coffee while attending a conference in an unfamiliar city. They acknowledge that no one would carry around something like this, but they say the technology could be put into something smaller, like a key chain.

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