Suppliers Summit and a Duke's Choice Award

Good Afternoon Teams,

This week FRC is holding our annual Supplier’s Summit. Every year we invite our major suppliers (most of whom are also donors) to join us for a day here in Manchester. Thursday night we host a thank you dinner at Dean’s house, then Friday we meet to recap the 2009 season, discuss next year’s kit, gather feedback and ask for additional support. This year, for the first time, participants will have a chance at the Summit to interact with teams, see match play up close and drive robots built with the parts they supplied. My thanks to teams 40, 131, 151, 238, 501 and 1519 who helped make this possible.

Congratulations to Brad Miller of WPI who received a Duke’s Choice Award at last week’s JavaOne Conference. Brad was honored by Sun Microsystems for his work creating a Java port and a Java library for FRC teams to use in the 2010 FRC season. Thank you Brad for all you do. And thanks to teams 115, 604, 846 and 971 who demonstrated their robots and answered questions from the crowd during the conference.

What is your team up to this summer? Are you doing something interesting to promote FIRST? Let me know at FRCteams@usfirst.org.

212 days until the 2010 Kickoff
See you there!

P.S. FIRST is switching to a new email server this weekend. During the transition, delivery of email sent to any usfirst.org address after 5PM EST on Friday will be delayed. By Monday morning everything should be back to normal.