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As we saw at CES this past week, Microsoft is ready to look past Vista and move onto their new Windows 7 operating system, which features full multi-touch support.  To further push for the advancement of multi-touch technologies and speed up the adoption of the technology in the PC market, the company has just led the latest round in financing multi-touch panel and sensor company N-trig, an Israeli start-up.  Other investors in this round include Aurum Ventures, Challenger Ltd., Canaan Partners, and Evergreen Venture Partners.

Multi-touch anywhere and everywhere possible.

While Erick over at TechCrunch may disagree with my point, I think multi-touch technologies should be used anywhere and everywhere possible; however I do agree that Microsoft and others need to start taking UI design and usability very seriously.  In the future, I foresee the traditional laptop category merging with the tablet category, and therefore it only makes sense to pop some capacitive sensors into laptops as soon as possible.  There will always be low end models that don’t have quite as many features, but I feel multi-touch will become a standard feature in the next 5 or so years.

So is Microsoft making the right decision by investing in N-trig?

I would hands-down say yes.  With the wild success of Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch, Microsoft has realized its future is based around mutli-touch technologies.  The company has already done great work in the multi-touch space, but there is a long way to go to make the technology more affordable, make it smaller, and perfect it.

N-trig’s DuoSense technology is the only combined pen, touch, and multi-touch interface, which makes it an expert in every sense of the word touch.  In the future, people are going to want to be able to interact with their machines in any number of ways, so supporting a company that rules them all is a great idea.  Within a few years, we’ll be able to see if it was worth Microsoft’s chunk of change.  Either way, I’m sure they’re not worried—they’ve got plenty of money sitting around.

Press Release [N-trig]