I recently spent one day at the SharePoint Conference in Berlin. It was a great event. Kudos to Wim Dierickx who organized the event. There were plenty of problems in the sign up process, the organization, payment, exhibition agreements etc. which worried me but in the end the whole show came together to be (I've heard) 3 great days of connecting about SharePoint. I think perhaps Berlin was not the best venue but I suppose it was set there to cater to the German SharePoint customers.
In any case, we made some great contacts and our Chief Software Engineer, Lars Fastrup, gave two very popular speaches about Search and our products. He simply knows all (or almost all) there is to know about SharePoint search. Well done Lars!
If I didn't get a chance to meet up with you at the conference please send me a mail and we will arrange a time to talk. There is a lot of opportunity around search now.