As I was hunting around for a quick (and free) solution to set up a demo instance of SharePoint 2013 in the cloud, I found, much to my surprise, that the quickest and easiest way to get a SharePoint 2013 instance up was on the Rackspace cloud.  They have a 45-day, try-it-free offer.  Here’s a screencast to see how I did it.

I am wondering about your techniques for quickly building SharePoint 2013 proof-of-concept sites.  Share tips (as comments) on this blog post — thanks!