Bill Gates Keynote live from CES

So here I am at Bloghaus watching Bill Gates final CES keynote. Bill opened by recaping on the last "digital decade" and the fact that this is last keynote by Bill. There was a nice humorous video showing Bills "last day" as Chairman of Microsoft. It nice that Microsoft and Bill Gates can poke fun at its self.

You can watch the video at This Link

He then went on to talk about new natural use user interface, and a Vista usage of over 100 million, next up is a demo of Window Live, Windows Live Calendar and Windows Live Photo Gallery (nothing new yet). Surface technology showing Bill customizing a Snowboard looked nice, it will be good to see Surface in person as the videos look good but it is the kind of thing you have to touch

Silverlight was shown off, and it was announced that NBC will be using Silverlight for streaming content from the the 2008 Olympics

Robbie Bach talked about connected entertainment, this is what I wanted to hear about, first he talked about Xbox Live and how Disney would be bringing content to Xbox Live as well as MGM films.

Finally some Media Center news, Samsung are bringing out an Extender device, more on that as I find out more this week, unfortunately that is it for Media Center news which is disapoitning, maybe I can find out more during the course of the week

Mediaroom is getting a big push, new content and they are announcing that BT in the UK will be selling the Xbox 360 as a IPTV client, this is an interesting development that I would like to play with

Zune is coming to Canada in the spring, no mention of a UK launch, we can only hope. Robbie showed the Zune social software which looks very nice, it’s a pity it doesn’t work outside the US

The Ford Sync system demo looked good, having Zune, phones and other in car devices all connected is a great goal.

Windows Mobile voice search via Tellme was demoed, while it looks cool I think searching with text on a mobile phone works for me ok and I don’t feel the pressing need to search with voice.

Bill then talking about where he see the technology goes in the future and a demo of a device from the labs, a kind of mobile assistant.

Finally Bill played Guitar Hero 3 on the Xbox 360 withSlash!

So overall it was a good keynote but without any of the big announcements of the pervious years. I am looking forward to finding out the real Media Center news over the course of the week