As I type this, the Bill Gates keynote has just started (5 minutes late). This post will continue to be updated with notes from the live stream. The sign indicates there are 130,000 attendees and over one million square feet of booth space with 199 sessions.

Gary Shapiro, President of the CES, walks out on the stage and says a few housekeeping notes, a couple minutes of horn tooting and then introduces Bill Gates for his 10th CES keynote. No, wait, first a Microsoft video which had a few employees talking about how great it was work to there.

And then the video froze, I’m assuming from overwhelming load. Argh. Here it goes, I thought.

Fortunately, the buffering went away quickly and then the video returned. Then the lights came on to Bill Gates standing. He opened with talking about how he felt honored to receive the person of the year award from Time along with his wife and Bono.

- This continues with the “decade of the digital lifestyle”
- Year 2005 was a big year but this next year will “probably be even bigger”
- “Consumers are getting more and more connected.”

DEMO #1: He touches a gigantic screen on the wall (DEMO) where he can touch and drag items with this hand and shows how he might interact at the home (pictured at top of this post).

DEMO #2: Gates sits down at a desk with a long three pane futuristic monitor which shows interacting at the digital enabled office. No logins, all fingerprint security (biometric).

He uses his Tablet PC to take notes during the meeting and interact with the other participants.

DEMO #3: At the airport and there is a long table where Gates lays down his phone and it recognizes through Bluetooth who he is and it beams out on the screen more information from his cell phone. He checks his email.

Aaron Woodman comes out and and shares some Vista screens and functions. The search seemed real snappy in the examples.

- Mini-screen on the bottom of laptops where you can check out the time and other small gadget functions without actually having to boot up the computer. This would be cool on the underside of a tablet.
- For the first time ever in Windows operating system parental controls will be built into Vista.
- Flight Simulator demo with helicopter demo. “Gaming is going to be awesome on Windows Vista!”
- Photos (pic #10) with smaller thumbs and more picture information. More built-in photo editing functionality. Always saves original (wow, imagine that will eat up some hard disk space). Ability to add themes to photos.
- Music. Includes album art inside next generation Windows Media player. Additional information. Quick results returned on search emphasized.

Van Toffler (spelling?) came out next from MTV to talk about their new (coming soon) music service Urge. Will be programmed for music fans by music fans.

Subscribers will drive this program. It sounded somewhat like LAUNCHcast and Pandora.

Justin Timberlake comes out on stage. Does a little one bar spoof of Ebony and Ivory with “Artistry and Technology” Timberlake will be doing some work (exclusively perhaps?) with MTV Urge.

Bill Gates back out on the stage, starts talking about Palm and the single hand operation functions they have innovated. And here I thought Palm was on its way out.

- 6.5 million Media Center PCs sold. 130 manufacturers and 33 countries on board. He gives way to the Media Center Rep (didn’t get name) who goes through new features coming with Vista Media Center.

- HD-DVD has some interesting features like a talking head commenter function where people can be seen floating over the DVD offering commentary on the movie.
- album sorting (music) by year, now that is a slick feature. So you can go back through your library and listen to only 80s albums.

Peter Moore comes out to talk about the Xbox 360 (7:56pm PST):

- Xbox in more than 22 million homes.
- Xbox Live now has 2+ million members
- Xbox 360 in nearly 30 countries … on track to ship between 4.5 - 5.5 million consoles by June 2006
- Adding a third manufacturing partner in order to try and better meet consumer demand
- Over 4 million downloads from Xbox live in a month
- Xbox Live Arcade will have 20+ games by March 2006. Texas Hold ‘em to be fully sponsored by River Belle? Did I hear that right? They will have an online casino partner for an Xbox 360 casino style game? Very interesting development there considering online casinos are of questionable legality. Could this be an early sign of greasing the path to real online gambling possibly being allowed someday (legally?) through Xbox Live? Now that would be something.
- Bill Gates in an Xbox 360 game vs. Steve Ballmer.

After that a few wrapup words from Gates and it’s over.

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