Bill Gates kicked off proceedings last night with his last keynote as a full-time Microsofter; see Bobbie Johnson's report on the celebrity cameos (Slash, Bono, etc) and product announcements during the speech and his handbag-sized Gates- biog.
Those announcements in brief:
• Microsoft and NBC Universal are partnering on coverage of the Olympics, with NBC providing video coverage for MSN that can be accessed live and on-demand. The service will be branded NBCOlympics.com and built using Silverlight.
• ABC and Disney TV shows will be added to the Xbox Live video offering, some of which will be in HD. Shows include Ugly Betty and Lost and movies including Legally Blonde and Rocky will be added, as well as additional titles from United Artists.
• Xbox sold 1.7m at Christmas, Microsoft said - putting Xbox 360 "Xbox 360 on track to register the biggest year in video game history as U.S. consumers spent more on the Xbox 360 platform in 2007 than on any other gaming platform".
• Zune will launch in Canada in the Spring. More than 1.5 million people have joined the Zune social networking service, said Microsoft.
• 100m Vista licences have been sold, said Gates, wheeling out a couple of 'fashion' laptops as examples of how PCs will remain what Microsoft described as "a central catalyst for the advances of the digital decade'.
• One million set-top boxes now use Mediaroom, Microsoft's IPTV technology, and a new service called DVR anywhere will launch, allowing users to watch pre-recorded shows on multiple home TVs.
• Speech, vision and touch are the future of interfaces. The Tellme mobile service, already launched with AT&T and Sprint, gives location-relevant search results and will be built in to future versions of Windows Mobile. Sync, the voice-activated entertainment system, is already being deployed in Ford cars.
Wired, Engadget and half the rest of the web were live blogging the keynote, but our Bobbie will also be filing some video soon from Gates' speech.
There are four more keynotes this week from Intel's president and chief executive Paul Otellini, Comcast chairman and chief executive Brian Roberts, General Motors' chairman and chief executive Rick Wagoner and Gary Shapiro, president and chief executive of the Consumer Electronics Association. More follows, as they say.
Update: Bobbie Johnson's video on the Gates keynote is now live.
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