brian's blog

So I'm in Vegas! I was lucky enough to be asked to help man the Microsoft booth at the CES tradeshow. Flew in a few hours ago, waited in the taxi line at the Vegas airport for an hour with five hundred other people, and am staying at the Wynn hotel. I snapped a few quick photos and have posted them in an album here.

I've never been to Vegas before so heading down the strip was a bit of a sensory overload. Right now I'm watching the Bill Gates keynote. Bits I'm particularly excited about:

• The Phillips VOIP phone that plugs into Messenger to make calls
• The DirecTV partnership with Media Center to enable rich on-demand TV content
• The Averatec mini Media Center (< $1000 w/ tuner, $499 w/o a tuner) -- seems like Averatec is trying to release a Mac Mini PVR before Apple does
• The MTV Urge music service -- this seems like a slick service, has a subscription option, and seems to integrate tightly with Media Player. Our team will have mixed feelings about it, though.
• They showed off a very sexy portable video device, roughly the size of a PSP, made by LG. Widescreen, too.
• A Windows Live gadget that recommends TV shows based on the shows you've recorded on your MCE (which can also be remotely programmed via a Live Remote Record gadget)
• A $400 HD DVD drive to be released in March, though the floating head producer / director commentary was a little creepy
• An agreement with the cable operators to allow HD protected content to be recorded & transfered via Media Center was announced -- I want to learn more about this
• The Xbox team is adding a third worldwide manufacturer to try and keep up with demand / supply issues
• An external Xbox HD DVD drive to be released later this year

I missed the first 15 min of the keynote, though, so I may have missed some other announcements.

Anyway, it's about time I get out of this hotel room!