[photopress:gates.jpg,full,centered] Ok, his final CES keynote speech as Chairman of Microsoft.

And another day of no real digital photographic breakthough news. Hmmm…I think people are holding out for MACWORLD AND PMA. And we’ll also be covering PhotoLA later this week. The Yin and the Yang.

What did we learn in this keynote speech though?

Major Microsoft partnering is afoot. The 2008 Olympics will be broadband in a big way this year.
Ford has already introduced Synch where you can synch your MP3 player and smartphone to your new Ford vehicle. Just say which song to play, and it will. Even from your iPod. And say the name of the person you want to call. And it will. Lots of voice recognition going on. And they claim 98% accuracy.
Social networking through MSN Live, some future looks at the Surface, the touch screen table, and a new GPS type personal…um…locator? Point it at a place, and it actually will be able to recognize landmarks as simple as a restaurant and or club and give detailed and perhaps video info on the image. OK, thats in the future.

Mr. Gates played a hysterical video about his last days at Microsoft, with roast material from a slew of heavy hitting notables.

Here is Matthew Mcconaughey training him for his new life.
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Gates ended the keynote with a Guitar Hero Challenge with one of his execs. Although Gates had a ringer come onto the stage…Slash who wailed with the opening straing of Welcome to the Jungle.
Now that’s good stuff.
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But he kept talking about Zune. Oh, well.

Right. It wasn’t all about Bill Gates today.

Sony had some product announcements, and they smiled about the industry winner Blu-Ray. the war is over and they won.

We’ll review the new products later this week as we see what they may mean to the photographer in you.

Now there was another event, filthy with tons of companies, and we found some great tools for your kit. Breakthrough stuff? Nope. But useful none the less.

Solar chargers, emergency battery chargers, bluetooth headsets (yep, tons more) digital frames (wait on those for now),large flash drives. small travel surge protected power bars, and more.

Just sifting through it all before we put out a solid list.