Consumer Electronics Show

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I'm back to Seattle from CES, still reeling from the one-two punch of CES plus Las Vegas. I’ve been to plenty of developer shows in my time, but never to CES. It is a different beast entirely than a PDC, TechEd or MIX.  A few highlights from my time there:

 

I gave a talk to the Windows Vista RTM lab about the partner opportunity with Vista, blogged about by Mary Jo Foley here. A bunch of great folks there, fun to talk to. In fact, here's are some photos of me I found on IStartedSomething showing my favorite feature of Vista, which is c:\program files\reference assemblies\microsoft\framework\v3.0:

 

 

 

I spent most of my time at the conference at the Microsoft Partner Pavilion, showing off, well, partner applications. Can't blog too much about it, as the pavilion was by invitation only. But here's a picture if you are curious. 

 

 

Also, spent some time at the Yahoo pavilion, where they were showing off their Messenger for Vista application:

 

 

I watched Bill Gates' keynote from the Bloghaus which was lots of fun. Caught up with the Scobleizer (pictured below) and had some other interesting conversations with the blogger Web 2.0 scene.

 

 

 

During Gates keynote, I cheered when he gave a shout out to Windows Presentation Foundation. (If you search the transcript, you'll find it.) Go WPF!

 

Admidst all this, I did have some time to walk the floor. Intense. My favorite booth from a design point of view was the CMC Magnetics booth. While everyone else was going for sleek, smooth, classically technical with lots of black and silver, lots of geometry, CMC had this bubbly, organic, pastel booth with plastic orbs, invoking Takashi Murakami. Here's their booth:

 

 

And here's a Murakami sculpture:

 

 

Here's a close up of the orb things; note the flower petals scattered among the CDS:

 

 

And finally, unexpected among all the gadgetry and technical wizardry: a booth featuring ukulele, acoustic, nothing tricked out, just a ukulele:

 

 

Too much fun; I hope I have a reason to go back CES next year. Of course, I'll be back in Vegas soon enough for MIX. Hope to see you there!