Drop, charge, and lose the cordsToday's Internet, he said, is a "go-to" Internet.
"The Internet reacts to our requests rather than anticipating them," he told the conference at the Venetian Hotel and Casino.
In the future, he predicts Internet services will be more proactive, predictive and context aware.
"The Internet is going to come to us," he said, "bringing us the information we need at any given time."
He expects this to have a radical affect on the wider technology industry.
When computing came to the desktop in the eighties and nineties, "computing became personal," he said, and "innovation, collaboration and standards drove growth beyond what anyone could imagine."
"I believe that the Internet is following the same path today."
Intel CEO Paul Otellini addresses CES
(Credit: Brett Winterford)Otellini said he expects the mobile Internet device, armed with mobile broadband and location-aware technologies such as GPS, to be the one that makes best use of this "personal" Internet.
Demonstrating a number of future applications on a mobile internet device, Otellini opened a window into a future where location-based services can aid users real-time in an intuitive way. In one demonstration, the device's camera could recognise objects on a street or translate a restaurant menu, serving up an "augmented reality". While the demos were staged at CES (replicated back-stage on a more powerful computer than the mobile device in his hand), Otellini says the continual shrinking of transistors could see such services come to the mobile device in the not too distant future.
There are four major obstacles to delivering such an experience today, he said. The first is silicon. The mobile internet device, the "next big thing" in computing, he said, will need a more compute-powerful, more power-efficient processor. The second obstacle is the lack of a ubiquitous wireless broadband infrastructure to deliver these services in a wider range of locations. Third, Internet services lack context, he said, that ability to know what we need at a given point in time. And finally, he expects that computing will need to come up with more natural, human interfaces to engage with.
In terms of silicon, Otellini believes Intel to be well on the way to making the dream a reality. The company continues to find ways to shrink transistors. To illustrate, Otellini showed how a 1971 Intel chip (the Intel 4004) featured 2250 transistors and was 10 microns in size. Today's chips, Otellini said, contain a whopping 820 million transistors. That many transistors in 1971 would have required a wafer nine feet by six feet, which would consume the energy of 200 U.S. households. "Instead its the size of a thumbnail," he said.
Otellini said Intel went close to missing its mark on Moore's Law in recent years as it struggled to find new ways to shrink transistors without leaking current. But Intel's engineers saved the day, discovering "a new recipe" with which to produce the next generation of processes - a High K Metal Gate process based on the element Hafnium.
This breakthrough, Otellini said, means that the next generation of Intel chips can deliver 38 per cent more performance on the same power usage, or cut power in half with the same performance as the current generation of chips. The mobile Internet device, he said, while slightly chunky today, will "shrink half and half again" in size in the next 12 months as a result.
From a wireless perspective, Otellini predicted that the WiMAX standard, technology in which Intel Capital has invested in significantly, will win out over other competing standards to deliver the necessary ubiquitous access to the Internet for mobile devices. WiMAX is particularly strong in delivering online video, he said.
"In the next five to ten years , we at Intel believe WiMAX will bring about the change necessary," he said.
The third obstacle is context. Otellini said we need to move from searching for information on a network towards a network that finds you the information you need proactively. These services will require that users give the network an indication of their location, their preferences, and other information of a private nature.
"The impetus is on us as an industry to provide security and privacy users need," he said.
The final hurdle is interfaces. Otellini used the example of the motion and gesture sensing technology of Nintendo Wii, which has revolutionised gaming by offering more human ways of interacting with the computer, as an example of what's to come.
"Its popularity lies with the interface and not the graphics," he said. "You expect to engage and interact with the Wii. In gaming, we have moved from the keyboard to mouse to joystick to wands - with each step, a more natural engagement."
The natural human interface has been a huge theme at this year's CES.
Bill Gates talked up the Surface Computer and voice recognition in the car, Paul Otellini talked up the gesture-based interface of Nintendo Wii, and there were plenty of new ideas around interfaces exhibited on the trade show floor.
Attendees mill around Samsung displays to try out the Reactrix gesture-based interface.
(Credit: CES)Natural human interfaces, ones that involve human movement, for example, tend to be incredibly engaging. It's rarely more noticeable than at CES--the crowds nearly always gather around those exhibits that provide some kind of interactivity. One of the most popular has been the WAVEscape advertising platform, developed by Reactrix and exhibited in partnership with Samsung.
WAVEscape is a stereo near-infrared vision system that sits above a television to enable interactions between viewer movement and content on the screen.
It uses a stereo 3D vision system to sense the distance of a person from the television. In the same way a person has two eyes to gauge proximity, the computer can get the full shape of everyone's body up to 15 feet away.
At CES, Reactrix demonstrated how users could stand in front of a Samsung LCD and interact with several games and information sites using the movement of their limbs.
Attendees play a game of volleyball on a Reactrix-powered Samsung TV.
(Credit: Brett Winterford)The technology is being used as a means of engaging people in a public space for interactive display advertising. Reactrix's first big customer is Hilton Hotels, which will provide the technology in its lobbies and other public spaces to both entertain and provide information on hotel services.
WAVEscape was developed by Matt Bell, Reactrix's chief scientist and founder. It is inspired by an earlier product he invented called the Stepscape--a 2x3 meter interactive floor-projected display deployed in shopping malls and other public spaces that can sense a person's presence as they walk over it.
"We are using these technologies to reinvent out-of-home advertising," Bell said. "Most advertising outside of the home is billboards and digital signage. I describe this as glance media--you look at it for two seconds, if that, and then you move on. What we do is engage people, get them interacting. They have fun and therefore the advertiser loves it because the user remembers the message, and the venue is happy because the venue is more interesting."
Bell says users are 10 times as likely to recall the message of an interactive advertisement as a static one.
"It is a revolution in the way people relate to TVs," he said. "The TV is now able to sense you and respond to your wishes."
WAVEscape inventor Matt Bell shows off an interactive TV application
(Credit: Brett Winterford)Beyond advertising, Bell sees applications in other verticals, such as education (pulling apart molecule diagrams on a classroom screen, for example) or as an attraction in a nightclub. "Ultimately this could be baked into any display to optimize the experience for whoever is using it," he said.
Eventually, he'd like to see it in the home.
"It will take a few years to make its way to consumer. Right now it's relatively bulky, but all of this will be shrinking as rapidly as we can so we can get it into the consumer market. In the home, you might be sitting on your couch and you gesture with your hand to change channel if you are sick of the program."
"Gestural interfaces are exciting because they are so natural," he concluded. "We communicate with body language. You get a display that's able to understand body language and that's very powerful."
But that was precisely the atmosphere in Las Vegas tonight as he both opened this year's CES conference and closed a final chapter of his career.
Thousands of journalists and technologists queued for some four hours in snake-like lines that wound around several floors of the Venetian Hotel and Casino to hear him give his tenth and final CES keynote.
In just under six months, Gates will retire from full-time work with the software company to devote his time and energy to his philanthropic project The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which aims for global equity in healthcare and education. As several Microsoft devotees said during the long wait to see the show, Gates' last CES keynote is a significant event. This was the man that revolutionised desktop computing and in the process influenced the career opportunities for millions of IT support workers around the globe. And for the very dedicated few among the 140,000 people in Las Vegas for this year's CES, it is likely to be the last time they will see him talk.
Gates isn't a dazzling stage-performer by any stretch. His squeak of a voice has nothing of the immediacy or intensity of some of his peers (Cisco's Chambers comes to mind), and he hardly appears the rock n' roll type with his daggy blue sweater and slacks.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates adrresses CES 2008
(Credit: CES)Thankfully there were plenty of stars at hand to liven up the event.
Early in the address, Gates was treated to a pre-recorded tongue-in-cheek send-off that included appearances by presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, former vice president Al Gore, U2's Bono, Hollywood director Steven Spielberg and actor George Clooney, all joking at Gates' expense as to what he might get up to upon retirement.
Among the frivolity, there was the business. Gates discussed the next "digital decade" as being one in which high definition content will be pushed to all manner of devices. He then touted the further development of the natural/human user interface - making an example of Microsoft's touch-based 'Surface' Table Computer, but not mentioning the Nintendo Wii or the Apple iPhone, both pioneers in the field.
Gates predicted that PCs will again grow this year at double digit growth rates, and announced that Microsoft's latest Vista operating system now has some 100 million users. He also announced that broadcaster NBC will be offering some 3,000 hours of footage from the Beijing Olympic Games online using Microsoft's Silverlight and Live software technologies.
In gaming, Gates' colleagues announced that the company has shipped some 17.7 million X-Box games consoles, claiming that more cash is spent on XBox games than games for both Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation put together.
The company also showcased new innovations in the digital home and for the portable music player Zune and demonstrated ways in which Microsoft technology can be used to improve the communications and entertainment experience while driving in a car.
There would be no major product announcements, nor any emotional farewell.
Instead his keynote closed, as perhaps the long wait to see Gates speak deserved, with some real rock n' roll royalty - a live Guitar Hero jam-off with Guns N Roses guitarist Slash.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates summons Slash for a Guitar Hero duel
(Credit: CES)Then Gates, unassumingly, walked off the CES stage for the last time.
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