-Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft Corporate, Steve Ballmer.
-As we speak today, millions of people around the world are enjoying their TV, their music, and their movies on demand through Xbox Live.
Millions more are playing blockbuster titles on the Xbox,
and living this idea that you are the controller through Kinect.
Let's take a look at how you control all of your entertainment with Kinect and a little bit of a sneak peek at what's coming this year.
Please welcome Ron Forbes from our interactive entertainment business to do a little bit of a demonstration.
Ron.
-Thanks a lot, Steve.
I'm here tonight to show you how Xbox is transforming the way that people enjoy their movies, their music, their TV, and their sports on Xbox.
This is Zune on Xbox Live.
Zune features a massive catalog of movies, TV, and music that you can instantly enjoy right in your living room.
You can watch movies in full 1080p with 5.1 surround sound instantly--
no waiting, no need to download.
Today, our Zune Video Marketplace is available in 20 countries.
Let me show you what it looks like.
As you can see here, all you have to do is wave and Kinect knows that I'm ready to get started.
Now there are several things for me to choose from on this menu and I could use my hands to choose one but, you know, there's nothing easier than just using your voice.
All I have to say is "Xbox," and Kinect is listening, so when I say, "Suggest a movie,"
it takes me to previews of this week's featured movies.
So here I can browse full screen trailers of movies that I can watch, like this first one, "Inception." Awesome, awesome film, and I can easily swipe my hand to move it on to the next one.
Alright.
"Despicable Me," also looks pretty good but, you know, I kinda wanna wait to watch this one with my little nephew so let's just see what else we have.
Alright, the Twilight Saga, "Eclipse."
You know, I actually started watching this one last night and I can continue right where I left off by saying, "Xbox, watch this." Now because I started watching a movie last night, I have the option of picking up where I left off with Resume, or I can restart the video from the beginning.
I'll just jump right back into the action of where I was and just say, "Xbox, Resume." So there you go.
Didn't need to go find the DVD case, pop it in the Xbox.
I'm already right back in my movie watching experience.
And this is a pretty good scene but if I wanna refresh my memory a little, all I have to do is wave to bring up the playback controls, reach my hand up, and just go a little to the left.
Right there.
That's how easy it is to control Zune movies with Kinect for Xbox 360.
It's simple.
It's natural.
It's effortless.
And, I didn't even need to remember where I left the remote control.
"Xbox, Stop."
So let's go check out some music.
"Xbox, Zune Hub." I can also enjoy controller free access to more than 11 million songs right in the Zune catalog.
I just wave one more time and when I select "Music," I can bring up a playlist of songs that I put together in my queue.
Alright.
So we got a little Daft Punk.
I think this one's right off the new Tron Legacy soundtrack, also a good film at that, and just like searching for a movie,
I can swipe to move to the next song.
Alright, some Neon Trees.
I actually own the music video for this one so it automatically starts playing or, again, I can just use my voice.
"Xbox,--
-Lost all your value, your rights, your pride, your sun so true.
What if you never have food to eat, a bed to sleep--
-Can't find anywhere else.
So that's Zune.
But the same people who have discovered the wonder of Kinect with Zune movies and music have also been asking, what about Netflix?
When can I use my gestures to swipe and browse movies and TV shows?
When can I use my voice to play, pause, or stop a movie?
Two years ago, Xbox was the first console to bring Netflix to the living room.
We continue to innovate.
Tonight, I'm pleased to announce that this spring, we are bringing the magic of Kinect to Netflix,
making Xbox the only place to experience thousands of movies and TV shows from Netflix, controller free, in the living room on the biggest screen in your home.
But what about Hulu?
Tonight, we are also announcing that we are bringing the controller-free Hulu Plus subscription service to Xbox Live in the US later this spring.
So you can instantly watch the full, current, and back-cataloged seasons of popular TV shows
in HD like Glee, 30 Rock, and Modern Family anytime with the magic of Kinect.
Controller-free Zune, controller-free Netflix, controller-free Hulu Plus.
All part of our vision to bring partner content plus the magic of Kinect straight into your living room.
Now, finally, let's talk sports.
For sports fans like me, it's all about ESPN.
In November, we launched an exclusive partnership with ESPN on Xbox Live.
I can watch over 3500 live and on-demand sporting events from ESPN3.com plus highlights from ESPN.com which includes the best in sports from college football, college basketball, the NBA, and international soccer including the Premiere League.
Now one of the things I love most about this time of year is the college football bowl season, and now I always watched the ball games with my friends from Virginia Tech but, you know, since I moved to Seattle three years ago, I miss watching the games with my crew,
so you can imagine how excited I was on New Year's Day to be able to watch the Rose Bowl right along with my friends on the other side of the country.
My sister, Melanie, joined us, too, and she was cheering for Wisconsin.
I'm a bit more of a TCU fan myself and Melanie and I are pretty competitive with each other so there was a lot of trash talk going on between us, and back in the day, I needed to make my picks on the PC while chatting about the game via text message.
Now, as we watched the game live, I can make my picks and trash talk as my team is crossing the goal line,
not an e-mail, not in I'm, not a text, but in my living room, right on my TV.
Live sports plus social experiences happening right now only on Xbox Live.
So you're probably wondering how you can get in on the action and it's not too late.
ESPN on Xbox Live will be carrying the BCS National Championship game on Monday, January 10th, Oregon versus Auburn, and with the College Bowl Showdown, you can enhance the National Championship viewing experience.
You can pick the winner, you can watch the game live with your friends and you can see how your predictions stacks up.
Alright, so let's take a second-- let's go see how the community thinks-- who the community thinks will win.
Wow.
Well, it looks pretty split, about 50/50, and, you know, most of my friends are going for the Ducks for Oregon but they're dead wrong, I'm going with Auburn on this one.
Alright, now, let's go take a look at the leaderboard.
Alright, there's my sister, Melanie Mallon.
She's doing pretty well, she's right up there.
We'll just have to wait until Monday to see if she can maintain that lead.
So that's the College Bowl Showdown where sports fans on Xbox Live can earn their bragging rights.
This is only the beginning of our exclusive partnership with ESPN, the worldwide leader in sports.
Fans can look forward to more ESPN, more games, and more new ways to enjoy sports with their friends only on Xbox Live.
So there you have it.
All of your entertainment.
Music, movies, TV, and sports.
All on Xbox Live.
All with the magic of Kinect, and it's all happening right now.
Thanks for your time.
-Continuing on job one, I want you actually all to see this phone and to do that for us today, please welcome on stage, Liz Sloan from the Windows Phone team.
-Thank you, Steve, and hi everyone.
In addition to being a devoted Microsoft employee, I'm also a zealous runner and a chief goat herder to two young, rambunctious kids.
If you're life is anything like mine, it's a little bit busy and I was invited up here today to show you seven things about Windows Phone 7 that are great for people like all of us.
First, the camera.
How many times has this situation happened to you?
You see something interesting happen, you reach for your phone, by the time that you actually unlock it, fiddle around for the camera app and take the picture, the moment is completely gone.
We were not okay with this type of situation so we set out to build a phone in which you didn't have to miss a moment.
With every Windows Phone 7, we have a dedicated camera button and the best part is this camera button works even when your screen is locked.
So, in this case, something interesting happens like me being up on stage with all of you, all I need to do is press and hold the camera and take a picture and I can instantly share that picture with my friends and family,
or I can upload it to Facebook and other social network sites, although in this case, it's gonna be pretty hard for me to tag all of you.
Pocket to picture to pose, all within seconds.
Number two, Glance and Go.
One of the things that we did with Windows Phone is help surface up all of the stuff that you care about right up to the top so that you don't have to hunt around to find that information.
We do this with the lock screen.
Here, on the lock screen, you can see your time, your date, your next calendar appointment.
You can see missed calls, e-mails, and text messages.
We also do this with our start screen.
Our start screen is completely different from anything on the market today as it's not a list of icons or a sea of apps, we have what we call Live Tiles and just like their names suggest, these tiles are live and they change,
so as my friends update their Facebook status and post new pictures, I can see that right here on my Live Tile.
I can also see things like the weather in the city of my choice, and I can also see things like mission-critical information like apps like this one, 5-1/2 months until summer solstice begins and when you're a Hawaiian native that lives in Seattle, you count every single day until summer arrives.
We also surfaced simple things like your alarm.
Is it on or off?
And what time is it?
And things like your calendar and your next appointment.
In this case, when I'm done with all of you tonight, I'm going out for a big team dinner that I was supposed to plan which brings me to point number three, voice search.
In this case, I was supposed to plan dinner and since I haven't had the opportunity, I'm gonna do it up here on stage with all of you.
I wanna choose a real classy restaurant to bring the team later tonight.
In-N-Out Burger.
That's right.
For all of you from San Diego, we're gonna go animal-style hamburgers tonight.
Alright.
Not only do I get all the results on the web that relate to In-N-Out Burger, I also get all of the In-N-Out Burgers in the area as it finds my exact location and brings up all of the In-N-Out Burgers.
In this case, I'm gonna go to the one on Dean Martin Drive.
I get the phone number, the direction, and the hours.
I can also read the reviews and there are a lot of great reviews for In-N-Out Burger and then I can also find nearby locations so once we're done having a few burgers, if we wanna run by the Lion Habitat, or maybe swing on my Starbucks and get a coffee which is probably what we'll actually do, we have all of the nearby locations.
And speaking of search, every Windows Phone comes with a dedicated search button
which brings me to point number four, we brought Bing to the phone.
Not only do you get to see the same great pictures and their descriptions, you also get instant answers so in this case, I'm curious how the Miami Heat did against the Bucks last night.
I type in "Miami Heat" and, bam, right up to the top comes the score.
Instead of a lot of blue links that then brings me to the answer, I get the score that I want right up on top.
I can do this for stocks, sports scores, weather, flight information, and more.
In addition to making search easy, we also worked to organize the stuff that you care about in a way that you can get to it that actually makes sense, which brings me to point number five, Hubs.
On other phones, your information like games and apps and music are all a little bit disorganized and live in separate silos.
On our phone, we have what we call Hubs.
An example of this is my Office Hub.
Here in my Office Hub, I can do all sorts of things.
I can work on documents with colleagues and post them back to SharePoint.
I can do a little bit of financial modelling in Excel and I can also keep all of my notes in OneNote.
I'm a big OneNote user and one of the things that I love about OneNote is that my OneNote sync across my phone, my PC, and the web.
In this case, I'm keeping a OneNote of birthday ideas for my husband.
What's great is I can pin this OneNote to my start screen
so as ideas come to me throughout the day, I have one-click access to this OneNote.
Let me open up the OneNote to see some of my ideas.
Alright.
Little mani-pedi, couple retreats.
After Ron's demo, I think he's convinced me that a new Xbox is in order for his birthday.
So what I'm gonna do since I'm running behind on purchasing this gift is copy this, up on stage with all of you, and I'm gonna go to one of my favorite shopping apps and do a little bit of research on this Xbox.
As Steve mentioned, we have over 5500 new apps in Marketplace which brings me to point number six, our fantastic apps.
Big-name apps like Bank of America, Travelocity, Fandango, and in this case, Amazon.com.
If you remember, a few seconds ago, I copied the Xbox that I was interested in and since it's a little bit long,
I'm gonna paste it in and then I'm gonna search and I'm gonna look for the results, and within seconds, the results come up and if I wanted to, I could buy it right here onstage, but I won't waste your time and I will bring you to point number seven, lucky number seven, Xbox Live on the phone.
As you saw several minutes ago, we have many new hot games that are coming to our phone in the next couple months.
If have a need for speed, we've got you covered.
If you like some retro gaming action, we have you covered with Pac-Man and if you're a secret ninja, like myself that likes to slice and dice poor innocent pineapple and kiwi on the side, we've got you covered with Fruit Ninja and the best part is, with our upcoming update, our apps and games will load even faster and with the 3D graphics on this phone, it makes you feel like these are-- Ow, I'm not very good at this game, by the way.
They're falling right into your lap.
If you haven't played this game, it's highly addictive.
Alright.
That was a lot to get through in seven minutes.
If you can't tell, I'm excited about this phone.
I hope each of you get a chance to go out and try it as we worked hard to bring together the things that you care about in an easier and faster way so that you can just go out and enjoy life.
Thank you.
-There's one more product that I want-- like to talk about tonight before we wrap up and that's the Windows PC.
We made some announcements earlier today and I wanna spend some time putting them in context for all of you.
A year ago at CES, we talked about how excited we were with customers' early reactions to Windows 7.
We had just launched and all indications were that we had delivered a product that had hit the mark with customers.
That really proved to be the case.
Windows 7 PCs are the fastest selling PCs in history, selling over 7 copies a second.
They now represent more than 20% of all the PCs connected to the internet.
A Windows 7 PC is the best possible way and place to experience the modern web.
Internet Explorer 9 represents a leap forward
in what developers can do with HTML5 and great hardware including a breakthrough in hardware accelerated graphics.
Today, 20 million people are already using the IE9 beta.
We shipped the new release of Windows Live to over 500 million people around the world.
It includes the Windows Live Photo Gallery that lets you sync up and organize pictures
from all your devices and easily share them with friends on SkyDrive, Hotmail, Facebook, et cetera, and Hotmail, which is the number one e-mail service worldwide, deeply integrating Microsoft Office took major steps forward.
In the first hundred days, we drove over 20 million people to use our Office Web applications through Hotmail.
And, finally, the all new Windows Live Messenger connects easily to Facebook
and is already the number two application on Facebook.
A year ago, our partners were just getting started with Windows 7 PCs.
There are more new innovative PC hardware designs and machines at this year's CES than ever before.
Hardware that brings the full Windows experience to life,
including the modern web, rich media experiences, and full PC productivity.
Customers increasingly have come to expect the full power of the PC across a wide range of form factors, and we're excited to see our partners continue to bring great and innovative new hardware to market.
I'd like to invite Mike Angiulo from our Windows team to come up on stage and show you
some of the exciting, interesting, innovative, productive, and really beautiful new Windows 7 PCs that you'll be able to see.
Mike.
-Hi, I'm Mike Angiulo and I've got a few things to show you tonight.
I'm gonna start with some of the work that our partners have done on Windows 7, show you the new version of Surface and then a little glimpse into a technology preview of what's coming next.
So here are some new Windows 7 PCs and I'm gonna kinda walk through each one and tell you what's cool about them.
The first one, this is about Intel's new announcement.
They just announced their new generation, their second generation of their Core processors.
It was code named "Sandy Bridge" and what Intel did was combine a multi-core CPU and GPU on to a single chip and that increases your graphics performance and decreases the amount of power it takes at the same time.
PC World says that this gets 20 times more graphics performance than previous generation CPUs,
and HP is gonna put the new Core i7 into this notebook and expects to get 6-1/2 hours of battery life out of a standard six-cell battery which is pretty impressive but I'm gonna show you performance demo so this is the Galactic Performance Demo and it's an application that was written all in HTML.
This is Internet Explorer 9, the only browser that really takes full advantage of the underlying PC, to use the GPU to graphically accelerate the web browsing experience.
What you're looking at is an animated solar system that's made out of 2D pictures of planets that have been spherized by the GPU.
It's really calculation intensive.
You can see I'm getting 36, almost 40 frames a second on a mobile PC.
A year ago, this was completely impossible.
Here's another example.
This PC is using the new processor from AMD.
They just announced it, it's called Fusion.
It's a multi-core CPU, a discrete-quality DX11-level GPU, and a north bridge all put together on to a single die.
They call this an accelerated processing unit or APU
and what this lets you do is have a really high performance PC in a very small form factor with really great battery life.
In fact, HP, by just changing the processor, almost doubled the battery life of this thin and light system to 9 hours and I've launched the IE9 test drive site.
This IE site has become a popular way for people to demonstrate hardware accelerated web browsing and I can increase the number of fish to 250 fish in this tank
and get over 40 frames a second and we're talking about, in a PC that cost less than $500 and is this thin and light so that kind of performance on an ultraportable notebook is really brand new and quite impressive.
And while processors continue to get more powerful and more efficient, our partners continue to invent really cool new modern form factors for the PC so here's an example.
This one is from Acer and this is a dual-screen PC so you can see I have two 14-inch touchscreens here.
I can-- is that cool?
You like that one?
It looks really cool from here, too.
And what's neat is you not only have a lot of room for browsing but I can take 10 fingers, put 10 fingers down on the screen and immediately a software keyboard that comes built in.
Go ahead.
Let it out.
So I can launch Word here.
I have a trackpad.
I can do productivity scenarios.
It's got that kind of hardware and software integration there in a really cool form factor.
Here's an example, this is an engineering prototype of a PC that's coming in March.
This is the Samsung PC 7 Sliding Series and you can see I can slide this close, touch the screen, and then I have a PC that's really good for entertainment.
What's really neat about this PC is what it has.
It's got a micro SD card, it's got micro HDMI and USB.
It has all the things you want in a PC.
It's really light.
It's about a kilo but what's really cool is what's missing.
This is an Intel Oak Trail-based PC.
It has no fan.
It's light, it's passively cooled, and you can immediately switch back and forth between those two form factors.
This new tablet-- You like that one, too?
I think it's pretty cool.
This one I'm gonna take a moment to really explain.
This is the new tablet PC from Asus and this is a full power Windows PC so this PC has a Core i5 processor in it.
It ships with this wireless keyboard.
It makes a great productivity workstation for maybe a small area like on an airplane or a student's desk, and what you can see is that it responds well to Windows Touch because it has a capacitive touchscreen,
but because it's a tablet PC, I can also take out the pen and use ink, and what ink lets me do is stuff like I'm highlighting here in Excel, I can take a pen and say that's a, great.
I can take an eraser.
I can erase, and one of the cool things about ink in tablet PC is a tablet PC has handwriting recognition in 26 languages and you could see this.
When I have the pen down on the screen, can you see how my hand is not moving the spreadsheet around?
This is one of the reasons that it's hard to do ink on touch-only devices
and why tablet PCs are so good for ink is because it's implementing palm rejection here.
It actually knows what my hand is and knows what the pen is and doesn't get the two confused.
Here's a touch-only game that I can launch and you can see the characters following me around the screen but I wanna show you here is the screen itself.
This screen is really bright and what we did with Asus was we worked really hard with them to make sure that this screen would have off-axis viewing of almost a full 180 degrees so as I move it around here on the camera,
you can see that from almost any angle, this screen is really, really bright and the colors don't shift and we did that by working together on a process to optically bond all the components of the screen so the Gorilla Glass on the surface, the underlying LCD, the touch sensor, even the electromagnetic digitizer for the ink, are all bonded together as a single unit and that process eliminates the air gap that's usually underneath the screen so the screen is not only brighter, it uses 20% less power to actually get that same level of brightness.
You can order these PCs starting right now.
The page just went live on Amazon.com and the Microsoft Store and I think they're gonna be pretty popular, but if you wanna see an example of really extreme integration on Windows 7, you have to look no further than the brand new version of Microsoft Surface.
Microsoft Surface is announced today, this is a brand new version, and if you remember from the first version, you notice there's some pretty stark differences from version 1 of Surface PC.
We worked hand to hand with Samsung on the entire end-to-end experience I'm about to show you.
The first to notice is that the PC is thin.
No longer is it a big box with the cameras inside.
This is only 4 inches thin.
Inside here, there's a full power Windows 7 PC.
It's got a dual core CPU and a GPU from AMD.
Up top, this is the biggest piece of Gorilla Glass that has ever been bonded to an LCD ever, but what's really amazing about this technology, what really makes it magical,
is the sensor itself, so those first generation Surface PCs needed cameras underneath that would look up to try to see what was going on, but what we have here is called Pixel Sense.
Pixel Sense is new technology we've invented where there's infrared sensors all across this screen, every single pixel is actually acting as a camera.
The PC, the Surface here, can actually see so I'm holding up a piece of paper that says I can see, and when I set it down, what you see on this debug monitor and what you can see in the split screen above is that the PC can actually see that paper
so this is even beyond touch and Pixel Sense is more than just vision, it's actually the processing inside that takes that data and makes it available for developers to write cool applications on it.
One of the really cool things about this new thinner form factor is it no longer has to just be a table.
You can also use Surface as a kiosk and I wanna talk a little bit about the Royal Bank of Canada.
This was one of our launch partners that is gonna be putting these Surface PCs in public.
These are ruggedized PCs.
This thing is designed for industrial/commercial application.
In fact, if you go across the street to Hard Rock Cafe, you can see some of the generation 1 Surfaces in use there in the bar.
They can take the impact of a beer bottle dropping from 18 inches on to the screen without breaking and even the fluid will run off properly but do not tell them I sent you over there to try that.
Here's an example of an application that would be up in the bank.
The Royal Bank of Canada sends these flyers to thousands of potential customers and when they take the flyer into the bank,
they just show it to the screen and Surface recognizes the flyer.
It can see the flyer and enter you into this drawing and see whether you've won and that's the power of Pixel Sense technology, vision-based interaction creates a whole new category of applications that developers can write.
You could see in this case, I've won which always happens in my demo, and when I close this, I can interact with some of the other applications that the bank might have to show off some of the products and services that they would have for customers so here's an example of modeling how their savings products would work
so I save $5 a day, I get a little more realistic interest rate and save it for 20 years and see how it accumulates.
So at the new lower price, the smaller size, the more versatile form factor, I think you're gonna see Surface PC in a lot of cool places in the next year or two so, Steve, if you wanna come back out, you can take a look at what it looks like to have 20 fingers on the screen at the same time here.
-I like this--
-You got ten, I got ten.
-There we go.
-Thanks.
-Great.
Thanks, Mike.
Only the imagination limits what can be done with Windows PCs today.
Write on them, draw on them, hang them on the wall, touch them, use a wireless keyboard, play a game, and much, much more.
All the Windows PCs that Mike had a chance to show you are gonna be available in the next few months.
I can't tell you how excited I am just personally as a user for some of the things that are becoming available with Windows 7 PCs.
They're on the leading edge of new devices that offer it all, without compromise.
