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Microsoft at CES 2004
By CPU-zilla
Category : Events
Published by Aaron Yip on Thursday, 8th January, 2004


Introduction

What has live nude shows, Siegfried & Roy, Celine Dion, Cirque du Soleil and Bill Gates have in common? Well, if you really don’t know, you can find all of them in Las Vegas right now. Yes, it is that time of the year again where all the industry giants gather at Sin City to showcase their latest wares at the world’s largest consumer electronic show.

The International CES 2004 kicked off today with a pre-show keynote by Bill Gates. Bill shared with the audience about Microsoft’s plans to build upon their software layer to further increase the consumer’s experience in digital and consumer electronics devices.

The New MSN

Gates first unveiled the new MSN.com and will also release a new MSN Premium service. The MSN.com will come in a new fresh look with a configurable home page that allows the user to personalize what they want to include in the page. The information in the home page can also be moved around, very much like how you would move your windows around the desktop. The drag and drop interface is highly customizable and it really helps one to keep track of their information the way they want it.

MSN Premium is a new subscription service that is priced at US$99 a year. It comes with other features such as the Encarta Encyclopedia, a Money package (for those who wants to keep track of their finances), Email, McAfee AntiVirus, McAfee Firewall and including others like anti spam and such. For those that hate pop-up windows, MSN Premium also includes a pop-up blocker that allows one to manage pop-ups with ease.

MSN Premium also makes photo management and sharing a breeze. All the user needs to do is just copy the photos into MSN Premium and the software will take care of the rest – even going as far as creating a web page for your photos so that visitors accessing your shared photos could view or download them with ease. These photos can also be shared in MSN Messenger, through a new photo slide show interface.

Bill Gates and Jay Leno discuss the new MSN video service.

Finally, there’s a new video streaming service on MSN that allows one to download high quality video content and watch them over the Internet. Doesn’t sound too exciting except that if you were to watch the demo, you’ll be amazed at the quality of the streamed content. Launching tomorrow, this video service will come decked with content from NBC, Showtime, Discovery Channel, Weather Channel, and more.

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