On the eve of the largest consumer electronics show in the world CES 2011, Microsoft hosted its hallmark keynote presentation at the Las Vegas Hilton Center by the man, Steve Ballmer during which he covered Kinect, Windows Phone 7 and teased the future of Windows.

Disclosure: I am attending CES 2011 as a guest of Microsoft Australia.

At the Consumer Electronics Show 2011, Microsoft has decided to host a special press conference at 1pm PST before its hallmark keynote event this evening at 6pm with Steve Ballmer.

It’s anticipated they will give some teasers revealing what the company has in store for the years ahead. iPad killers? Google TV competitors? Watch to find out.

Update: You can find additional photos from the press conference on my Flickr page.

Disclosure: I am attending CES 2011 as a guest of Microsoft Australia.

A day ahead of the center-stage Microsoft keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2011, ASUS announced at its own press conference several tablet devices, specifically one of which runs Windows 7. Granted Windows-powered slates are all the hype, this doesn’t seem like the right way to go about it.

It wasn’t that long ago the PC industry wandered down this path before – loading a desktop operating system onto a slate form factor. In fact, they even tried it twice – first with Tablet PCs, then Ultra Mobile PCs. Although all of these things sold (maybe quite a few), none of them took off quite like the iPad has. Even with the experience behind the PC industry, OEMs seems to be making the same mistakes again.

For the same reasons Apple didn’t build the iPad with OS X, OEMs need to admit Windows 7 is not “good enough”. Although Microsoft has made significant improvements to touch usability in Windows 7 over previous versions, notably the first – Windows XP Tablet Edition, it is not a tablet OS at the fundamentals. No amount of slick form factor, third-party shell overlays or touch-friendly application bundles will fix that.

Hopefully during this week, Microsoft will show off (and lead their OEMs partners) how it’s suppose to be done. There’s an undeniable amount of rumors Steve Ballmer will announce a version of Windows to power devices that are more competitive against the iPad.

One can only hope it’s something more than just an ARM port of Windows.

Disclosure: I am attending CES 2011 as a guest of Microsoft Australia.

Australian’s very own government scientific research body CSIRO, infamous for its recent patent disputes on its innovations used in the WiFi standard, has just successfully field-tested a new wireless broadband technology using existing TV antenna infrastructure for rural areas.

The “Ngara” system field-test in outback Australia yielded a data-rate of 12 megabits per second (1.5MB/s) at a range up to 8.1km (5 miles) using just one channel of a soon-to-be decommissioned 7MHz analogue TV spectrum with just 3-watt antennas. The benefit of such a system is that it utilizes an ubiquitous infrastructure for TV transmission.

Of course, the CSIRO is not the only ones interested in wireless networking on white-spaces. Microsoft has been doing some research of their own.

Microsoft’s project, dubbed “WhiteFi” focuses more on the ability to utilize fragmented white space spectrum across different channels as they vary by location and interference. They too have successfully deployed a white-space wireless network at the Microsoft campus that provides a bridge for WiFi internet access within its shuttle buses.

Hopefully the two technologies can complement each other to improve wireless networking in wider areas.

Some people hang colorful Christmas lights outside their house and others hang flashing ones on the Christmas tree, but you probably haven’t seen Christmas lights as cool as these on an office wall. Then again, very few Christmas lights are powered by the .NET Micro Framework.

According to Andrej Kyselica’s forum post, who happens to be a Microsoft employee, he wrote a driver for the FEZ .NET Micro Framework embedded controller to individually-control a set of hackable GE-35 LED Christmas lights. Yes, homebrew has made its way into holiday decorations.

With his new-found powers over a string of lightbulbs, he had the bright idea to use them to display presence information for his instant messenger contacts, on Microsoft Lync (Unified Communications) of course, which according to Andrej has a great SDK.

The end result is decoratively festive yet arguably functional. Check out the set up and an overview of the project in the video below.

A new prototype Internet Explorer add-on from Microsoft Research called “Diff-IE” adds a little bit of version control magic to your browser, showing you exactly what has changed on the increasingly dynamic web. Perfect for people who refresh websites every other minute like myself.

This simple but ingenious plugin caches multiple copies of websites you open (by default, last five visits) and on subsequent visits compares the contents and highlights any changed text elements. Optionally, you can also enable to save an image-cache of each visit which you can later view or compare side-by-side.

Until now, RSS and (more recently) Twitter feeds has become the status-quo for keeping up-to-date with websites, but unfortunately they take you out of the website’s experience. Although not applicable to all sites, an enhancement to a browser like this makes much more sense for sites and forums whose content evolves rather than change completely.

In a test conducted with 30 users over a month, the researchers’ found their tool had a positive effect on revisitation patterns and perception of web content. They also noted “some participants reported the highlighting had become an indispensable part of their browsing”.

Personally I think the idea could very well make its way inside Internet Explorer if made a bit more subtle, for example, gradually fading out the highlight after it has been seen.