Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates was recently interviewed about what he thinks will happen to ally format HD-DVD after Warner Bros. decided to go exclusive to Blu-ray. Gates gave an interesting response which seems to point to a totally new direction. Will the format war have a rival of its own? Find out in the full article and tell us what you think.

Microsoft Corporation chairman Bill Gates bid the Consumer Electronics Show a bittersweet farewell as he opened it for the last time in his legendary career. After showing a cool video of what he'll do after stepping down from Microsoft, Gates talked about the next 10 years in the electronics scene, earmarking touch screen, faster, and more accessible connectivity, and HD technology as the future's pillars. Head on to the full article for more details.

It's official: Microsoft will bring out the big guns in CES 2008 as Bill Gates and Robbie Bach take center stage with keynote addresses. This should provide a nice blast-off for an event which never fails to deliver glimpses of the latest in the gadgets scene. Are we expecting big announcements? You bet. Read the full article for more information on Microsoft's CES 2008 presence.

After Sony had its big ad campaign for the PlayStation 3, it's about time that Microsoft followed suit as well. The software and gaming mogul is said to be setting aside a hefty US$ 300 million in advertising most of its wares. More details in the full article.

Followers of major electronic and gaming events take heed: the activities for the upcoming 2008 International CES (Consumer Electronics Show) are finally announced, and there's a lot of stuff in store for gadget aficionados and gamers alike.

The 2008 International CES will put the latest gaming technology in the spotlight, with major gaming exhibitors such as Commodore Gaming, Entropia Universe, Red Lion Interactive, Shuttle Computers and War Machine as participants.

The gaming-related CES events are as follows: CES Game Power Conference Partner Program; Sandbox Summit, where people can experience the latest gaming gear, toys, and products; CES Mobile Entertainment Partner Program, where breakthroughs in mobile gaming and technology are featured.

For general electronics consumers there's the Home and Lifestyle Entertainment Knowledge Track, where visitors are given a peek of whats to come in the future of gaming as well as the possibilities of 3D home theater.

Finally, close followers of the current format wars should be interested in the Blu-ray Disc TechZone and the HD DVD TechZone, where the features of each of the leading high definition formats are tackled.

The 2008 International CES will be held in Las Vegas on January 7-10. Bill Gates will deliver the opening keynote address for the event on January 6.

The folks from Redmond are going to hold an event on Tuesday, October 2, 2007, to announce the next iteration of the Zune. Insider sources say that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and design chief J Allard will be attending the said event to commemorate the announcement.

The new Zune would include the first flash memory-based gadget of the initial 2.4 million-unit product line, a strategy that Microsoft eyed significantly for the company. Microsoft currently holds a 10% share of the HDD player market and hopes to turn a profit from its share with the release of the flash-based Zune. 

The "Zune 2," as it's unofficially coined, is claimed to be similar in design, only thinner in profile. BetaNews reports that the new Zune will come in dimensions of 3 inches by 1.25 inches, and will look similar to the iPod nano. Video playback capability seems to be a feature confirmed for the next-generation Zune, though the claims of Wi-Fi inter-connectivity and larger in-house storage still remain unconfirmed.

While over two million units of new Zunes will be in production by the holiday season of 2007, about a third will take the form of the flash-memory based player. The first batch should be available by November, coupled with a Beta launch of a new Zune community site. There are also reports of first-party accessories for the product, though full details

Most of us are all excited about Microsoft's new baby, Microsoft Surface, and there's no denying that watching the video we posted yesterday made most of your jaws drop. Sure, almost everybody was astounded when we saw that simply placing a digital camera will automatically download pictures onto the Surface, and that uploading of files is simply a matter of dragging the files towards the devices, but get this: you can also make payments and even give tips just by laying your credit card on Surface.

We have just recently found out about some of Surface's innards: underneath the impact-resistant touchscreen monitor are five infrared scanners, a projector, as well as a wireless modem. That makes sense, given that the Microsoft Surface automatically detects what objects are placed on it using the sensors, and downloads (or uploads) the data when necessary via the wireless modem.

Before we gawk too much at the fancy coffee table, let us remember a similar product that is also yet to be released: Apple's iPhone. iPhone also features multi-touch, something that Microsoft is bragging about its high-tech coffee table. Noticing this fact doesn't help the rumors about patent problems between the two technology giants that's been in circulation recently.

Watching the iPhone demo from Apple's official website reveals that the manner of zooming photos is very much like how it is done on Microsoft Surface, by dragging two fingers either closer or farther from each other across the *ehem* surface of the screen. Just a strange coincidence? We'll leave that up to you to judge.

The Blu-ray is leading the next-generation format war in North America thanks to the good sales of the Sony PlayStation 3 console. Around 94 percent of all Blu-ray players in the US are PS3s, prompting Microsoft to take action.

The apparent response from Bill Gates' troops comes in the form of the Xbox 360 Elite package. The new Xbox 360 not only has a bigger hard drive, but has also packed in its own HD-DVD drive. In light of all this, ZDNet analyst John Carroll asks why.

Carroll questions Microsoft's move to make like the PS3 and adopt an all-or-nothing ploy. The PS3 did this for a lot of reasons. First, it wants the PS3 to be the most advanced entertainment machine on the planet, and Blu-ray was the way to do it because of the huge storage that can accommodate big game files and movies. Second, it has a vested interest in Blu-ray because it developed the technology. Ergo, the console and the disc are bound because they live and die with each other.

"A failure of the Blu-Ray format would negatively affect PS3 sales (though I would argue that the PS3's failure as a game console is more dangerous)," says Carroll. He then went on to say that Microsoft is not in the same situation as Sony and did not have to take the same gambit. Microsoft helped develop HD but isn't producing HD DVDs. The Xbox 360 is leading the console war because it debuted early and has the biggest game library among the three competing machines.

By choice, buyers seem to prefer HD DVD because of the value. Half of all players sold using the format are stand-alone devices, meaning that even if the Xbox 360 wasn't helping out, there would still be a market for it. European studios are embracing HD DVD even though the PS3 has already launched in PAL territories.

"The PS3 has put new wind to the Blu-Ray formats' sails, but it hardly seems to have blown away the advantages of the HD-DVD format," concludes Carroll.

Now we're sure you gadget folks out there have been informed of the "supposed" teaming up of Microsoft with Apple for a pilot player sporting Microsoft's Windows Media software. But since the release of the Zune music player (not without some hiccups as we can recall), some of us had to find out the hard way that it just wasn't meant to be.

The folks from Redmond could have changed history by going down the path less traveled on, because it would have made all the difference - for once. Now that Apple and Microsoft are head-to-head once more, Apple is out for the early win. In fact, 21.1 million iPods (and that's just last quarter's sales) is pretty much a win already when compared to an unimpressive "hundreds of thousands" of Zune players, despite Zune's shove into the iPod market.

E-mail evidences, presented at a private anti-trust class action against Microsoft in Iowa, confirmed the idea of a team-up. According to the e-mails from Windows chief Jim Allchin, there are suggestions that he talk to Apple CEO Steve Jobs to get the iPod to work with Microsoft's media software for fear that the iPod would "drive people away from the Windows Media Player."

Also interesting to note is Jim Allchin's e-mail regarding the statement that he "would buy a Mac" if he "was not working at Microsoft." The funny part is that the e-mail was sent to two people, one being Bill Gates himself (ouch!). We remember another time that Microsoft employees felt kinder to Apple than usual.

But as noted earlier, Microsoft decided to go its own way. You can admire their courage, but up against the iPod? That's just suicide.

Here's even more from Bill Gates on the console war. Apparently, he thinks that in the end HD-DVD and Blu-ray may not even "count" since they represent the last generation of optical media.

In an interview over at The Daily Princetonian, he said: "For us it's not the physical format. Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be. Everything's going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk. So, in this way, it's even unclear how much this one counts."

Writer Theo Valich, thinks that while many other people have overlooked that statement made by Bill Gates, he believes that Bill is pretty much on target.

He predicts that the technology that will win the optical standards war isn't even an optical standard. He believes that flash memory, with its falling prices and its ever increasing capacity will win in the end. He also adds that the trend today is that consumers are willing to sacrifice quality for mobility.

Of course Bill Gates doesn't miss the opportunity in the Princetonian to decry the Blu-ray format, but you can't really blame him for that. It's sorta his job.

It's not the physical format that we have the issue with, it's that the protection scheme on Blu is very anti-consumer. If [the Blu-ray group] would fix that one thing, you know, that'd be fine.

Well guys, what do you think? Blu-ray, HD-DVD, some hybrid format, or flash storage?