It’s the end of an era. Microsoft announced last month that this year’s Consumer Electronics Show keynote will be the company’s last for the foreseeable future. The show definitely won’t be the same without Microsoft’s chief executive officer Steve Ballmer kicking things off with his unique brand of charisma, but all good things must come to an end. According to reports, Microsoft won’t have anything big to announce at this year’s keynote. Instead, Ballmer will recap the strong year Microsoft had in 2011 and discuss the company’s core consumer-facing products moving into 2012 including Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox and more. Mr. Ballmer always puts on a show, however, and we’re sure he’ll toss in a few surprises to keep things interesting. The keynote kicks off at 9:30 p.m. Eastern / 6:30 p.m. Pacific, so hit the break to follow all the action — and Ballmeresque yelling — as it unfolds.

8:54PM:Alright we're all seated and ready for Steve Ballmer to take the stage. Hopefully we hear some interesting news, although Microsoft did say earlier that it could just be a recap of the year. There's country music playing but we're not sure who it is.

8:55PM:Googled it for you, it's Scotty McCreery: Better than that. Not bad if you're a country fan.

8:57PM:We should be getting under way in about 30 minutes or so, enough time for you to order Dominos. Unfortunately we can't leave our seats to find a water fountain.

9:10PM:General admission is still filing in, we're just sitting here listening to the music.

9:14PM:Should be kicking off in about 20 minutes or so.

9:20PM:The music is still blaring but it looks like the people have slowly stopped flooding into the room.

9:27PM:We're being told to take our seats so this should be kicking off shortly.

9:29PM:And the lights are lowering!

9:30PM:"This place about to blow" is blaring over the speakers.

9:31PM:President and CEO of the CEA Gary Shapiro is taking the stage. "Welcome to the 2012 CES."

9:34PM:"In 1995 Bill Gates took to the CES stage for the first time to speak to the CES workshop, a small workshop. Bill walked into the Hilton by himself with his head buried in a book. He made some remarks, and then I fielded written questions from the audience. Bill said this revolution would be social. That was in 1995. In 1998 they launched a new concept, the CES keynote. We invited Bill [and others] to become the first CES keynoters. For 14 years Bill and his successor have taken the stage. As you've heard, Microsoft is taking a break from the keynote stage is 2013. As a company, Microsoft uniquely changed the world and productivity, more, Microsoft keynotes drew press. Microsoft took a risk on us early and we both benefitted. In the technology world we recognize change is the only constant. For CES and Microsoft to be fresh, innovative and enticing we agreed to a pause."

9:35PM:"We have nearly doubled in size since the first CES keynote. I offer gratitude and good will to Microsoft." He's comparing Microsoft to the founding fathers of this nation. "I would be shocked if a Microsoft leader does not return to this stage again in the next few years. Please join me in welcoming the CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer."

9:36PM:Ballmer is on stage now and Shapiro is giving him a photo album highlighting Microsoft and CES together. Aww.

9:37PM:We hope this isn't just a history of CEA and Microsoft together..

9:37PM:There's a weirdo techno mashup of Bill Gates making announcements on stage. The Rock has a few appearances. It's weird.

9:39PM:Ryan Seacrest is taking the stage. "Thank you for that one scream over there." Might have been Corey.

9:40PM:He's thrilled to be here, not sure if the audience feels the same way.

9:40PM:We're going to talk about and hear what's next for Microsoft and the tech industry. Seacrest is promising Microsoft's latest gear so hopefully we hear some new announcements.

9:41PM:Seacrest is asking what we can expect. "Tonight I have a tremendous show, frankly," Ballmer said. "We have a chance in the next year to raise our game and product line to the next level across phones, tablets, TVs and the Xbox. The heart and soul of that will be our feature attraction tonight, the metro user interface.

9:41PM:"when you said Metro you looked at me in a strange way" - Ryan Seacrest.

9:43PM:We're starting with Windows Phone. This is a weird interview format where Seacrest is interviewing Ballmer. "We took a different approach than everyone else and we have a unique experience," Ballmer said. "If you take a look at it, the other phones all make the sea of icons the sea of applications the view of the world. What we've done is Windows Phone is have a better way by taking your people... and we put them right out there in front of you. It puts people first."

9:44PM:"It all gets put together for you right on the screen." Basically we're going over what we already know about Windows Phone as a mobile platform, nothing really new here.

9:45PM:Derek Snyder the Windows Phone product manager is on stage now. He's explaining the variety of features available from various Windows Phone vendors. And he's showing us what Windows Phone software looks like. Not sure why we're going over all of these features again.

9:50PM:Sorry internet trouble real fast there

9:54PM:The Lumia 710 and Lumia 800 will also launch in Canada on Telus and Rogers

9:56PM:Ballmer and Seacrest are going over the Lumia 900, which we'll bring you a hands-on of shortly. Nokia just announced it an hour or so ago so be sure to check out our live coverage of that on the BGR.com homepage.

9:56PM:Ryan Seacrest seems to like the phone.

9:57PM:Seacrest is playing with the HTC Titan II also and sounds somewhat excited about it. Now we're going to discuss Windows PCS.

9:58PM:Ballmer said there are now 1.3 billion Windows-powered machines in use today.

9:59PM:Windows is the most popular smart device around, Ballmer said.

10:01PM:There's a short clip of the latest Windows 7 powered devices playing.

10:01PM:Ballmer said change is the essence of this industry. Two things are constant. 1: Things change. 2: People don't want to compromise on what they have today. They want the best of what they have and the best of what they want.

10:01PM:We see a couple of the new ultrabooks rolling through the video.

10:03PM:Chief marketing officer for Windows Tami Reller is discussing the benefits of Windows 7. This is really just a recap of everything Microsoft has done this year, we suppose. Hoping something more exciting comes later in the keynote.

10:06PM:We're seeing a demo of how metro UI can be used on larger devices such as touchscreen monitors and laptops or tablets. There's a lot of swiping, natural touch-based gestures similar to what users do with their Windows Phones. It looks solid.

10:06PM:An NVIDIA Tegra 3 chip is powering the demo device.

10:08PM:We're seeing a demo of the Windows Store and cut the rope. Neat, but it's hard to be impressed after seeing so many stores lately.

10:11PM:We saw a quick look at the Windows 8 app store but it's hard to be impressed after we've seen so many new ones proliferate the market.

10:13PM:We saw a quick look at the Windows 8 app store but it's hard to be impressed after we've seen so many new ones proliferate the market.

10:14PM:The live tiles remind us a lot of Windows Phone 7.5 tiles but there's a cool zoomed-out feature that lets you see all of your tiles in one place.

10:16PM:Sorry for the multiple entries we're running into internet problems here with multiple devices.

10:16PM:We're looking at some new thin and light notebooks that will surely hit the market this year.

10:18PM:Samsung Series 9. Spectre from HP with the glass lid. A few devices that were unveiled today during CES that should be in consumer's hands soon.

10:18PM:Ballmer said that, by the time this keynote is over, more than 25,000 users will have adopted Windows 7.

10:19PM:A choir is taking the stage singing gospel-style music.

10:20PM:We're being told to watch the LSU game I think.

10:20PM:Oh it's a Tweet Choir. We get it.

10:21PM:Kind of wish we were talking about an Xbox 720 or something instead.

10:22PM:That was entertaining.

10:23PM:Now Seacrest is talking about the Xbox. "Did you expect to go from ground 0 to a household name a decade ago?" Ballmer says he was bullish and patient and that it represents the best of its NDA and Microsoft is really proud of the gaming console.

10:24PM:Ten years later we're the world sales leader. We have over 66 billion Xbox users. perhaps the most amazing things is we have over more than 40 million xbox live subscribers tuning in on a regular basis. Some for games, increasingly it's really an entertainment hub."

10:24PM:"Did I expect it 10 years ago? No. But I bet on it 10 years ago."

10:24PM:Now we're going to see an overview of the new Xbox software. This is all just a big recap..

10:25PM:But Ballmer does promise something "even more different" so maybe we'll get lucky.

10:25PM:18 million Kinect Sensors shipped over the past year.

10:26PM:Greg Davison from Microsoft's Xbox team is taking the stage to show us what's new from Xbox (the software update that landed in December).

10:26PM:We're going to see Kinect's voice controls. These are all features that are already available to all Kinect and Xbox owners.

10:27PM:We just saw a demo for searching for Harry Potter using Kinect. It works well.

10:30PM:Now we're seeing how a Lumia 900 with the Windows Xbox Companion can be used to control the Xbox. We've tried this at home with a different device and it actually works quite well.

10:31PM:Comcast Xfinity on Demand's library will soon be launching on Xbox. There's also a new News Corp partnership that will bring The WSJ, Fox content, and IGN to the Xbox video library.

10:32PM:Fox will add Family Guy, The Simpsons, House and more. The new content should be available in 2012.

10:32PM:"We're working with some of the best known creative artists and production companies to create..

10:33PM:Sesame Street Kinect TV just took the stage to demo two-way TV. Are there any kids in the audience?

10:34PM:Microsoft took the current episodes from Sesame Street to turn them into fully interactive experiences. You can use your voice to interact with the show.

10:35PM:They are "watching and playing" Sesame Street. Elmo introduced a move of the day "throw" anda number "4". Now when elmo spills his coconuts children can act and pretend to throw coconuts at Elmo to help him collect them again. You have to see it to understand it better, but the concept is cool.

10:37PM:Now Elmo is taking the stage. Same sort of interactive demo going on.

10:38PM:In this demo the young girl is part of the Sesame Street show and she's interacting with the virtual objects around her.

10:39PM:"The number of things you can do with interactive entertainment, video interactivity together..it's going to be amazing." - Ballmer

10:39PM:"Just as Kinect revolutionized entertainment, we'll see it revolutionize other industries. Education, healthcare and many many more."

10:40PM:Kinect is coming to Windows on February 1st. Pretty big news there folks.

10:40PM:Microsoft is working with more than 200 companies including United Health Group, Toyota, Mattel, American Express, Boeing and many more.

10:41PM:Microsoft Office 2010 is the fastest selling Office version in the history of Office.

10:42PM:We're just going over a few of Microsoft's other projects. Skype users have used more than 300 billion minutes in the last year.

10:42PM:Bing has a 30% market share in combination with Yahoo in the U.S.

10:42PM:The final question: What's next? "Windows 8 is what's next!"

10:43PM:There's nothing more important at Microsoft than Windows.

10:44PM:Metro will be huge for Microsoft across all of its platforms. In 2012 what's next? "Metro Metro Metro!"

10:44PM:"And of course, Windows! Windows! Windows"

10:44PM:That's all folks thanks for joining us!

Microsoft announced and launched a new deals website on Friday tied to its growing Bing suite of services. Bing Deals is a shopping site that compiles specials from GroupOn, Target, LivingSocial, Nordstrom and others. “Instead of building another program, we’re harnessing deals from major providers and retailers,” said Bing senior director Lisa Gurry. Microsoft’s Bing Deals offers more than 200,000 specials across the United States and, as a deal aggregator, it should eliminate the need to sign up for email alerts from multiple coupon-based services. Just like competing options, Microsoft will offer daily specials that will be accessible from its desktop website located at http://bing.com/deals and from mobile devices.

Microsoft has lost $5.5 billion, an average drain of $1 billion per quarter, on Bing since it introduced the search engine in 2009, CNNMoney reported on Wednesday. Despite the losses, Microsoft’s Bing reached a 30% share of the U.S. search engine market in April of this year, slowly narrowing the gap with Google, although comScore’s figures pin the search engine’s share at just 14.7%. Despite the constant drain, Microsoft still has a plan for Bing. During the company’s financial analyst meeting in California recently, Microsoft’s president of online services Qi Lu said his company hopes to use Bing to “reorganize the web” to “change the game fundamentally” instead of taking on Google in a head-to-head dogfight. Read on for more.

“We are able to try things with much more flexibility,” Bing director Stefan Weitz said. “If we make a mistake, it’s not going to take down the company.” Analysts believe Microsoft will continue to lose money, however. “Bing will likely be better than Google over time, but even if it is, users and advertisers still need to go to them,” McAdams Wright Ragen analyst Sid Parakh told CNNMoney. “To be clear, this will take a long, long time to play out. This is something Microsoft will continue to lose money on.”

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Microsoft’s Bing team took the wraps off of a new location-sharing application for Windows Phone on Thursday called “We’re in.” The application is similar to foursquare and Latitude in some respects, and yet still very different. The idea is simple: you can create an invitation that will allow your friends to share their location for a specified amount of time. Say, for example, you want to share your location and see where four of your friends are, for one hour, while you all head towards a local restaurant. You can create a quick event with “We’re in” and then send it to those friends. Once they accept, their pictures and locations will appear on Bing Maps. If you hit traffic or the train is late, you and your friends can update your status as you make your way to the restaurant. Unlike Latitude, which some people avoid for fear of location privacy issues, you can always leave the party. Better yet, when the allotted time is up, your location is automatically turned off. The application is available in the Zune Marketplace now and Microsoft says it plans on delivering it to other platforms soon, too.

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Microsoft has struck a deal to provide English search results in Baidu, China’s most popular search engine. According to The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft anticipates that the Bing-labeled English search results will help expand its Bing brand in China. Baidu also hopes that the partnership will help its efforts to expand its search engine to the global market. Chinese users typically use Google for English search results, however, the Chinese government has blocked that search engine — and other Google services, such as the newly launched Google+ — from time to time. Baidu will begin implementing Bing results later this year, although neither company provided an exact date as to when that functionality would be added.

Several new features set to be introduced in Microsoft’s upcoming “Mango” update for Windows Phone were revealed this past weekend. We already knew that Mango is set to be a major update to the Windows Phone platform — perhaps the most anticipated new feature is improved multitasking support — but Microsoft had been keeping several upcoming additions under wraps. Newly revealed features include Bing Audio, which will identify songs by listening to music, a la Shazam; Bing Vision, which will provide barcode scanning along with a host of camera-assisted search functions; the addition of turn-by-turn navigation to Bing Maps; speech recognition support in the messaging app; and a new native podcast player. None of these new features have been confirmed by Microsoft at this point but considering the proven track record of the source, it looks like Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.5 update is going to be even more exciting than we thought.

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During the BlackBerry World Keynote in Orlando this morning, Research In Motion announced that it is working with foursquare to include support for the social-network in an upcoming version of BlackBerry Messenger. Users will be able to share their location information as their BBM status, but RIM execs didn’t go into much detail on how check-ins will work or just how feature rich the implementation will be. The native foursquare client, for example, allows users to find nearby deals, compete with friends for check-in points, and more. RIM did not say when the client would make its debut, although we suspect it will be around the launch of its BlackBerry 7 powered Bold 9900, which will occur later this summer.

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Just moments ago on stage at BlackBerry World 2011, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis (no, the other one is also CMO, dummy) announced a strategic mobile partnership with Microsoft (translation: we’re super scared of Andy Rubin). Starting around the holiday timeframe, Microsoft’s Bing maps and search will be the preferred search and mapping solutions for BlackBerry products. We’re talking about a system-level integration, “far beyond a search box,” RIM said. Check out our live coverage of RIM’s BlackBerry World 2011 keynote for more!

According to data collected by Experian Hitwise, Bing’s share of the U.S. search market surpassed 30% last month. Microsoft’s Bing search engine is less than two years old, but a series of key deals and increasingly effective mobile integration pushed the service’s share of the U.S. search market up nearly 6% between February and March to 30.01%. Yahoo!’s share of the U.S. market grew as well, from 14.99% in February to 15.69% in March, while Google’s share declined 3% to 64.42% for the month. Google still owns the lion’s share of the U.S. search market of course, but the Internet giant’s search engine is less effective than Bing and Yahoo! according to Experian Hitwise. The firm notes that over 80% of searches performed with Bing and Yahoo! result in a visit to a website while only 65.91% of Google searches result in a visit. Hit the break for the full press release.

Experian Hitwise reports Bing-powered share of searches reaches 30 percent in March 2011

Bing.com share of searches increases 6 percent;
Google monthly share of searches at 64 percent

New York, N.Y., April 11, 2011 — Experian® Hitwise®, a part of Experian Marketing Services, announced today that Google accounted for 64.42 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending April 2, 2011. Bing-powered search comprised 30.01 percent of searches for the month, with Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 15.69 percent and 14.32 percent, respectively. The remaining 69 search engines1 in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 5.58 percent of U.S. searches.

Yahoo! Search success rate highest for March 2011

Yahoo! Search and Bing achieved the highest success rates in March 2011. This means that for both search engines, more than 80 percent of searches executed resulted in a visit to a Website. Google achieved a success rate of 66 percent. The share of unsuccessful searches highlights the opportunity for both the search engines and marketers to evaluate the search engine result pages to ensure that searchers are finding relevant information.

Microsoft has filed a complaint with the European Commission in regards to Google’s search operations in the European Union. “Our filing today focuses on a pattern of actions that Google has taken to entrench its dominance in markets for online search and search advertising to the detriment of the European consumers,” said Microsoft’s general counsel, Brad Smith. “Google has engaged in a broadening pattern of walling off access to content and data that competitors need to provide search results to consumers and to attract advertisers.” Smith added that Google has a 95% grip on the search market in Europe and that the company has aimed to stop any other firms from creating a competitive search alternative. Smith also argued that Google, since acquiring YouTube in 2006, has restricted other search engines from properly accessing YouTube videos for search results.

Similarly, Smith said Google doesn’t allow Windows Phone 7 devices to properly search YouTube content — although it does allow the iPhone and Android smartphones to do so. Google also reportedly blocks access to content owned by book publishers, restricts advertisers from accessing their own data, and blocks websites in Europe from distributing search boxes from competing search engines. “We readily appreciate that Google should continue to have the freedom to innovate,” Smith said. “But it shouldn’t be permitted to pursue practices that restrict others from innovating and offering competitive alternatives.  That’s what it’s doing now.  And that’s what we hope European officials will assess and ultimately decide to stop.” Hit the jump for Brad Smith’s full blog post.

[Via The Wall Street Journal]

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Analytics company ComScore has released its October search engine market share numbers and… instead of making you fire up your search-site of choice and finding the information yourself, we thought we would just put it right there for you. October’s search numbers are as follows: Google 66.3%, up from 66.1% in September; Bing 11.5%, up from 11.2% in September; Yahoo 16.5%, down from 16.7% the month prior; Ask.com 3.6% down 0.1% from the previous month; and AOL 2.1%, down from 2.3%. We are curious to see how/if the recent release of Windows Phone will help Bing’s search numbers. We’ll find out next month.

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According to research firm Nielsen, Microsoft’s Bing search engine has overtaken Yahoo! as the second most-used search engine in the United States. There is, however, a little catch. Nielsen’s numbers, which are for August of 2010, only count what they are calling “intentional searchs” and do not include contextual or slideshows searches. The company pegs Yahoo!’s U.S. search share at 13.1% and Bing’s at 13.9%; Google is still dominating with a cool 65%. To further cloud the waters, comScore’s data — from July of 2010 — shows that Yahoo!’s explicit search numbers are six points higher than Bing’s. For the time being, all we know for sure is that Google has almost two-thirds of the U.S. search market and either Bing or Yahoo! is in a distant second.

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If you bought a Samsung Fascinate from Verizon Wireless, you might have been feeling a certain way at the fact that the default search engine on the device is Bing and not Google. In addition to Bing being the default, Google Search isn’t even a selectable option. It is well known that Verizon and Microsoft have entered into a multi-device agreement to promote Bing, appearing as the exclusive option on Verizon’s BlackBerry handsets for instance. It wasn’t known if users would ever be able to change search engine options, but a Verizon Wireless spokesperson has chimed in, and broke it down for everyone. Once the Fascinate is updated to Android 2.2, users will be able to download the Google Search application to get their Google searching fix directly from the device. Even with the new application though, customers will not be able to change the default search setting from Bing to Google, and the search button will always trigger a Bing search. Oh well.

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We have a couple quick Microsoft tidbits here. Today, Microsoft announced that the official Bing mobile application for Android is available to all Verizon customers. If you have a Verizon Android device, and don’t like the ease-of-use and integration that is provided with Google, you can run on over to the Android Market and download Bing. You’ll also be thrilled to know that Bing for Android will be coming pre-installed on future Verizon Android devices. Joy.

Also, as a follow-up to a previous post… ActiveSync for Hotmail is now live. If you have a device that supports the ActiveSync protocol, and would like push email, calendars, and contacts, hit the read link to see how to configure the new hotness on your device.

Read [Bing] Read [Hotmail]

comScore has released their search engine numbers for July of 2010. The search market share numbers were gathered using a new methodology which only accounted for explicit searches (typing a search query in a text box) as opposed to including automated searches in the results (via hovered text for example). Analysts had predicted that removing automated searches would put a serious dent in Google’s search engine market share, and although the company’s metics did fall, a precipitous decline was not present. Google ended July with a 65.8% piece of the search pie (down from 66.2% in June), Yahoo! increased from 16.7% in June to 17.1% in July, and Bing stayed constant month-over-month at 11.0%. AOL shed a tenth of a percentage point from June to end up with a 2.3% share. All this occurred with a 15% jump in the number of users running search queries from a year prior and an almost 11% increase from June. Anyone recently abandon Google for another search provider? Any pros and cons you’d like to share?

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